[MPlayer-users] BUG: long file names with Japanese characters

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 12:33:38PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> > For example, the file I have is: (TV) [ドラマ] ブラッディ・マンデイ 第01話 「日本最後の日！1
> > 人の命か！？千万人の命か！？最凶ウイルステロの陰謀と伝説の天才ハッカ—の闘いがいよいよ今夜はじまる！！」 (1280x720
> > DivX684).avi
> 
> I copied one of my existing video files to that filename (on an NTFS
> filesystem created for the purpose), and it plays just fine in MPlayer
> from the command line

This is _only_ an issue on Windows, and it is several issues.
1) the maximum command-line length on Windows i rather small (though i
somewhat doubt that is an issue.
2) Windows designers thought it intelligent to use UTF-16 (UCS-2
orignally), thus those Japanese characters can not be passed to MPlayer
via the normal main() arguments but you must call a special function.
Since MPlayer cannot and will not use UTF-16 internally, you'd then have
to convert them to UTF-8.
3) Then the same issue exists with the file-open functions, you can not
use UTF-8 there, thus you can not use the same functions, so you have to
use different functions to open the files in any place where you want to
support non-ASCII.
4) In order to avoid all that mess which is somewhat hard to implement
in MPlayer cleanly (though mostly the problem is that nobody cares), I
think SMPlayer might try to use the short (8.3) name. This has two
issues: subtitles are not found, since their short name does not relate
exactly to the short name of the movie, plus I think Vista no longer
creates short names by default.