I've seen this on different sites, but here's a prime example. This is a webpage for a streaming radio station that I'm listening to right now, and the little boxes below the "Privacy Policy" with the little green arrows shows up looking like it has the wrong characters. I think those are part of flash. The rest of the kanji on the page looks fine (I have enabled the language support in my Windows XP settings.) I tried both IE and Firefox on Windows XP. I'm thinking I need to do something special to get Flash to support kanji.

http://www.fm-nirai.jp/top.html

FIXED: Thanks to Tobberoth for picking the right solution: "If you're using XP, in the advanced tab of the Date, Time, Language, and Regions settings, is it set to Japanese in the box for non-Unicode programs? That's probably it if that's the case."

I have the same problem, but can't seem to figure out how to fix it.

I checked that website and had the same problem. Also had the same problem at Radilog, which is pretty annoying.

Some improperly made web content doesn't explicitly define what character set they use (and don't use unicode). I believe the only way to fix this is to change your OS region and all os & browser defaults to Japanese.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Some improperly made web content doesn't explicitly define what character set they use (and don't use unicode). I believe the only way to fix this is to change your OS region and all os & browser defaults to Japanese.

This. Japanese people unfortunately do not use Unicode... they use various encodings such as Shift-JIS, JIS and EUC. If the webcontent isn't properly made, the computer won't be able to decode such text on it's own.

It'd be nice if we could right-click on the Flash content and set the character encoding in the Flash player plugin settings, like we can with the browser settings when dealing with misencoded HTML. Maybe there's an alternative Flash player plugin that can do this?

I'd just like to note that that site doesn't work here on Firefox/OSX either.

Edit: Using Flash 10 as well.

The garbled text is in an embedded flash control, as drivers99 speculated. The same is true of the site Sebastian referenced. This is only a hunch, but I have a feeling the issue is that Flash has somewhat crappy support for Japanese text. Here's another site where almost all the content is in flash and it's unreadable http://www.le-sarment-dor.com/ (I think I've even tried to view it on a Japanese PC and got the same results). I think the people at Adobe need to try a little bit harder.

mikemorr Wrote:It'd be nice if we could right-click on the Flash content and set the character encoding in the Flash player plugin settings, like we can with the browser settings when dealing with misencoded HTML. Maybe there's an alternative Flash player plugin that can do this?

Nah, Flash is a proprietary format. There is some open-source alternatives on Linux but they are useless.

Both of those work fine for me... I'm using Japanese version of Firefox.

They work fine for me too, and I'm using the English version of Firefox. It also works for me in Opera and IE. I'm using Flash Player version 10.

SammyB Wrote:Both of those work fine for me... I'm using Japanese version of Firefox.

Same here. I'm also using japanese version of firefox and I have no problems.

fluxcapacitor Wrote:They work fine for me too, and I'm using the English version of Firefox. It also works for me in Opera and IE. I'm using Flash Player version 10.

If you're using XP, in the advanced tab of the Date, Time, Language, and Regions settings, is it set to Japanese in the box for non-Unicode programs? That's probably it if that's the case.

Tobberoth Wrote:If you're using XP, in the advanced tab of the Date, Time, Language, and Regions settings, is it set to Japanese in the box for non-Unicode programs? That's probably it if that's the case.

Yes I have it set to Japanese.

FIXED: Thanks to Tobberoth for picking the right solution: "If you're using XP, in the advanced tab of the Date, Time, Language, and Regions settings, is it set to Japanese in the box for non-Unicode programs? That's probably it if that's the case."

Though that'll work, I wouldn't really call it an ideal solution. That setting exists for a reason, and changing it from English to Japanese has the potential to make other programs function in ways you don't want.

Tobberoth Wrote:This. Japanese people unfortunately do not use Unicode... they use various encodings such as Shift-JIS, JIS and EUC.

That would have been true a few years ago. It's not the case now however. Unicode is gaining wide acceptance in Japan.

onafarm Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:This. Japanese people unfortunately do not use Unicode... they use various encodings such as Shift-JIS, JIS and EUC.

That would have been true a few years ago. It's not the case now however. Unicode is gaining wide acceptance in Japan.

As it is in the rest of the world. The vast majority of Japanese sites are still encoded in non-unicode encodings however and it will take a long time before that changes.

I changed my whole system language to Japanese (Vistalizor) and downloaded Japanese firefox, but that site still looks wonky to me.

sethg Wrote:I changed my whole system language to Japanese (Vistalizor) and downloaded Japanese firefox, but that site still looks wonky to me.

I don't know about Vista (or if you are even using it) but that isn't sufficient in XP. As said in a previous post you need to change the defaults for non-unicode scripts as well.

I've managed to get it to work by using AppLocale. It basically allows you set the locale for non unicode programs on a per application basis. It works in Firefox and IE on XP, but you need close your browser before launching. You can't have an English instance and a Japanese one running at the same time. They'd either both be English or both Japanese. On Vista there is a workaround.