[Edward21]

Hi, new here, happy to be a part of Kodi community! I have 2 questions:-

Question: 1.I want to watch Bengali (Bangla) subtitles, but I did not find any character set that contains Bangla, can I add character set for Bangla manually to Kodi, if I can then how??

Question: 2.I have tv shows stored locally on my PC these shows have embedded subtitles, I want to turn off embedded subtitle and want to add or view subtitles from Kodi subtitle add on service, is it possible? 
Thanks!

[PatK]

I did not find any character set that contains Bangla

If there is a Bengali font set it might be possible. Is there a Bengali font set for windows ? The samples I've seen appear quite artistic and I could only see this as word art embedded into the screen. The fonts Kodi uses are located Matrix\Kodi\media Fonts (wiki) each skin will also have add-on font folder. There should be some tutorials on how to change the fonts, Google is your friend.

shows have embedded subtitles, I want to turn off embedded subtitle

Maybe, if it's just within the file container, a program like MKVmerge Supplemental tools (wiki) will enable you to pull apart the archive and either eliminate or better still add a new one. Sadly if the subtitles have been merged with the video (some art editing program) then it's like a water mark, and embedded into the pixels.

[scott967]

There are some shortcomings in the current 19.2 and prior releases of Kodi that makes display of some languages buggy, in particular those with Indic scripts.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that we have a dev who is working hard on improving the situation for Kodi 20.  At this point, there is already a much improved subtitle display in the latest Kodi 20 development nightly builds with more improvements planned.  Since you are running Kodi on Windows, you might be willing to install the current Kodi 20 nightly to a separate folder (from your current install) and run it in "portable" mode so that it doesn't interfere in any way with your current install.  If you are willing/able to do that you could help the team by testing subtitles in your language and script.

To do this, you need to find an open type feature font that covers Bengali (in ttf format) and create the folderpath portable_data\media\Fonts in your portable Kodi folder.  Place your font in that folder.

In Kodi go to settings/player/language/font to use for text subs and select this font.  You can leave the char set as is (assuming your sub files are utf-8 encoded, which is most likely the case).

Note that subs can be "burned in" (a "picture" of the sub is added directly to the video stream aka "hard sub") -- these you have no control over.  Alternatively, subs can be muxed into your AV file as separate tracks either "pictures" (vobsub or pgs from DVD or BD) or "text" (mostly subrip or substation alpha).  Muxed subs can have metadata flags for "forced" or "default", but in general when playing a file you can go into the OSD menu and open the subtitles dialog which allows you to select an internal or external sub.  The sub language Kodi displays is based on the sub filename (or internal metadata) having a recognized ISO 639-2 3-letter alpha code (i.e., BEN).

If you are interested in trying this, any feedback is welcome since most of us can't tell if Arabic, Indic, etc scripts are being rendered properly.

scott s.
.

[Edward21]

There are some shortcomings in the current 19.2 and prior releases of Kodi that makes display of some languages buggy, in particular those with Indic scripts.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that we have a dev who is working hard on improving the situation for Kodi 20.  At this point, there is already a much improved subtitle display in the latest Kodi 20 development nightly builds with more improvements planned.  Since you are running Kodi on Windows, you might be willing to install the current Kodi 20 nightly to a separate folder (from your current install) and run it in "portable" mode so that it doesn't interfere in any way with your current install.  If you are willing/able to do that you could help the team by testing subtitles in your language and script.

Hi Sir, thank you so much for taking a look into this! And Yes, I'm willing to help by testing subtitles in my language and script!

To do this, you need to find an open type feature font that covers Bengali (in ttf format) and create the folderpath portable_data\media\Fonts in your portable Kodi folder.  Place your font in that folder.

Yes Sir I have found an open type bangla font that is in ttf format, I'm going to do accordingly what you have said in the mean time I would like to attach the website link just to be sure if I'm looking at the right thing! Please have a look :-https://www.ekushey.org/index.php/page/33

Note that subs can be "burned in" (a "picture" of the sub is added directly to the video stream aka "hard sub") -- these you have no control over.  Alternatively, subs can be muxed into your AV file as separate tracks either "pictures" (vobsub or pgs from DVD or BD) or "text" (mostly subrip or substation alpha).  Muxed subs can have metadata flags for "forced" or "default", but in general when playing a file you can go into the OSD menu and open the subtitles dialog which allows you to select an internal or external sub.  The sub language Kodi displays is based on the sub filename (or internal metadata) having a recognized ISO 639-2 3-letter alpha code (i.e., BEN).

I have totally understood this part, thank you for clearing this up!

[Edward21]

I did not find any character set that contains Bangla

If there is a Bengali font set it might be possible. Is there a Bengali font set for windows ? The samples I've seen appear quite artistic and I could only see this as word art embedded into the screen. The fonts Kodi uses are located Matrix\Kodi\media Fonts (wiki) each skin will also have add-on font folder. There should be some tutorials on how to change the fonts, Google is your friend.

shows have embedded subtitles, I want to turn off embedded subtitle

Maybe, if it's just within the file container, a program like MKVmerge Supplemental tools (wiki) will enable you to pull apart the archive and either eliminate or better still add a new one. Sadly if the subtitles have been merged with the video (some art editing program) then it's like a water mark, and embedded into the pixels.

Hi, okay thank you very much for taking the time to explalin this!

[Edward21]

There are some shortcomings in the current 19.2 and prior releases of Kodi that makes display of some languages buggy, in particular those with Indic scripts.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that we have a dev who is working hard on improving the situation for Kodi 20.  At this point, there is already a much improved subtitle display in the latest Kodi 20 development nightly builds with more improvements planned.  Since you are running Kodi on Windows, you might be willing to install the current Kodi 20 nightly to a separate folder (from your current install) and run it in "portable" mode so that it doesn't interfere in any way with your current install.  If you are willing/able to do that you could help the team by testing subtitles in your language and script.

To do this, you need to find an open type feature font that covers Bengali (in ttf format) and create the folderpath portable_data\media\Fonts in your portable Kodi folder.  Place your font in that folder.

In Kodi go to settings/player/language/font to use for text subs and select this font.  You can leave the char set as is (assuming your sub files are utf-8 encoded, which is most likely the case).

Note that subs can be "burned in" (a "picture" of the sub is added directly to the video stream aka "hard sub") -- these you have no control over.  Alternatively, subs can be muxed into your AV file as separate tracks either "pictures" (vobsub or pgs from DVD or BD) or "text" (mostly subrip or substation alpha).  Muxed subs can have metadata flags for "forced" or "default", but in general when playing a file you can go into the OSD menu and open the subtitles dialog which allows you to select an internal or external sub.  The sub language Kodi displays is based on the sub filename (or internal metadata) having a recognized ISO 639-2 3-letter alpha code (i.e., BEN).

If you are interested in trying this, any feedback is welcome since most of us can't tell if Arabic, Indic, etc scripts are being rendered properly.

scott s.
.

Hi Sir, thank you so much for taking a look into this! And Yes, I'm willing to help by testing subtitles in my language and script!

Sir I have found an open type bangla font that is in ttf format, I'm going to do accordingly what you have said in the mean time I would like to attach the website link just to be sure if I'm looking at the right thing! Please have a look :-https://www.ekushey.org/index.php/page/33

[Edward21]

There are some shortcomings in the current 19.2 and prior releases of Kodi that makes display of some languages buggy, in particular those with Indic scripts.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that we have a dev who is working hard on improving the situation for Kodi 20.  At this point, there is already a much improved subtitle display in the latest Kodi 20 development nightly builds with more improvements planned.  Since you are running Kodi on Windows, you might be willing to install the current Kodi 20 nightly to a separate folder (from your current install) and run it in "portable" mode so that it doesn't interfere in any way with your current install.  If you are willing/able to do that you could help the team by testing subtitles in your language and script.

To do this, you need to find an open type feature font that covers Bengali (in ttf format) and create the folderpath portable_data\media\Fonts in your portable Kodi folder.  Place your font in that folder.

In Kodi go to settings/player/language/font to use for text subs and select this font.  You can leave the char set as is (assuming your sub files are utf-8 encoded, which is most likely the case).

Note that subs can be "burned in" (a "picture" of the sub is added directly to the video stream aka "hard sub") -- these you have no control over.  Alternatively, subs can be muxed into your AV file as separate tracks either "pictures" (vobsub or pgs from DVD or BD) or "text" (mostly subrip or substation alpha).  Muxed subs can have metadata flags for "forced" or "default", but in general when playing a file you can go into the OSD menu and open the subtitles dialog which allows you to select an internal or external sub.  The sub language Kodi displays is based on the sub filename (or internal metadata) having a recognized ISO 639-2 3-letter alpha code (i.e., BEN).

If you are interested in trying this, any feedback is welcome since most of us can't tell if Arabic, Indic, etc scripts are being rendered properly.

scott s.
.

Sir, I have done exactly what you said, I installed Kodi Nightly Build:20-ALPHA in portable mode, I have downloaded OpenType Bangla Fonts(ttf format) and added to Kodi Nightly and it was able to read Bangla subtitle file that was saved locally on my PC successfully! Thank You! Although I tried the same thing on my Kodi Matrix v19 and it wasn't able to read Bangla subtitle file correctly, the words were broken and disassembled.

[Klojum]

Sir, I have done exactly what you said,

Just an observation... No need to quote someone's post every time for a new brain fart.. ;-)
If you want someone's attention, just ping the person's name: @Edward21

Our forum also has an intelligent quote system. Just mark an important part of the text of a post with your mouse (or finger on a touch screen), and click on the appearing "Reply" bar underneath that post, and the selected text will be copy/pasted into your reply section. It will avoid other forum users (and moderators) having to scroll endlessly thru unnecessary text blobs, and we'll keep our forum server lean. Thanks in advance, sir.

[scott967]

Sir, I have done exactly what you said, I installed Kodi Nightly Build:20-ALPHA in portable mode, I have downloaded OpenType Bangla Fonts(ttf format) and added to Kodi Nightly and it was able to read Bangla subtitle file that was saved locally on my PC successfully! Thank You! Although I tried the same thing on my Kodi Matrix v19 and it wasn't able to read Bangla subtitle file correctly, the words were broken and disassembled.

I looked at that font site -- didn't see any license info and one that I looked at based on Lohit font had a strange em-box size. Also those fonts don't include any latn script except for numbers which might be limiting. I made my own from Google's Noto Sans Regular plus Noto Sans Bengali UI (combined). You can get it here:Noto Sans Regular plus Bengali UI Google Noto Sans is licensed under SIL OFL 1.1 see here:https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ofl-1.1/ for details.

From a technical view, in Kodi 20 we now can do what is called text "shaping" which is important for some language's scripts. The shaping info is included in fonts and provide certain open type features like ligatures. If you see some subtitle text in Kodi 20 that is rendered wrong it would help to provide a screenshot and describe what is wrong (sample of the subtitle file also). There might also be problems in rendering text for the UI, but currently the only Indic UI language is Devanagiri script.

scott s.
.

[Edward21]

I made my own from Google's Noto Sans Regular plus Noto Sans Bengali UI (combined). You can get it here:Noto Sans Regular plus Bengali UI Google Noto Sans is licensed under SIL OFL 1.1 see here:https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ofl-1.1/ for details.

Thanks a lot Sir!

If you see some subtitle text in Kodi 20 that is rendered wrong it would help to provide a screenshot and describe what is wrong (sample of the subtitle file also). There might also be problems in rendering text for the UI, but currently the only Indic UI language is Devanagiri script.

I checked Kodi 20 with bengali subtitles it renders bengali fonts perfectly without any errors(no broken texts no weird boxes) , I was actually referring Kodi 19 issues with subtitles, but that's completely understandable as because you mentioned it's downside earlier that it has problem rendering indic scripts but Kodi 20 doesn't have this particular issue.

[Edward21]

No need to quote someone's post every time for a new brain fart.. ;-)
If you want someone's attention, just ping the person's name: @Edward21

My bad I accidently quoted multiple times earlier! Have mercy!