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kodi-pvr / pvr.iptvsimple

IPTV Simple client for Kodi PVR
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Feature Request: Allow Unicode symbols such as flags #163

Open Anuskuss opened 6 years ago

Anuskuss commented 6 years ago

I don't know if this has to happen in Kodi or the addon but it would be nice if I could use flags in my m3u playlist.

phunkyfish commented 5 years ago

I would imagine it would require both. Do you mean flags as in country flags?

kekukui commented 4 years ago

Regional identifiers are defined in ISO 3166-1 as follows:

In unicode this is implemented as code pairs which produce an image of the 2 letter alpha (not image of flag)

https://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/iso3166 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol

To display the actual flag, the platforms unicode implementation would have to contain flag images instead of 2 letter alpha images. Supporting unicode will get you an image of 2 letter country codes. If you want actual flags, you might have to replace the platforms unicode library. The addon cannot supply flag images, only support unicode. But the 2 letter alpha is sufficient to distinguish national origin.

Flag images reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 https://www.countryflags.com/en/ https://www.countryflags.com/en/emoji-overview

phunkyfish commented 4 years ago

Kodi supports Unicode alright but as to how I read or pass that to Kodi I have no idea I’m afraid.

kekukui commented 4 years ago

ok I have run some tests on Windows & Linux. This is what I found:

∆ (2206) Ӆ (04C5) ֆ (0586)

֎ (058E) 😁 (1F601) emoji 🇦🇮 (1F1E6+1F1EA) country code or flag image (depends on unicode library)

I therefore conclude that the missing support for emoji & country code is a Kodi bug, not a problem with IPTVsimple. I think the Arial font in Kodi may need to be updated because (0586) and (058E) both appear in the Character Map for Arial on the Windows platform but only (0586) will display in Kodi.

phunkyfish commented 4 years ago

Nice. Can you give an example M3U entry that works with Unicode?

Do any of the flags work?

kekukui commented 4 years ago

Can you give an example M3U entry that works with Unicode?

https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u

Do any of the flags work?

No. In order to see any kind of regional identifier which is supported by unicode, Kodi needs to support that first. I am just pointing out that IPTVsimple does not need to be modified to support unicode. I know there are some Windows apps that dont support unicode even though the OS supports it. And some terminal applications on Linux (such as "vi") dont support unicode. So I modified other Kodi addons and found that those example characters which did not work will not be rendered on screen in any Kodi addon. I think there is nothing you can do to fix the issue here: We already have unicode support in IPTVsimple, but Kodi only has a partial implementation. The proof that we have unicode support is when you see oriental alphabets in channel names rendered on screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_(Unicode)

This is working in IPTVsimple on LibreELEC with all of the channels I tested, and it works in the YouTube addon (if your skin font is Arial based.) The bottom line is, Kodi lacks support for the subset of unicode which includes emoji & regional identifiers. If those characters appear in some addon source text that will be rendered on screen, they will all be rendered as a .notdef glyph (which represents valid unicode characters that cannot be rendered by the selected font.) The .notdef symbol used by Kodi's "Arial" font is a white vertical rectangle ▯ (25AF). But the rendering of unicode characters from non-latin alphabets is working in IPTVsimple, so we do support unicode here. The problem appears to be in Kodis fonts and/or unicode implementation. I can see why users think we dont support unicode when Estuary's default font does not even render some alphabets correctly. And we need to see some support in Kodi/Estuary for unicode regional identifiers before we can debate whether those identifiers should be a country code or a flag. Whoever fixes that issue in Kodi/Estuary can also add support for emoji (which is needed in Kodi because its allowed in YouTube video titles & descriptions.)

phunkyfish commented 4 years ago

This is a really good explanation. Thanks.

dagwieers commented 4 years ago

Yup, we have this on our wishlist as well. Would be nice to have emojis/icons for things like geo-blocked content or list-items that are being "followed" or tagged as "watch later".