Zune HD Will Have Unicode Support

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.insidethecircle.net/2009/06/unicode-support-coming-to-zune-hd.html' target='_blank'>http://www.insidethecircle.net/2009...to-zune-hd.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/zt/auto/1244476238.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb; float: left; margin: 10px;" /> This is news that will make some people happy: the Zune HD will have unicode support, meaning that it will display non Latin-based characters. This means that if you have a song/video/photo that has a file name, or metadata, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. it wil display the filename on those characters rather than showing you the "unknown block" characters. Not having any files like that myself, I'm unsure of exactly what languages are supported, or how the implementation will work. What would make people <em>really </em>happy of course would be if unicode support was rolled back to older Zune devices - because no one wants to buy a new device to get unicode support. Microsoft has thus far remained quiet about what sorts of software support they'll continue to provide for the older Zune devices. Let's face it, they've extended the feature-life of the Zune 30 further than anyone else has ever done with an MP3 player - so if they were to stop releasing firmware updates for it, it wouldn't be very surprising. I'd really like to see unicode suppot trickle down to the Zune 120/80/16/8/4 devices though - it would be a shame to see the devleopment stop on devices that are still being sold today.</p>

[Adam Krebs]

Fina-frickin-ly. This is most certainly a welcome addition, and I sincerely hope at least this part trickles down to the older models (I'm fully expecting some of the cooler features of the HD won't make it down, but at least I hope they hit the basics).

[lokimotive]

I had some Armenian choral songs (they were fantastic, seriously) that I created metadata in the original script for just out of curiosity. When it was imported into the Zune software, it displayed it perfectly, ramping up my excitement. As you can guess, of course, it translated to blocks when it got over to the device.

It will be interesting to see what scripts are supported in Unicode and how. I've long been fascinated with Unicode encoding and how diverse it is. It will be interesting to see if right justified scripts such as Hebrew and Arabic are integrated correctly. That's not to mention more complicated Asian scripts like Devanagari, which, when properly rendered, changes character appearances based on surrounding characters.

It would be great to seem them provide full support for their very own Arial Unicode MS with full support, despite it being a rather astronomical 22 mb in size.