I managed to preview greek subtitles (.srt files) by using the vlc player (
www.videolan.org). Follow the steps below:
1.Go: Settings --> Preferences
2.Go: Video --> Subtitles/OSD
3.In the <Use subtitle file> field browse your subtitle file.
4.Go: Video --> Subtitles/OSD--> Text renderer
5.In the <font> field click <browse...> and choose a font file (ending with .ttf). The font files are usually in this directory: /usr/share/fonts/
6.Go: Input/Codecs --> Other codecs --> Subtitles
7.In the <subtitles text encoding> field choose the ISO-8859-7 option
For Arabic subtitles I think that you have to follow the same steps but in the 7th step choose the ISO-8859-6 option.