supporting another languages/character sets for mp3 tags

[vlad]

Hi everyone! I have some mp3 files, which have id tags in Russian using utf8. After I copied these files under /home/public/data/audio... and ran "Update Media", I could see twice as many albums appeared in the GUI but instead of letters there were only some strange characters. The tags in these mp3 files were broken as well after this. It seems to me that utf8 is not supported out of the box.
I have tried to figure out how to change the encoding in mysql and could write utf8 with sql directly to the db (pluto_media.Attribute.Name) but then there were only question marks in the orbiter. Is there a way to get it working properly?

[mintelm]

I also have some mp3 files that have russian/cyrillic id tags and file names. Only one of 200 is visible and playable. It has the strange characters instead of letters...  Has anyone found a resolution to this?

[nite_man]

Maybe that tool can help - http://sourceforge.net/projects/tag2utf. That tool encodes tags of mp3 files in the cyrillic charsets (cp1251, koi8-r) to unicode. So, I suspect that UTF8 should be displayed ok. At least in VDR 1.6.0 the Russian channels names and EPG are showed correctly.

[nite_man]

It's definitely problem with encoding. MP3 tags in cp1251 and koi8-r aren't displayed correctly in the LMCE UTF-8 UI. So, you just need to convert them to UTF-8 using tag2utf (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tag2utf), mid3iconv (part of python-mutagen) or EasyTAG (http://easytag.sourceforge.net/). After conversion all non-Latin MP3 tags will be displayed correctly.

UPDATED: Just added that info to the wiki page - http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Converting_MP3_Tags_To_UTF-8