[ac_car]

Hello,

This appears to be a very old problem but I'm not see anywhere where there is a current method to make it work.  If I use local Kodi DBs and try to include titles that have characters such as É and ù in them the entries will be added fine.  Move to MySQL or MariaDB (v10.3 in my case) and it is a whole different story.  When Kodi tries to update the library the log records Undefined MySQL error: Code (1366) and ERROR: CVideoDatabase::AddFile unable to addfile () errors and when you look at the insert SQL you see "�" in place of the of the special characters.  After this the library update is toast.  In my case I have a TV Series that has titles with these characters.  It doesn't finish the season.

In working with MariaDB I've tried the default codesets (latin) as well as utf8mb4 (see below). 

Over the years I've built up a rather large library.  In fact, it was how long it takes the local library to update and its impact on playback that drove me to looking at using MySQL.  Anyway, I don't have a lot of desire to go back through my files and rename them so they don't have "special" characters. 

Has anyone come up with a way to have Kodi work with MySQL/MariaDB in this scenario?  If so, please share.


MARIADB
=======================================================
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES WHERE Variable_name LIKE 'character\_set\_%' OR Variable_name LIKE 'collation%';
+--------------------------+--------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+--------------------+
|character_set_client | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_connection | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_database | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_server | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| collation_connection | utf8mb4_unicode_ci |
| collation_database | utf8mb4_unicode_ci |
| collation_server | utf8mb4_unicode_ci |
+--------------------------+--------------------+