I'm sure you're right, it's a variation in the encoding schemes of each machine. What I orignally used to encode the info for the database file is:-

$tagsdb .= pack("U2A*",$tags{ $_ }, length $$hot{ $_ }, $$hot{ $_ } );

$tagsdb is then added to the database file - for each fid.

Now I preprocess the tag data like this:-

my $utag = $$hot{ $_ };
utf8::decode($utag);
$tagsdb .= pack("U2A*",$tags{ $_ }, length $utag, $$hot{ $_ } );

This seems to produce the correct length count on both the Mac and RedHat and most importantly when I rsync the resultant database file the empeg player no longer tries to rebuild. So that appears to be the solution to that problem.

I am still having trouble with rsync though. After the first bulk upload rsync crashed with an error I wasn't able to record and the recent update also produced a different error when trying to turn swapoff after the sync:-

swapoff: /dev/hdc6: Cannot allocate memory

but the sync did complete, although I'm sure it transferred far more then it ought.

The beauty of rsync of course is that you can simply try again and it catches up from where it left off so you just keep going till it shows no files were tranferred and then you know it finished. I just need to keep doing it to iron out these last probs, but I feel that with memory so short it may be impossible to entirely eliminate all issues.

So, it now seems to count ok, but any advice on running rsync in low memory situations (or with no terminal) would be welcome:-)