God damn it! This has taken a long time to figure out! I was trying to get Chinese subtitles to work on mplayer and everytime I tried it, I get crazy garbage text. After installing truck load of language packs on Ubuntu, I am not successful. One guy suggested loading up specific a codepage for the subtitles but I had no clue what the encoding was for my srt subtitles.
After taking a couple of months break from it, I decided to start looking again and this time, I lucked out. Someone suggested to use smplayer instead for the subtitles and it only took a few clicks on the preferences to make it work. I changed the fonts on the preferences to use Code Page 936 Simplified Chinese for the subtitles. Voila! Subtitles are appearing there!
Unfortunately, I tried to use it on mplayer, I still get garbage text. Whatever. As long as I can read the subtitles, I'm fine.
