Movies

[russ 1]

Regarding MPEGs and WMVs...if I download some movie onto a USA fromat DVD-R disk, a Russian computer DVD disk reader will read the files OK?

The files will be fine. The NAMES of the files may be unreadable, depending on the computer you are using. Any UTF-8 filesystem should be fine. If you don't use a Mac or Linux, that probably means the file names won't show up correctly on a US PC.

With modern computers, this is less of a problem. (And why Unicode/ UTF8 is a good thing).

[shikarnov 7]

Regarding MPEGs and WMVs...if I download some movie onto a USA fromat DVD-R disk, a Russian computer DVD disk reader will read the files OK?

The files will be fine. The NAMES of the files may be unreadable, depending on the computer you are using. Any UTF-8 filesystem should be fine. If you don't use a Mac or Linux, that probably means the file names won't show up correctly on a US PC.

With modern computers, this is less of a problem. (And why Unicode/ UTF8 is a good thing).

What you've said is true when folks have used Unicode to encode their documents, files, and etc.

But I've found that many folks here use either CP-1251 or KOI8-R, with only a few using Unicode (even then Windows generally uses UCS2 and UTF16) . What's more, I've found that PCs are generally able to handle the variance in character-sets the Russians use and display the correct characters. Unfortunately, unless the encoding is Unicode, my Mac frequently hiccups. Ira's brother, for example, brought a flash drive, the volume label of which was written in Cyrillic. On OS X, that volume was read as "________" whereas on Windows (through Boot Camp) it read perfectly. I've had similar experiences with actual files like Word documents, MP3 files, and more. The only problem Windows seemed to have was with pointing to cyrillic folders over a network (go figure).

Even some open source software, like Firefox (in Windows or OSX), really messes up character display unless the web page author used so-called "standards compliant" methods to write their pages. In general, Microsoft's stuff is better at handling variance between good and bad, correct and incorrect, and what we hope will be and what is -- whereas OS X is rather idealist, IMHO.

Assuming he's using Windows, I think our friend seanconneryii will be just fine. Probably he just needs to install the Russian Language Pack.

Z

Edited December 26, 2007 by shikarnov