[mythtv-users] UTF8 / Japanese support?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Mon Aug 4 10:55:01 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 13:23 +0900, Frank Bennett wrote:
> Does MythTV (and its MySQL configuration) support the UTF8 encoding
> (for, i.e., Japanese)?
> 
> The only guidance on getting UTF8 support working is an ugly hack at
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Utf8_Text_in_OSD.  This page
> bears a warning that it will foul up attempts to upgrade MythTV.  I
> have attempted the patch, and did indeed find that it caused a lot of
> nasty breakage when MySQL ( and presumably Myth as well) was upgraded.
>  So I've abandoned that line of attack, like the well-mannered and
> timid little end user that I am.
> 
> The warning message on the page says, "If characters display
> incorrectly in MythTV then please submit a bug report."  I'd like to
> ask what the status before filing a bug ticket.  Has anything been
> done to fix this?
> 
> I looked at the development sources, but didn't see a changelog to
> check for this, hence this query.

Don't use that hack! :) (And please don't file bug reports unless
you've wiped the DB and started over since applying the hack.)

In MythTV 0.21 the DB is actually in UTF8, it just uses latin1 as
the character type in the DB. Which means inserting UTF8 data with
an external program is difficult, but not impossible (basically
import to you own utf8 table, then do a binary copy to the mythtv
table). This was do to some problems with UTF8 support in older
versions on mysql. Anyway this requires a fromUtf8() to be applied
to multilingual DB strings in mythtv to get them to display correctly
so if you file a bug report which makes it clear exactly where
this isn't being done in the code we can fix it relatively easily.

In the development version of MythTV we have dropped support for
the problematic mysql releases and switched the db over to UTF8.
But currently the trunk is in flux because we're also porting from
Qt3 to Qt4, so I don't recommend using it unless you are doing
development. I expect it to start to stabilize in the next month
or so. I just switched my production boxes over last week; I'm
getting some segfaults -- but I'm fixing them as they occur.

-- Daniel



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