problem with mplayer diacritics

Though not as popular as it used to be, mplayer is very versatile and I like it.
On a certain movie the .srt subtitle was displaying funny characters.
First I added all needed languages in Language Settings and then went into ~/.mplayer/config where I commented the iso8859-1 line and added utf-8. All worked well.

#subcp = iso8859-1 
subcp=utf-8