When Duet controller can support Chinese Characters ??

[kingkimo]

Sigh !! My SB3 can display Chinese perfectly but on the new Duet controller all my chinese songs' characters displayed like garbage. It's so pity that the new Duet can't support Chinese. Is there anyone know why Duet did not follow SB3 ? when will the controller support Chinese ?

[mherger]

> Is there anyone know why Duet did not follow SB3 ?

The fonts we're using don't support CJK character sets.

> when will the controller support Chinese ?

This I don't know.

Micheal

[bobkoure]

>
The fonts we're using don't support CJK character sets.
Micheal

Are CJK char sets what used to be known as "double byte character sets"? And there's now just support for unicode? As UTF-8, 16, or both?
If that is the issue, possibly the answer is to use something like MP3Tag to convert to ID3v2.4.
kingkimo - don't do this until someone more knowledgeable than me chimes in, I've plenty of experience with char sets, DBCS and Unicode, but don't really understand what's used for the char sets used in tags, so I may be suggesting something that's a bad idea...

[radish]

The problem is not that the tags aren't being read correctly (as they show up properly on the web interface I believe) but that the font used on the SBC simply doesn't contain the required characters.

[mherger]

> Are CJK char sets what used to be known as "double byte character
> sets"? And there's now just support for unicode? As UTF-8, 16, or
> both?

As radish says it's just the characters for Chinese, Japanes, Korean
(AFAIK this is what CJK stands for...) which are not implemented in that
font. But there's eg. Hebrew. Thus we clearly can do utf8.

> If that -is- the issue, possibly the answer is to use something like
> MP3Tag to convert to ID3v2.4.

We can interpret the information, but not display it. Thus retagging won't
help.

Micheal

[kingkimo]

SB3 can support Chinese perfectly. That's why I pre-order SB Duet. Most of the new products can support old version's features. Is it difficult to include the CJK fonts in the SBC software ? There are a lot of SB fans in Taiwan. Hope you can solve the problem shortly.

[tomb]

One way to get CJK (or any other character set) to work on the Duet is to supply the necessary fonts yourself, replacing the shipped font.

I just tried this, and it (kinda) works.

Requirements:
* scp (Secure CoPy) installed (I happen to have Cygwin on my Windows installation, which comes with a scp)
* a font which support your desired character set - let's assume it's c:\windows\fonts\simhei.ttf

Preparation:
1. enable remote access on the Duet remote (Settings->Advanced->Remote Login->Enable SSH) - it will tell you the remote's IP, I assume 192.168.1.3 for the example
2. open a console (cygwin or otherwise)
3. cd c:\windows\fonts

Backup of original fonts:
1. scp root@192.168.1.3:/usr/share/jive/fonts/FreeSans.ttf FreeSans.ttf
2. enter password (1234)
3. scp root@192.168.1.3:/usr/share/jive/fonts/FreeSansBold.ttf FreeSansBold.ttf

Installation of CJK-enabled font (simhei in this example):
1. scp simhei.ttf root@192.168.1.3:/usr/share/jive/fonts/FreeSans.ttf
2. enter passwowrd (1234)
3. scp simhei.ttf root@192.168.1.3:/usr/share/jive/fonts/FreeSansBold.ttf
4. enter passwowrd (1234)
5. restart the remote

After this you will notice that the menu font looks different, as it's using simhei now.

I noticed that the italic portions (such as when looking at song info) doesn't work right, there's a mess of pixels. However, in the "Now Playing" screen, it's just fine - or at least looks fine to me, I don't read Chinese

[bobkoure]

Is there anyone know why Duet did not follow SB3 ?

I got to looking at the way the server and a Squeezebox2/3 communicate, and it looks as though the Squeezebox can't actually display Chinese characters (or any characters) - instead it receives graphics for a bit-map of the display. (see grfe in the protocol).
The problem is, this works fine for a 320x32 monochrome display, but it doesn't really "map" to the Duet Controller.
I hope tomb's fix works for you...
Bob

[mherger]

> The problem is, this works fine for a 320x32 monochrome display, but it
> doesn't really "map" to the Duet Controller.

The Controller is a completely different architecture. It basically has nothing in common with a SB3. It's an embedded Linux, thus you can log in to it using SSH and replace files in its filesystem etc. as suggested in the other posting.

--

Michael

[bobkoure]

Right - sorry, I was being ambiguous. The solution of sending character graphics to the Squeezebox 2/3 as a bitmap doesn't map to the new device.
Just trying to answer the why question. Of course "it's a completely different architecture" is a perfectly valid answer as well. I was trying to get at the implied "why didn't they just do whatever they did with the SB2/3?"