The tabs in the videos list was not working on orbiters

[Domodude]

Hi devs,

Not sure if this is the right spot to post it, so feel free to move around if not appropriate.

Here's something that scores 11 out of 10 on the weird-scale.

I've been pulling my hairs out for a month or so because the  tabs with starting letters in the video list (on the side of the screen) were suddenly not working anymore, on every orbiter! The list would jump back to the beginning ("A") regardless of which letter-tab I selected. Same tabs on the music list worked fine. Very strange.

Last night I did major maintenance of my media, by looking up many, many Amazon attributes for many mkv files. 'Lo and behold, the tabs now work again! My guess is that some attribute of some file, now overwritten by Amazon data, messed sorting/searching up big time.

I would put it on trac, if I knew how to reproduce this behavior, or even if I knew for sure that it could happen in 0810. I can't, and don't, so I won't. However, if someone wants to know more about the exact behavior, I can describe it in some more detail.

For what it's worth 

Cheers
Mark

[posde]

Mark,

this is a known problem.

It happens if any of your tags contain wrongly encoded characters.

[Domodude]

It happens if any of your tags contain wrongly encoded characters.

  Argh I should have posted a month earlier!

Oh well. Keeps life interesting.

[colinjones]

get rid of special characters as well, such as ' & and so on. " and . and - and () are fine, but the others can cause problems in the SQL queries because apparently they aren't properly escaped... once removed, the tabs will work again.

[posde]

get rid of special characters as well, such as ' & and so on. " and . and - and () are fine, but the others can cause problems in the SQL queries because apparently they aren't properly escaped... once removed, the tabs will work again.

colinjones,

it is not the characters that are causing the problem, but the encoding. I have quite a few artists with an ampersand in the name, a german Umlaut, and they display fine, after being assigned thru the web admin.

[colinjones]

Possy - I'm not talking about displaying, fine, I'm talking about the "ABC" etc tabs down the side not working (and so is Domodude!)

I know for certain that special characters existing in filenames (for instance) cause this problem. I have come across the problem many times.... I go into my media folders and remove any of these characters that may have crept in, in recently added media, and immediately the tabs start working again!

I did list in a post once a more extensive list of the problem characters, but at the least I know that ' causes it (as it 80's) and pretty sure / as well.

[posde]

Possy - I'm not talking about displaying, fine, I'm talking about the "ABC" etc tabs down the side not working (and so is Domodude!)

I probably have used the wrong wording.

Ampersands in artist names, work just fine. And the AB CD buttons work with those artists without any problem. The only problem is, if the characters are wrongly encoded in the original tags. I have used ampersands, Umlauts, accents (and other stuff I do not know the name of), from the web admin. They do not cause problems. The only problems I have experienced is from stuff tagged outside the web admin.

[colinjones]

Interesting.... could you perhaps please add a ' to the filename (not attributes) of an audio file, then browse in your audio folders using Filename sort mode, as a test? Click on some of the tabs....

I understand what you mean about the encoding... and certainly my tags often come from other than me, so it is entirely possible that the encoding varies quite a bit...

At the same time, 1) the only thing I did to resolve the issue was edit the tag in mp3tag and remove the 's (among other characters), I didn't change the encoding, just placed the cursor at the character and hit delete, and this solved the problem, and 2) I am aware that this issue always seemed more pronounced in Filename sort mode for some strange reason.... and I note that in filename sort mode the db should only be pulling out the filenames as strings, so the encoding of tags shouldn't really be relevant....

Can some others please test this too? I don't doubt possy at all that there is an encoding issue... its just that I think perhaps there is more than one issue that causes the same symptoms...

I, too, will try adding back in some ' and see what happens....

col

[colinjones]

Possy - I just found a folder that the tabs don't work for (its parent folder and children folders work just fine). So I set about trying to find a character that might be causing the problem. Note: this is in Filename sort mode, and there are no media files, only folders in this non-working folder, so just looking at the folder names. There were no obvious candidates....

Then I got to wondering whether a [ or ] could be an issue.... however I have plenty of folders that work fine that have these files/folders that include these characters in the filename. BUT, the only difference I could find was that this folder contained a folder that had a [ as the first character (ie "[2006] GSSP RMX").

So I tried removing the [2006] bit altogether, leaving just "GSSP RMX" as the folder name. Did a resync, and immediately the tabs started working. So I put the [2006] bit back again, resync'd and the tabs immediately stopped working again. Removed it one final time and resync'd, and the tabs started working again....

So there is definitely something more than just the tag encoding that causes these symptoms...

Col.

[posde]

There seems to be one difference between how you use the file list, and my use of the media list. I very rarely go into file mode. Most of the time, I use the default mode, sometimes I move over to the genre mode. But I will test the ' and the [

[colinjones]

There seems to be one difference between how you use the file list, and my use of the media list. I very rarely go into file mode. Most of the time, I use the default mode, sometimes I move over to the genre mode. But I will test the ' and the [

Possy, thanks, that's why I pointed out the Filename sort mode specifically.... because I know some never use that mode, and because I know in the past it seems to react differently in this area and has sometimes been overlooked...

The one I'm most sure of (because I just tested it, the ' was a while ago) is the [ but seemingly only when at the beginning of the file name. I know discussing this in the forums in the past someone indicated they were aware of specific sql query escaping issues with special characters... so that definitely is not related to character encoding... I think there is a strong case that there are two separate issues causing same/similar symptoms.