[mythtv-users] MythV's mysql d/b - should it be UTF-8?

[Jaakko Heikkilä]

On ti, 2007-05-08 at 09:30 -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 05/08/2007 05:13 AM, Neil Bird wrote:
> >    Currently, the default seems to [still] be latin1 as the encoding, not 
> > utf-8.  This does make manual/scripted access a tad tricky when there are 
> > non-ASCII characters present.
> >
> >    Now, my understanding of it is that it shouldn't actually make any 
> > difference to Myth how the table is configured in that respect, as the text 
> > will still be UTF-8 encoded, but I may be wrong.  So:
> >
> > a) *Does* it make a difference?
> >   
> 
> Yes!!! Very much so.  If you change your charset on tables, your data 
> will become corrupt (either at conversion, during normal usage--because 
> of Myth's assumption that you're using a latin1 database, or during a 
> future upgrade).  Myth can assume you're using a latin1 database since 
> mc.sql sets the default charset for the DB before any tables are created 
> and http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/8922 resets the charset on 
> database upgrades to fix cases where DBMS upgrades change the default 
> charset.  (In other words, the only way you won't be using a latin1 
> database/tables is if you change them yourself, which you shouldn't do 
> because Myth was designed to use latin1.)
> 

There is also limitation with key length:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4541, which prevents change of some
MythTV tables. I tried and failed.

I noticed that if filesystem is using UTF-8 filenames at least MythMusic
can not find files with some special characters. Is there any workaround
for this problem? Except changing file names back to latin-1.

- Jaska