[MPlayer-users] MPlayer won't open filenames with non latin characters

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Tue, Dec 25, 2007 at 08:04:17PM +0100, Krzysztof Duchnowski wrote:
> Rich Felker pisze:
> > On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 03:13:21AM +0100, RVM wrote:
> >> Well, at least I know there's nothing wrong in my program. I hope you can 
> >> finally fix this bug but until then I can pass the short name to mplayer, so 
> >> it's not a big deal.
> 
> > The problem is that it's a bug in Windows not in MPlayer, and it
> > requires some wrapper hackage to work around the bug..
> 
> Yes.
> Not even native Windows player could overcome this and for such a file 
> it couldn't be even renamed under Windows to clean up from this non 
> latin character.
> But, suprisingly, eMule can rename such a file under Windows - maybe 
> it's a some clue.

That is not surprising, because it is not actually a Windows bug, but
"only" a horrible design decision, namely to make internationalization
and all-or-nothing approach with the predictable effect of most people
taking the "nothing" road - since the "all" road can mean a
rewrite of major parts, all at once while at the same time completely
loosing compatibility with Windows 9x unless you take extra measure (I
think an extra dll is enough usually, but still).
Not to mention that it is an approach that doubles memory and possibly
disk usage for applications handling lots of mostly ASCII strings.

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger