Japanese SRT files garbled, can't determine encoding to fix with iconv - utf-8

Question

I have an srt file, excerpt:
2
00:00:36,208 --> 00:00:39,667
Èá óå óêïôþóù, ÃïõÜéíôæåëóôéí!
3
00:00:57,917 --> 00:01:00,917
Ãéáôß ôñÝ÷åéò, ÃïõÜéíôæåëóôéí;
Óïõ ðÞñá äþñï ãåíåèëßùí.
4
00:01:00,958 --> 00:01:03,208
Äåí ðåéñÜæåé, äåí ÷ñåéáæüôáí
íá ìïõ ðÜñåéò êÜôé.
5
00:01:03,250 --> 00:01:06,375
Óïõ ðÞñá ëßãï êïñìü äÝíôñïõ.
Êáé èá ôï öáò.
6
00:01:06,417 --> 00:01:08,875
Ùñáßá. ¸ôóé êé áëëéþò
èá Ýôñùãá êïñìü.
7
00:01:08,917 --> 00:01:10,208
Äåí èá Ýôñùãåò.
8
00:01:10,208 --> 00:01:11,000
Íáé. ÂëÝðåéò...
9
00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:12,417
...üëá ôá ðñÜãìáôá ðïõ Þèåëåò
íá ìïõ êÜíåéò...
10
00:01:12,417 --> 00:01:13,958
...ó÷åäßáæá íá ôá êÜíù ìüíïò ìïõ.
Supposedly these are japanese subtitles, but obviously it is garbled from encoding issue. I am trying to figure out how to correct it and convert to UTF-8 ultimately. Anyone have any ideas?
File output: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text, with CRLF line terminators
File can be obtained here for testing:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/5040215/the-incredible-burt-wonderstone-ja

Answer 1

What you have is a document that has been transcoded from the ISO-8859-1 character set to the UTF-8 encoding scheme, but the document source was coded in the ISO-8859-7 character set. After the transcoding to UTF-8, a U+FEFF byte order mark (BOM) has been added and a few quotation marks (U+201C, U+201D).
The language is Greek and 2nd subtitle sequence when corrected is:
2
00:00:36,208 --> 00:00:39,667
Θα σε σκοτώσω, Γουάιντζελστιν!
The English translation is "I'll kill you, Gouaintzelstin!".
To reverse/correct it:
Decode the document from the UTF-8 encoding scheme
Remove all code-points greater than U+00FF
Encode the document using the ISO-8859-1 encoding
Transcode the document using the ISO-8859-7 encoding to the UTF-8 encoding scheme.
An implementation of the above in Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode qw[];
(#ARGV == 1 && -f $ARGV[0])
or die qq[Usage: $0 <file>];
my $file = shift #ARGV;
my ($octets, $string);
# Read all the octets from the file
$octets = do {
open my $fh, '<:raw', $file
or die qq[Could not open '$file' for reading: '$!'];
local $/; <$fh>
};
# Decode the octets using the UTF-8 encoding scheme
$string = Encode::decode('UTF-8', $octets, Encode::FB_CROAK);
# Remove all code points greater than U+00FF
$string =~ s/[^\x00-\xFF]//g;
# Encode the string using the ISO-8859-1 encoding
$octets = Encode::encode('ISO-8859-1', $string);
# Decode the octets using the ISO-8859-7 encoding
$string = Encode::decode('ISO-8859-7', $octets);
# Encode the string using the UTF-8 encoding
$octets = Encode::encode('UTF-8', $string);
# Output the octets on standard output
print $octets;