Movie titles - Emby App on Roku

[dropshadow 4]

Long time win7 WMC user, recently moved to Roku. I have an international folder of movies. In the nfo file I will copy the "original title" into the "title" so that I can see them in apps. For example:

 

  <title>The Monkey King 3 • 西游记·女儿国</title>
  <originaltitle>西游记·女儿国</originaltitle>

 

This used to work fine in WMC, however it looks like the roku emby app isn't able to display double-byte characters like Chinese/Korean. Is this emby or is this roku?

[speechles 1917]

It is Roku. The only UTF-8 capable function it has is subtitles. For the labels on everything this is a limit of the Roku firmware not properly sequencing the multi-byte characters. It will render them singularly as if they were ASCII characters.

 

This is a problem Roku hasn't addressed because of the regions they officially support, shown below:

 

They are all latin based languages.

 

They also have German and Italian available as supported, but they do not sell Roku devices in those countries directly. They must be imported and use a power adapter for the prongs. 

Edited February 1, 2019 by speechles

[Happy2Play 8281]

@@speechles well you already got it.

Edited February 1, 2019 by Happy2Play

[speechles 1917]

@@speechles well you already got it.

 

Didn't mean to beat you. Just wanted to explain how this is more of our problem than Roku's because of how we want to appeal to a World-Wide audience. It is a problem because we already have code written to translate all the app strings into any language we want. Not just the Roku supported countries shown above. This is a more advanced translator than the Roku firmware version. This translator we have supports translations in the exact same way as every other Emby app (reading json) and can support any language. The issue is because of how Roku breaks UTF-8 it is seriously hampering our ability to add all these other languages and get translations for the entire world written. We want just as badly to be seen correctly in every language but Roku makes it difficult. If this ever changes we are ready for the World.

Edited February 1, 2019 by speechles

[Luke 37060]

So i guess we can't really do much here then? 

[speechles 1917]

Not at the moment.

 

I have seen Roku themselves mention using Googles Noto font when people have display issues. Not suggesting we do that, but we might investigate if this cures any issues. It might be worthwhile to check if there is a difference compared to Roboto that we currently are using. Roboto cannot render Chinese properly.

Edited February 1, 2019 by speechles

[dropshadow 4]

Appreciate the thorough, detailed answer. I understand it's a limitation of roku, but any ideas on how I might be able to display Chinese correctly? I have some family that can't read English well, and they definitely would not know English names of Asian movies

 

If not, I guess family will just have to rely on folder covers and I'll keep my fingers crossed for something from roku in the future.

Edited February 1, 2019 by dropshadow

[Luke 37060]

You might have to use a different device instead of Roku.