The file name is Chinese. I encountered an error.

It’s great. it allows me to sort out my videos faster. I love it. But I have a problem. when the file name is in Chinese, it doesn’t work. When I renamed him English, it worked again.

 amy@AMYS-MBP  ~  vcsi 你好_世界.mp4 \
-t \
-w 850 \
-g 3x5 \
--end-delay-percent 20 \
-o output.png
Processing 你好_世界.mp4...
Sampling... 15/15
Composing contact sheet...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/vcsi", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/__init__.py", line 3, in main
    vcsi.vcsi.main()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/vcsi.py", line 1451, in main
    process_file(filename, args)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/vcsi.py", line 1532, in process_file
    image = compose_contact_sheet(media_info, selected_frames, args)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/vcsi.py", line 862, in compose_contact_sheet
    template_path=args.metadata_template_path)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/vcsi.py", line 785, in prepare_metadata_text_lines
    text=remaining_chars)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/vcsi/vcsi.py", line 749, in max_line_length
    text_width = 0 if len(text_chunk) == 0 else metadata_font.getsize(text_chunk)[0]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/PIL/ImageFont.py", line 112, in getsize
    return self.font.getsize(text)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u4f60' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)

[amietn]

Okay, I believe this happens because the default system font does not support unicode characters. Let’s see if this theory is correct.

Can you try running vcsi with a TTF font that supports unicode and let me know if that changes anything? For example:

$ vcsi 你好_世界.mp4 \
-t \
-w 850 \
-g 3x5 \
--end-delay-percent 20 \
-o output.png \
--timestamp-font /Library/Fonts/SOME_FONT_WITH_UNICODE_SUPPORT.ttf \
--metadata-font /Library/Fonts/SOME_FONT_WITH_UNICODE_SUPPORT.ttf

[amietn]

Should be fixed in https://github.com/amietn/vcsi/commit/1a3457b947073285a0b07d0a1d2a356303da943c