Display Thai characters

The font built into the SqueezeBox does not allow to display Asian characters. There is an applet available to install fonts for CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean), but for Thai characters you need to replace the font files directly in the SqeezeBox. Note that you cannot activate CJK and Thai fonts at the same time.

Prerequisites

  1. The font files. Don't use the true type fonts from Windows (they display too small on the SqueezeBox), use the open source versions from the Thai Linux Working Group, download at their FTP-Server

Change the font files on SqueezeBox

  1. Extract the fonts from the archive, then choose your preferred font. I used Loma.ttf and Loma-Bold.ttf.
  2. Enable SSH access on the SqueezeBox under advanced settings.
  3. Run WinSCP and enter the IP address (host name) of the SqueezeBox, root as user name and 1234 as password. Choose SCP as file protocol. There will be an “Error getting name of current remote directory”, which you can ignore. Find the font files on your local computer and transfer them to /usr/share/jive/fonts on the SqueezeBox.
  4. Rename the existing FreeSans.ttf and FreeSansBold.ttf to FreeSans.original.ttf and FreeSansBold.original.ttf, in case you later want to restore the original fonts. Then rename Loma.ttf to FreeSans.ttf and Loma-Bold.ttf to FreeSansBold.ttf.
  5. Reboot the SqueezeBox

Meta tags of the audio files

Should your SqueezeBox display the Thai characters of the song names and artists incorrectly, then you might need to fix the character coding of the meta tags. This is easiest done with foobar2000 on a Windows PC.

  1. Download foobar2000 and install.
  2. Download the Chacon component, then open the foobar2000 preferences dialog, go to the Components page and click the Install… button and select the downloaded zip file. Restart foobar2000.
  3. Add the music files you want to update the meta tags for, right click all files and select Tagging/Fix Metadata Charset…. You need to set the charset to UTF8 and Apply, then replace the files on the server.