[vlc-devel] EPG standard ignorants

[Marian Ďurkovič]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 06:30:54PM +0300, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> Le mardi 8 septembre 2009 16:04:21 Marian Ďurkovič, vous avez écrit :
> > I believe this is a no-go for VLC, so I propose to stay with language codes
> > used by those providers and modify the list of exceptions like this:
> >
> >         if ( !strncasecmp( psz_lang, "fre", 3 ) ||
> >              !strncasecmp( psz_lang, "deu", 3 ) ||
> >              !strncasecmp( psz_lang, "spa", 3 ) )
> >         {
> >             psz_encoding = "ISO_8859-1";
> >         }
> >         else
> >         {
> >             psz_encoding = "ISO_6937";
> >         }
> >
> > OK to commit this?
> 
> I just wonder what happens to the non-ignorant French, German and Spanish 
> language broadcasters... ? Are they using ASCII only?!

No, they typically use properly declared latin-1, i.e. with 0x05 byte
prefixing each text. The above workaround will work just fine with those
since it only touches the undeclared case.

Please note that vlc-1.0.1 uses latin-1 as default for all languages, so
I'm in fact proposing to *restrict* latin-1 hack to only 3 western countries,
making e.g. all latin-2 countries (SK, CZ, HU, PL, ...) work correctly with
ISO-6937. A quick look at the forum doesn't show anyone from FR/DE/ES
complaining about broken EPG, but someone from CZ:

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=41013&p=127818&hilit=epg#p127818

AFAIK, there are several STBs on the market, which use latin-1 for EPG when their
menu is switched to german language. They apparently implement a similar hack
which probably means that no german station uses ISO-6937.

Anyway, the only correct solution is to push on TV stations to stop ignoring
ETSI EN 300 486 and start prefixing each text with 0x05...

   With kind regards,

        M.