Stressed characters support in m3u playlists ?

[Radenim]

Bonjour !

After much (cumbersome) testing, I figured out the WDTVLive "m3u" processor doesn't support stressed characters in file names. It will display other names, but kick those out from list.

Strangely enough, stressed characters are perfectly supported for display and cause no harm whatsoever when directly playing the file (e.g. from integrated file browser). It really just seems to affect "m3u" processing, which incidently makes it tricky to find out .

In addition, and in if that would not be enough, "m3u" files are SUPPOSED to support ANSI encoding including stressed characters.

So I think you'd call it a BUG.

I'm having "Firmware 1.0.1.24" running, and language setting is french ;-) (you bet !)

If any WD engineer read this, I know you're trying hard freeing customers from technical complexity, but it would be cool if you'd specify things like :

- charset(s) to use for "m3u" encoding ?

- max path length / file name lenght in "m3u" files ?

- forbidden chars ?

- other constraints...

Hope this will be patched soon in some firmware upgrade...

Except this (happens to be VEEERY important to me) WDTVLive is such a pleasure to use... - R

[Radenim · Accepted solution]

I found a solution !

-> use UTF-8 character encoding <-

"m3u" playlists with an UTF-8 encoded content ARE suported by the WDTVLive and as far as I can tell from my music collection, all file paths & names with unusual characters are correctly handled now.

From what I understand about encodings, supporting UTF-8 is a clever choice, as it is more likely than any other encoding to support a real-world variety of characters. Pretty important to international music fans like me.

On the other hand most users probably don't even know what a character encoding is, and playlists are unfortunately often encoded with something else than UTF-8.

So I would say this is finally not a bug, but rather an information problem. WD's design is actually good. But the "UTF-8" keyword should definitely appear somewhere in the WDTVLive documentation. Preferably close to the "m3u" keyword.

Hope this can help other users - Rad