Quote:
The reason StreetDeck can't handle Unicode has to do with Windows Media Player. They use .wpl files for playlists. .wpl files are wierd; they are encoded using windows-1252 as long as no item contains Unicode. But once you add a single item with a Unicode filename, the .wpl file will be utf-8 encoded. But there's no Unicode BOM or charset= header that tells what encoding is used. It's up to the application to guess its encoding.

I was a bit alarmed by that, so I tried it. I can't persuade WMP11 (11.0.5721.5145) to create non-UTF-8 WPL files whatever I do. If I give it ASCII names the resulting WPL is indistinguishable from ASCII, but of course ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so that's OK. If I give it a filename with U+00F1 in, the resulting WPL is UTF-8 (not CP1252) even though U+00F1 is in CP1252. If I give it a filename with U+FF1F in, the resulting WPL is still UTF-8.

Basically I think WPL was Microsoft's attempt to fix codepage and escaping issues in their XML-like playlists after messing it up in ASX (try using filenames with "&" in).

Peter