[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] lavc: make invalid UTF-8 in subtitle output a non-fatal error

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 10:08:39PM +0200, wm4 wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 22:00:14 +0200
> Nicolas George <nicolas.george at normalesup.org> wrote:
> 
> > I agree. I already told that I had work-in-progress encoding
> > autodetection somewhere. But wm4's proposal is a step in the wrong
> > direction for that.
> 
> Except auto-detection is not the solution. Not for every application,
> and not for this specific problem. It's also fragile and complicated
> and will most likely require (optional) external dependencies.

I think we are just going round in circles.
Why not just implement a relatively simple solution like
supporting a special charenc "noconv" that just passes
things through (possibly broken) as they are, plus
some documentation update that says in this case we
make no promise the output is UTF-8?
I don't think it's a big deal, when the user requests
broken data it's ok if he gets it.
I mention this because MPlayer has a "noconv" as well
to work around people with systems that have no iconv (binary
in that case) for example.
Btw. as to installing iconv: My experience with trying to
cross-compile is that libiconv is one of those utterly
broken libraries that are just impossible to get to cross-compile.