Unicode support? Will this come in the future?

[thesleeve]

Hi everyone,

I own Replay Music and I was thinking of buying Replay Media Catcher - right now I'm using the demo. I'm running into a problem. Both Replay Music and Replay Media Catcher seem to be incapable of supporting Unicode characters in file and folder names. This causes them to show error messages and fail downloading/encoding.

I primarily want to use Replay Media Catcher to record streaming audio/video from Japanese news websites, so I can keep up to date with what is happening in Japan. The problem is that Applian software doesn't like filenames containing Unicode characters.

For example, if I try to stream/convert a video called NHK動画ニュース.wmv, Replay Media Catcher will convert the Japanese Unicode characters to gibberish, displaying something like this: NHK%^*1lb:]\.wmv. Then, since it is inserting characters in the filename that aren't allowed by the Windows file system, it "forgets" where the file is located, and encoding fails.

You can reliably get Replay Media Center to fail with almost any language you try - Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic.

Does anybody know how to avoid these failures?

I think it would be a really good business strategy for Applian to update their software to support Unicode strings and filenames. That would open up a whole new world of customers who want to use the software for non-Western languages that require Unicode. By not supporting Unicode, you're effectively prohibiting half of the world from using the software!

Anyway, the software is great - it just sucks that I can't use it for more than half of the media that I want!

[thesleeve]

Hi everyone,

I found a workaround. It's not really a fix, but at least it keeps the program from showing error messages. You just have to turn off automatic naming, because that's where the software appears to be tripping up. To do that, follow these steps:

* Tools menu > Settings
* File Naming Rules
* Disable the option for "Enable Active Browser Title Naming"
* Disable all other checkboxes except for "Enable URL Path Naming"

This will effectively force RMC to use the filename taken directly from the URL, so it works in almost all cases.

A note to the developers at Applian: this is only a temporary workaround. Apparently the governing body of internet standards is going to allow unicode characters in URLs in the near future, meaning that I could register a domain name like www .例.com.
I really suggest you update your software to allow for unicode support so that it will be functional in other parts of the world that don't use Latin script!!

[Jeff Lenney]

Hi everyone,

I found a workaround. It's not really a fix, but at least it keeps the program from showing error messages. You just have to turn off automatic naming, because that's where the software appears to be tripping up. To do that, follow these steps:

* Tools menu > Settings
* File Naming Rules
* Disable the option for "Enable Active Browser Title Naming"
* Disable all other checkboxes except for "Enable URL Path Naming"

This will effectively force RMC to use the filename taken directly from the URL, so it works in almost all cases.

A note to the developers at Applian: this is only a temporary workaround. Apparently the governing body of internet standards is going to allow unicode characters in URLs in the near future, meaning that I could register a domain name like www .例.com.
I really suggest you update your software to allow for unicode support so that it will be functional in other parts of the world that don't use Latin script!!

We are very much aware of the issue - thank you. For now, you can do this - or simply rename the downloaded file to english characters before the conversion.

Thanks for posting the work around as well! :-)