Forum

Software
XBian version: 1.0RC3
XBMC version: 13.2
Overclock settings: Default

Hardware
RPi model (model A/B 256mb/512mb): B+ 512Mb
SD card size and make/type: SanDisk® microSDHCTM 8GB
Network (wireless or LAN): LAN
Connected devices (TV, USB, network storage, etc.):
-TV (HDMI)
-Western Digital 2TB External Hard drive (USB)
-Keyboard

Problem description:
When I browse through the files located in the Ext Drive any folders or file names that contain characters such as: カタカナ　と　ひらがな　漢字　è à ç
all show up as ??? (where each question mark represents one character)
I changed the font type to Arial and the local language to Japanese with character code set to Japanese as well, but no luck. It should be noted all the xbian menus and what not did display the unicode characters properly. I do not have this issue when I connect the Ext Drive to my windows laptop or desktop. After googling a bit I think it might be something do with not mounting the drive to accept UTF-8 characters in it's folder structure, but I dunno, I'm knew to linux and the like.
How to reproduce:
Any time I open up the Ext Hard Drive with Xbian.

Any help would be much appreciated!

@flyingcar

the UTF-8 conversion (or mount option) can be valid in case your ext. disk is formatted with filesystem comming from the dos/windows era (fat, ntfs).

also, if (you didn't specify) you are referring to viewing from inside XBCM, support is present (XBMC's internal format is UTF8), but if you are listing your disk via ssh remote session, current environment settings and also ssh client font encoding can influence what you see at the end.

going back to the filesystem mount options. /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf FS_MOUNTOPTIONS variable specifying special (per filesystem type) mount options. for instance if the disk is ntfs, you can add to the first line "utf8", so the whole option line would read: