I'm syncing .mp3 files with UTF-8 filenames and .m3u playlists referencing these filenames -- generated on an Ubuntu system -- to a Windows machine. .mp3 filenames appear correctly in the Windows explorer, but when trying to play a .m3u playlist with Windows Media Player, it shows broken filenames and skips over files with non-ASCII characters.
I guess the filenames are stored in another encoding than UTF-8 on Windows, which Ubuntu One doesn't really care about, but the contents of the .m3u files aren't translated.
I'm looking for suggestions in dealing with this! :-)
Thanks!
-- Loïc Minier
11 Answer
The problem is that your music player on windows is opening the .m3u in something other than UTF-8. From searching around a little, it seems that if the extension is .m3u8, things will just work.
What's more, the Wikipedia article on M3U says that the encoding has to be Latin-1 if the extension is .m3u, and that you have to use .m3u8 for UTF-8 encoded filenames.
Also, as you lool pointed out "[c]reating a .wpl file with the playlist worked; I copy-pasted the model from: and it worked with UTF-8 encoded filenames (since encoding of XML is well defined). Another option is to use more tolerant software such as VLC."
