[CONFIRMED] Unicode charset not fully supported

[kulakov]

[ -> continue from this thread]

Not sure if I'm supposed to create another topic or continue this one, but to me the problem was not fixed. The funny point is that this thread does not have a solution provided in it. French songs by Mylene Farmer with names like

07 Derriére Les Fenétres.wma
13 Leut-?tre Toi.wma

are skipped by the player both if I try to open that file directly and if I open the whole dir and the file is displayed in the playlist correctly (!) but I can't make BSPlayer play it back. For ex. the file manager Total Commander also displays the files in a wrong way - without the extra marks, and it cannot open the files. Only Explorer displays and handles the files correctly. My XP only has English and Russian languages installed, and I'm not going to install Frensh . Not sure if this has something to do with lang files installed with the player.

Note that this whole problem is not serious cause I can rename the files any moment and they will play fine. It's just kind of a cosmetic bug. But there may be people out there who won't notice that a song or 2 of an album will be skipped every time they play the album, so this should better be fixed.

[Tizio]

I have WinXP Italian and I can play the file, so it's probably related to the languages installed on the system since your Windows OS probably can't correctly handle French diacritics..

[kulakov]

My Windows OS can handle French diacritics correctly, but it does it using Unicode, because it cannot present the characters using installed languages. Explorer handles the files fine, and so does WMP - it plays all the files. I think it's about Unicode filenames support. If a filename has an advanced character in it, and the character is of the same second language installed on the system, all programs handle the filename correctly because Windows maps the character onto the 2nd language thus its code remains within 256. Otherwise, it cannot present the name using the installed languages so the only way to present it is Unicode.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the technical details regarding handling Unicode filenames, and I don't want to install C++Builder to just test that right now. I think some programs deal with filenames as is so they may have problems with filenames like that, while some do have Unicode filenames support and they handle all files correctly no matter what languages installed. Whether you should "upgrade" BSPlayer to understand Unicode filenames - is a subtle question because this problem is not wide spread as I see.

[Tizio]

Maybe it's really related to Unicode, since French diacritics are included into 8-bit ASCII character set (ANSI character set), but not in the 7-bit ASCII character set (the one included in US and Russian Windows)
So, Explorer can display them because it fully supports Unicode or because it has a built in 8-bit ASCII character set.
I know that BSPlayer has been updated several times to include full Unicode support, but it seems that this support is not 100% complete.

Maybe you can install the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set and see if this solve your problem. I know it's a workaround and not the definitive solution to the problem, but it's a start..

[kulakov]

Maybe it's really related to Unicode, since French diacritics are included into 8-bit ASCII character set (ANSI character set), but not in the 7-bit ASCII character set (the one included in US and Russian Windows)

I'm sure all versions of Windows have full ANSI character set. Russian is an optional extra language, I can install Windows without it as well, and then Windows will display 8-bit ANSI characters where it would display Russian ones if I had installed it.

So, Explorer can display them because it fully supports Unicode or because it has a built in 8-bit ASCII character set.

If it was only about 8-bit ASCII character set Explorer would not be able to display Russian filenames as well. It displays Latin characters, Russian ones and French diacritics (actually 8-bit ANSI characters) which is only possible with Unicode.

Maybe you can install the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set and see if this solve your problem.

According to my language settings I do have 8859-1, and, honestly speaking, I doubt some one does not have it. It's like not having English language installed. I tried installing Frensh, but that didn't work out. I changed the default language for applications not supporting Unicode from Russian to English, it didn't work either. I scanned through the list of all available character sets, and found one '20269 Diacritic marks', I checked it but even that didn't help.

The point is BSPlayer does display the file name correctly in the playlist, it even displays the time of the song (04:09), yet it fails to play it.

[adicoto]

My advice, install french support in XP. Open control panel, regional and language options and in the Advanced TAB, select French also for non unicode. Should solve the problem. Also, drag'n'drop of the file over the main window should get the file played.

[kulakov]

install french support in XP. Open control panel, regional and language options and in the Advanced TAB, select French also for non unicode

Won't do that. I may try just to know if it works but renaming the files is much easier. I did everything except selecting French for non-Unicode, but English didn't help that way and I think it's not about non-Unicode applications.

drag'n'drop of the file over the main window should get the file played

Of course, it doesn't. What does it change regarding Unicode?!

[adicoto]

It's up to us to propose a solution, it's up to you to apply the solution or not. ;)
Of course renaming the files is the simplest solution.

[kulakov]

Yes. I cannot make French or even English the default for non Unicode applications - all my Russian software will stop working for me. Also, when I installed XP I selected Russian in the very beginning, and that cannot be changed with settings - only at installation stage. Maybe BSPlayer would be fine if I had selected English at that point, but other software would display illegible stuff.
The goal of my post(s) was definitely reporting a bug, not asking for a solution, cause I can rename any time. I wanted to let you know that under some conditions BSPlayer cannot play back unicode filenames, then you can think about fixing that or not. Unfortunately I cannot debug that stuff now cause currently I do not work with C++.
I think that since BSPlayer displays the song time it does open the file correctly, so it does support Unicode, but perhaps when it tries to play it opens files in a different way?