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@JamesChevalier
Last active December 6, 2024 07:17
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Unicode on Mac is insane. Mac OS X uses NFD while everything else uses NFC. This fixes that.

convmv manpage

Install convmv if you don't have it

sudo apt-get install convmv

Convert all files in a directory from NFD to NFC:

convmv -r -f utf8 -t utf8 --nfc --notest .

Convert all files in a directory from NFC to NFD:

convmv -r -f utf8 -t utf8 --nfd --notest .

@jcarnat
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jcarnat commented Apr 14, 2021

Great. Thanks a lot!

@boulderob
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boulderob commented Apr 30, 2021

So i just upgraded to a new used intel-based macbook pro (aka mbp). I reformatted the internal SDD to use APFS and i'm seeing the exact symptoms defined here when i use VLC to view downloaded french video mp4 files with matching subtitle vtt filenames that have unicode characters in the filenames themselves! VLC plays the mp4 fine but it can't locate and autoload the vtt file with the same exact filename except for the extension! If there are no unicode "french" characters in the filenames it all works fine. But all files whether they had unicode "French" characters or not worked great on my old mbp with an older version of VLC and a NON-APFS file system.

In fact if i mount my external NTFS drive with a huge library of previously downloaded french video mp4 and vtt files on the new mbp (using an NTFS driver to mount the drive of course), the new VLC recognizes and plays these OLD files normally.

BUT on the new mbp, VLC will not autorecognzie the coinciding and same exact vtt filename as it's equivalent mp4 when the filename contains unicode french chars when i download new files via youtube-dl onto the internal SDD formatted as APFS

If i copy these new download files to the usb attached NTFS drive they then magically work they way i expect from VLC on the new mbp! :) If i then copy them back to the new mbp internal SDD with APFS, they also work the way i expect :) This seems to indicate that the NTFS filesystem changes the fileNAME encoding when the file is copied to it and that copying back to APFS somehow does NOT change that new encoding!???

I have a huge collection and am constantly adding to and maintaining it.

Is there any way to just set what your scripts are doing at the filesystem or even system level? Or going forward will i have to always run a post download script on every new filename to convert the unicode flavor used so that my mac / vlc can recognize them?!

Thanks

@hwdbk
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hwdbk commented May 1, 2021

yup, that is exactly the madness with having two allowed but different character encodings for, say, the è (e-accent-grave)
the simple way to make sure both the media file and the vtt/srt file uses the same file name encoding is:

for i in *.mp4 ; do
mv -vn "$i" "$(syn2mac <<< "$i")"
done

and do the same for the subtitle files. You'll probably get a lot of "same file" warnings from mv on those files that were already in the target encoding.

@s2k
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s2k commented May 4, 2021

Very nice tip!
On my Mac, I used brew install convmv, BTW.

@igorsgm
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igorsgm commented May 13, 2021

You saved my day. Thank you!

@simnalamburt
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simnalamburt commented Jun 16, 2023

Take a look at https://github.com/cr0sh/jaso for a faster alternative written in Rust.

$ brew install simnalamburt/x/jaso
$ jaso .
DONE; 100 files in 1.111529301 seconds

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