[Gildor Oronar]

I am surprised nobody seems to have asked about it, search with google and in this forum turns no relative posts.

How do you configure XBMC to access a file system with different encoding? This scenario is so typical when the file is on a server with different OS than the host that runs XBMC. For example I run NFS on my Linux file server (naturally, UTF-8), and my XBMC runs on Windows XP (naturally, never could be UTF-8). I instructed XBMC to browse the files on NFS, result is: it seems XBMC hid all video files whose name contain unrecognised character.

The same would naturally occur when you have XBMC running on Linux and media files on NAS device - which is often configured to use a Windows locale to flatter other Windows clients.

I can name a few hundred other use cases where file name encoding needs to be configured. My guess is XBMC has this feature somewhere to configure, only how to find it. Google was my friend but didn't help me this time. Any idea?

[Ned Scott]

From what little I know, and I might be totally wrong about this: I believe it's the job of the file server to get that right, not XBMC.

EDIT: my bad, see below.

[scott967]

Don't know but windows (FAT/NTFS) is using UTF-16 and whatever calls XBMC makes should return file name converted to UTF-8 which I understand is how XBMC manages all data. It is possible to request short filename from NTFS to get ASCII 8.3 version of filename but don't see any reason XBMC would need that. Displaying filenames to user is a different issue, but an appropriate font in XBMC should handle that.

scott s.
.

[Gildor Oronar]

From what little I know, and I might be totally wrong about this: I believe it's the job of the file server to get that right, not XBMC.

I am not sure about that. NFS for example is a protocol totally ignoring filename encoding issue. There is no way to configure NFS to offer a different encoding other than that of the server.

But leave that aside, XBMC must have some facility to deal with character encoding conversion, e.g. having built with iconv, because it is a needed feature to support .srt format, which is often offered in a different locale than that of the player.

[Ned Scott]

Err, yes, you are correct. For some reason I wasn't thinking about filenames.