Microsoft Rebrand Unicode to UTF-16 LE in NotePad Windows 10 2004

So basically like the title says Microsoft managed to remove the Unicode (Sometimes Unicode 1200) encoding format found in the Save As dialog of it's NotePad and introduced several other encoding formats which weren't present before .

So if you ever wonder what happened to Unicode , its simple , it was just re-branded UTF-16 LE along the list .

So why is this tip important ? Probably not to you but for the majority of consumers of offline Subtitles files , Unicode is found to be the widely acceptable format of choice as it works on almost all LCD TVs , Smart or Dumb , Software Players , IPTV Boxes , Smart Boxes and Satellite Receivers with USB Aux support .

Yet then comes in line UTF-8 which works fine on some of the upper devices but fail on others and display machine code like characters .

Usually offline Subtitles are uploaded to hosting websites in raw ANSI format probably out of laziness or poor understanding from the uploader to the concept of encoding , where people had to use NotePad to change encoding to Unicode to play .

Now with its absence foreign communities started questioning the use of 3rd party softwares and came out candidates as CP Converter etc. where the irony is NotePad is still capable of doing the job only the format had been re-branded to UTF-16 LE

Cheers

Microsoft did the right thing. It should have been done a long time ago.

The problem with using "Unicode" to specify a file encoding is that is doesn't specify a file encoding. The purpose of Unicode was to assign values or codepoints to characters. It says nothing about how those values will be encoded in a file or storage media. Over the years there have been quite a few of these encodings. UCS-2, UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are all Unicode. All except UTF-8 come in both LE and BE varieties. And files may or may not include a BOM or Byte Order Mark that specifies this. So when you see "Unicode" specified as an encoding the question arises, Which one is it?

The encodings shown in the Save as dialog do away with the vague "Unicode" specification and makes it explicit.