Step 1: open the VLC settings by pressing Ctrl+ P or by going to Tools > Preferences If you are sure the file is encoded in UTF-8 but the subtitles still show up as boxes or weird symbols, you should make sure you are using the right font in VLC.
You can easily convert a text file to unicode with the convert to UTF-8 tool. You need to convert the subtitles to UTF-8 for them to be readable in VLC. The second picture is the same file converted to UTF-8, displaying correctly. The first picture shows a file using Chinese text encoding, and can't be read by Notepad or VLC.
