Roku Forums

[Brenda]

Hi, guys, just bought M1001 from www.mlinking.com in Beijing in China. It's nice and nice to join the Roku Forum also.

[mchu]

After waiting for a year, the Chinese font supported by Roku is still crap! Don't know how well it's going to sell in China.

Very disappointed I must say.

[quote="Brenda"][color=darkred][/color] Hi, guys, just bought M1001 from [url]www.mlinking.com[/url] in Beijing in China. It's nice and nice to join the Roku Forum also.[/quote]

[RokuMike]

I have an update on Chinese and Japanese support.

There are two basic issues with supporting these languages. The first is the size of the fonts in ROM, and the second is the actual size of the font in terms of the pixels required for them to be legible.

Chinese and Japanese are actually a bit different, so let me describe them separately:

Japanese
The Japanese font will fit in the ROM on all SoundBridge models, but it is not legible at sizes below 16 pixels in height. This means that the SoundBridge UI, which requires at least two lines of text, cannot be displayed in Japanese unless the model has a 32-pixel display. Currently, this means that Japanese UI can be used on M2000 and SoundBridge Radio.

All VFD models support Japanese song metadata if you put the display into the 16-pixel or larger mode. LCD units do not support Japanese.

Chinese
The Chinese font is simply too big to fit in the ROM of older SoundBridge models. Therefore, Chinese is not supported on the M1000 and M2000, either for song data or UI. (As above, the LCD-based M500 cannot display Chinese.)

M1001 and SoundBridge Radio have larger ROM, and therefore have Chinese. M1001 can display Chinese song metadata, similar to the Japanese support described above, but its 16-pixel display prevents use of the Chinese UI. SoundBridge Radio supports full Chinese UI as well as the song data.

The future
We have developed an Asia-market model of the M1001 that uses the 32-pixel display that is used in the SoundBridge radio. This unit will be available in China, Taiwan and Japan through our partners. It will not be sold by Roku in the United States. It is expected to ship in the next couple of months, but the exact timing is up to our partners.

I hope this answers the questions regarding support for these languages.
_________________
Mike Kobb
Senior Software Engineer
Roku

[mchu]

Thanks for the info. It's sad to hear that my M2000 can't display all the Chinese characters.

Have you considered the following alternatives?

1. As we all know, there are the Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Can Roku support the font mapping for only one of them? Can it fit into the rom?
2. There are some code mapping tools out there that you can translate, let say, GB encoded character into Big5 encoding. This way, you don't have to have the entire font map, you simply decode it by using a formula instead of looking up the font table. This may solve the ROM size limitation.
3. Install the smaller pixel fonts, and scale it up accordingly. And how about install only one of Simplified or Traditional Chinese fonts (think pixel)?

Just my 2 cents. Still hoping you guys can find a solution for it.