[bitbieger]

I'm sharing network drives via NFS (OS X) to my XBMC client (linux, OpenELEC) and special characters (German Umlauts) are not correctly recognized by XBMC. Access to the shares is done with "nfs://" sources directly in XBMC.

OS X uses UTF-8 encoding with decomposed characters (NFD) while the rest of the world (as it seems) is using UTF-8 with precomposed characters (NFC). This is not a big deal as linux normally can handle both composing models.

It seems like XBMC can't handle NFD UTF-8.
Or is this just a problem of the OpenELEC distro?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence

EDIT:
Ok, I have verified that OpenELEC has the same Problem.
I should have done this first, sorry...

Anyway, if XBMC is not using the underlying os implementation of NFS, a workaround could be possible...

[Memphiz]

We assume UTF8 NFC for all shares - like the rest of the world. There is no code in place atm which handles encodings (we would need to decode from shares and reencode to shares for getting this to work - this could lead to some mess for sure). I'm not even sure how we should detect the encoding tbh.

Some other servers do this on server side (are are able to be configured in that way) - e.x. netatalks afp server and a bunch of other nfs servers are handling encodings to serve a defined encoding to the clients.

Well it seems that even osx own nfs clients are suffering from the issue (folders with special chars - hosted on a linux nfs server are not accessable from osx finder ...).