Support for UTF-8 playlists?, .m3u8 playlist only partially loading Options

[alexbrn]

Hello everybody

I'm thinking of changing from WinAmp to foobar2000, but find that UTF-8 encoded playlists don't appear to be fully supported (they load fine in WinAmp). I've got a playlist with multiple lines and some line appear to load correctly, e.g.:

E:\music\Composers Q-S\Strauss, Johann II\Eine Nacht in Venedig - Ouverture (Berlin PO, Harnoncourt, 1998)\02-Johann Strauss , Ouverture Eine Nacht in Venedig - Berliner Urfassung.flac

but others appear in the playlist as "?-?" e.g.

E:\music\Composers D-G\Debussy, Claude\Orchestral & Concertante\L'enfant prodigue (Royal PO, Beecham, 1959)\09-Claude Debussy , 'L'Enfant prodigue' - Scène lyrique.flac

The common feature of lines which so fail is that they contain non-ASCII characters. In the above line the "è" of "Scène lyrique" is represented by the byte sequence C3 A8 (which is correctly encoded I believe).

Does foobar2000 not support such playlists?

[EDIT: this is with foobar2000 v1.1.11 on Windows 7 64-bit]

[EDIT: I have uploaded the problematic playlist. See http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=93906 ]

- Alex.

This post has been edited by alexbrn: Mar 9 2012, 13:31

[foosion]

As far as I remember foobar2000 requires a UTF-8 byte order marker (BOM) for .m3u8 files. If this is missing it will assume the file is using a different encoding (ISO 8859-1, ANSI - I don't remember). As far as I can tell your file is correctly UTF-8 encoded but has no BOM. However this could have been lost during the download.

[alexbrn]

As far as I remember foobar2000 requires a UTF-8 byte order marker (BOM) for .m3u8 files. If this is missing it will assume the file is using a different encoding (ISO 8859-1, ANSI - I don't remember). As far as I can tell your file is correctly UTF-8 encoded but has no BOM. However this could have been lost during the download.

Thanks for the response.

I tried prepending a BOM, but still no joy :-(

The Unicode spec states "[u]se of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8" so this would be a surprising requirement.

Surely a m3u8 playlist should be encoded in UTF-8 as described at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-ht...ve-streaming-07 ?

I think this is a bug in fb2000. It would be very useful for users of non-Western languages if it were fixed :-)

- Alex.

[foosion]

After reading your first port again I wonder whether foobar2000 really has problems loading your playlist. Can you play all the files in the playlist after loading it with foobar2000? What about the ones displaying as "?-?"?

[alexbrn]

After reading your first port again I wonder whether foobar2000 really has problems loading your playlist. Can you play all the files in the playlist after loading it with foobar2000? What about the ones displaying as "?-?"?

No, they don't play -- but my original post was wrong in saying they appear as "? - ?" -- they don't appear at all (those ?-? are the untitled "silence" tracks in the playlist).

- Alex.

[mjb2006]

I tried prepending a BOM, but still no joy :-(

I'm unable to reproduce this problem. When I prepend the bytes EF BB BF to a UTF-8 encoded .m3u8 file, then open the file in foobar2000, the non-ASCII paths are loaded properly into foobar's playlist, as long as they exist on disk. This is on Windows 7 64-bit, with foobar 1.1.18.

The Unicode spec states "[u]se of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8" so this would be a surprising requirement.

Surely a m3u8 playlist should be encoded in UTF-8

I fully agree that foobar2000 should assume a file whose name ends with ".m3u8" is UTF-8 encoded. It would be nice to see this change made in a future version.

This post has been edited by mjb2006: Jan 2 2013, 23:21