I 've purchased lately a Rio Car Player (yep it's amazing:), but I have a problem with some of my songs. I am Greek, so I also store greek songs in the player. Though the display refuses to show greek characters. Is there any support/upgrade for unicode characters in ID3? Any other possible solution? I believe that users outside English speaking countries should have a similar problem. You see, I want to avoid changing the ID3 tag for my 1500 songs to english characters; it will take me days for it.

Question No 2: If I connect the hard drive of Rio Player to my desktop computer using the appropriate cable for laptop hard drives, will I be able to manage my mp3's? It will be 100 times faster to exchange files. If so, should I use Linux to recognise the hard drive's file system?

Though the display refuses to show greek characters. Is there any support/upgrade for unicode characters in ID3?

Currently the player does not support unicode characters. However, some people have been able to edit the player's fonts so that it will display non-US characters in the extended ASCII character set, so it's possible someone might be able to make a Greek font for you. Anyone up to the task?

If I connect the hard drive of Rio Player to my desktop computer using the appropriate cable for laptop hard drives, will I be able to manage my mp3's?

No. The management must be done by the player software in conjunction with Emplode, Emptool, or JEmplode.

If you are not satisfied with the speed of the USB cable, you should try ethernet, it's faster. It should be plenty fast for pretty much any music management you need to do.

Thanks a lot for making things clearer.

I would be gratefull if someone explained me how to create and upolad a font, so as to give it a try.

Does Rio Car support 100MBits Ethernet? I thought that it supported 10Mbits, and USB 1.0 is 12Mbits; something that makes it faster.

No the empeg only supports 10Mbps ethernet, but there's a lot of extra error correction added to the data when you run over USB that is not needed when using TCP/IP, thus degrading the throughput on USB.

/Michael

It's more than just error correction. USB is interrupt-driven and very CPU-bound. It's actually a pretty awful hardware specification that never should have gotten off the ground the way it did. It's got all sorts of limitations that prevent high throughput rates. Rarely does USB even approach its maximum throughput rate. Ethernet is much more efficient, both in hardware and software overhead.

There was a recent thread on the font topic. I was considering making a Cyrillic 8bit set because some people had the need for it. I haven't had the time though. I did complete the 8bit Latin set (the current b11 software has many of my character mods but is missing the last changes I made to complete the upper 128 set.

If you know how to use a bitmap editor (paint-type software) then you can make a font.

The two main fonts (for text display and menus) are the medium and small. The medium is 9 pixels tall (from bottom of descender to top of ascender) and the small is 6 pixels. On the medium, a capitals occupy the top 7 pixels and a lowercase "g" and "y" the bottom 7. On the small font, caps use the top 5 and lower case g and y, the bottom 5.

You can use two "colors" plus black/transparent. The primary colour is full brightness and the secondary is a very dim shade (used for antialiasing (smoothing) corners).

You might be able to get the font source files, but if you'd like, you can make a bitmap and I will make a font out of it. Just make sure you put them in the bitmap in order. Use a Greek 8bit set which includes the standard western lower 128 characters (you don't need to put those into your bitmap).

Thanks a lot guys !

hybrid8, I will make the bitmap files the way you said, and I will try to create the font. I would very grateful though if you could help me a bit on passing them into Rio. I will msg you when I will have the bitmaps ready.

One thing to remember. There is more than one font on the player. For instance, the "InfoTex" visuals use a completely different bitmap set than the text screens. I think the font Bruno is offering to convert for you is only for the text screens. So just keep that in mind as you are editing.

That's right. The large font can also be done and it's been documented in here already. That one involves some different steps in both editing and then getting it into the correct format.

Has anyone started a converter for it yet? The first step would probably be to define how a source bitmap should be structured for conversion (to make both editing and then conversion easy).

A large font can be quite a bit of work. But at the same time, there's a lot more freedom because of its size - you can also lay down the base graphics by using a real font.

Bruno

The TexInfo visuals don't bother me that much. For now I just want my playlists to be viewable. I could look into some code to create the big font later on.

I have created the bitmap files and I attach them here, in case Bruno has still time to make the conversion to a font.

Cool.

Looks like you did a good job. I can get those into an empeg font file later this week. I only took a very quick look, but it looks like you've put them into the correct spacing as well.

Bruno

Thanks Bruno!

I will be wating for news...

Spiros

the charset

the bitmaps with Windows' codes.

Some of your characters aren't using very steep angles, like the delta. Would these be better represented with more distinct diagonals? I'll make them all match what you've sent for the first version though. I should have it complete today.

Bruno

ok bruno, do whatever you believe that it will give a better result...

Thanks

First instance of the medium font working. I've emailed you this same file. Just in case, here it is attached.

Bruno