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2010 2011 BMW 5 Series Forum F10 F10 Technical Topics Navigation, iDrive, Audio, Video, Bluetooth, Phone, Coding Display Chinese Character from iPod?
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      08-04-2011, 05:49 PM   #1
Bomb617
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Display Chinese Character from iPod?

I have iPod with many Chinese/Japanese song with Chinese/Japanese character, can the F10 display them properly? I had my MINI (R55, non Navi) set to display Japanese character and it's kind of working...any luck for the F10 (with or without Navi)?
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      08-05-2011, 02:10 AM   #2
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I have the same question - have asked the senior tech manager and a resident German engineer at the dealer's and was told that they are still on this project of trying to put the additional character set (Simplified Chinese), previous trials were unsuccessful. He doesn't think that it's gonna come anytime soon though.
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      08-05-2011, 02:51 AM   #3
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it works on my japanese F10 with nav, so It's gotta work... pretty dumb they'd not include asian language support on non-asian cars.
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      08-05-2011, 03:21 AM   #4
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No luck for my F10. All Chinese characters got replaced by random codes or square boxes.

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      08-05-2011, 05:26 AM   #5
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i hope it work out soon with jus some easy tweaks and no coding needed..
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      08-05-2011, 10:20 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Losco View Post
it works on my japanese F10 with nav, so It's gotta work... pretty dumb they'd not include asian language support on non-asian cars.
But it's your whole interface in Japanese or just the iPod/radio display Japanese but trip computer in English?
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      08-05-2011, 09:08 PM   #7
Losco
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bomb617 View Post
But it's your whole interface in Japanese or just the iPod/radio display Japanese but trip computer in English?
well the whole thing is in japanese, but I can set system language to english and still display japanese correctly.
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      08-05-2011, 10:57 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Losco View Post
well the whole thing is in japanese, but I can set system language to english and still display japanese correctly.
Nice...can we have a screen shot?
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      08-06-2011, 04:50 AM   #9
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BestManWins, it'd be plain ignorant for BMW, if simplified Chinese,being one of the official language in Singapore is not supported for the car there. For our car in Hong Kong, the iDrive supports both Simplified & Traditional Chinese apart from English. Just like Losco's Japanese version we can display song names in pretty much every language known to mankind as long as the mp3 tag is corrected edited on the computer.

In this day and age, should iDrive be UTF-8 compliant for all cars around the world??

Last edited by mit; 08-06-2011 at 04:57 AM..
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      08-06-2011, 12:04 PM   #10
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@Mit, many thanks for your valued input. I concur very much with you that the iDrive should be using UTF-8 and that BMW would be silly not to include Chinese in Singapore.

I would much appreciate if you could post some pics of the idrive display with both Chinese and English characters - with it, I would be able to show the local dealer.

In your case, was the preferred language set to English? And yet it can display both Traditional and Simplified Chinese?

I have many chinese albums displaying correctly on iTunes and yet see only little rectangles on the iDrive.

@Losco, could I also trouble you to post some pics of the idrive showing both English and Japanese characters please?
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      08-06-2011, 01:50 PM   #11
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I'm going to snap a shot tomorrow and post it here. Actually it doesn't really matter whether I set the iDrive language to English / Chinese. Either way, the chinese, Japanese, Korean or whatever names of the songs should be correctly displayed but .....there is one prerequisite.

Every mp3 file should have a "tag" that specifies the title, artist, album, genre etc of the song. The iDrive system does seem to rely on this to identify each song or to allow you to search your collection according to the different parameters specified within that"tag". Even if your mp3 file name was shown correctly on your computer, it may still contain non-UTF-8 characters for the song title within the mp3's tag. If that's the case, most likely you will see all sort of #$%^^#$% for your song title, artist's name, Genre etc.

mp3 tag's WIKI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3tag

So you have to check the tag for each mp3 file to make sure they contain the correct UTF-8 characters under different headings.
Try to follow this guide if you're using iTune
http://www.cnet.com/1990-7899_1-6306475-1.html

Or if your system is Windows, download this "Mp3tag" from here to edit the tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html

PS: even if your iDrive doesn't allow you to change the system language to something other than English, the above should still work if the system is truely UTF-8 compliant. BTW you can attach a jpg file for the album cover to each song by editing the tag


I have all my songs stored in a ScanDisk USB key. Sometimes when I turned on the system, it just failed to recognise the USB key and I have to reinsert it into the USB slot and wait for a few sec before the iDrive was able to recognise the key again. Some other times, it just automatically jumped to the song I was listening last time when I turned off the car. Very annoying... I will bring this to my dealer's attention when my next service is due. Hopefully not hardware related....

Last edited by mit; 08-06-2011 at 02:22 PM..
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      08-06-2011, 03:52 PM   #12
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Wait so what you're saying is that by changing the tags on the songs, we'll be able to see Chinese characters?
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      08-06-2011, 09:51 PM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by joey5622 View Post
Wait so what you're saying is that by changing the tags on the songs, we'll be able to see Chinese characters?
I guess so. Every iDrive system I believe should be UTF-8 compliant these days. That explains why our Hong Kong's iDrive can display Japanese or Korean characters for the song name even though we don't have a choice to change the system language to either 2. Hong Kong being a very tiny market for BMW shouldn't be granted the privilege to be the only one with a UTF-8 compliant iDrive while you guys in Canada are stuck with a non-UTF-8 one.

Try editing the tag and tell us if it works

Last edited by mit; 08-06-2011 at 10:18 PM..
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      08-06-2011, 11:35 PM   #14
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After some further googling, I found the iDrive in F10 is designed by QNX Software System based on their proprietary Unix-like OS for embedded systems.

QNX's list of clients for their automotive solutions:
http://www.qnx.com/solutions/industr...ive/#customers

The QNX operating system should have no trouble with unicode according to their website
http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6...utfencode.html

As far as language is concerned, iDrive for cars in different parts of the world should only differ in the system language localization(i.e. English + your native language depending on where you bought your car)

Last edited by mit; 08-06-2011 at 11:56 PM..
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      08-07-2011, 01:48 AM   #15
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Here you go,
With the system language set to English...

Traditional Chinese characters under iDrive


Japanese characters


Korean
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      08-07-2011, 01:31 PM   #16
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Never had a pic displayed like that.. how does that happen?
My car knows Korean too, but haven't had a chance to see if it knows Chinese or Japanese..
Tried some old Mp3s (pre 2003) and it displays gibberish for Chinese and Korean.. new ones display fine.
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      08-07-2011, 01:33 PM   #17
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Under BMW's ETK, cars for HKG/CHN/TW/KOR & JPN markets have country specific parts for the main i-drive computer, hence they can display those languages correctly.
Cars for SE Asian markets don't seem to have those country specific parts so they can't display their local languages (I know Thai spec cars can only display in Eng even if fitted with Navpro).
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      08-07-2011, 01:57 PM   #18
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Quote:
Originally Posted by clarence View Post
Under BMW's ETK, cars for HKG/CHN/TW/KOR & JPN markets have country specific parts for the main i-drive computer, hence they can display those languages correctly.
Cars for SE Asian markets don't seem to have those country specific parts so they can't display their local languages (I know Thai spec cars can only display in Eng even if fitted with Navpro).
Damn, I'd be pissed with I were in Thailand, you'd think Bmw would've realized the popularity of Kpop/Canto/J-pop in SE Asia
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      08-07-2011, 07:52 PM   #19
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here's my car's CIC with japanese character. it is indeed running QNX with UTF-8 support, so I don't see a reason why it would not display characters properly. I know I've gotten square boxes when I did not tag my MP3 correctly, so if you don't have a good tag, it might cause CIC to not display those characters. it is also finicky about version of ID-tag, I've had problems with 2.4 tags itunes created such as album art not displaying, and incorrect artist field. I changed all my tags to ver 2.3 and it's been good.
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      08-07-2011, 09:12 PM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Losco View Post
here's my car's CIC with japanese character. it is indeed running QNX with UTF-8 support, so I don't see a reason why it would not display characters properly. I know I've gotten square boxes when I did not tag my MP3 correctly, so if you don't have a good tag, it might cause CIC to not display those characters. it is also finicky about version of ID-tag, I've had problems with 2.4 tags itunes created such as album art not displaying, and incorrect artist field. I changed all my tags to ver 2.3 and it's been good.
I won't have my car till sept, can anyone try that in US spec f10?
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      08-07-2011, 09:23 PM   #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Losco View Post
...it is also finicky about version of ID-tag, I've had problems with 2.4 tags itunes created such as album art not displaying, and incorrect artist field. I changed all my tags to ver 2.3 and it's been good.

Me too, have to stick to version 2.3 in iTune. But in Windows, everything works just leaving all the options as default. To be frank, I've no idea what this tag version is all about.. it just seems all these standard set forth for the tag are loosely adhered to by different software

Just tried with some other language characters copied from the net,

Russian??


Some other even more exotic language characters like Hebrew,Persian,Thai,Vietnamese, Geogian, Indian, Arabian.....


Characters not properly displayed for all, but apparently the system is unicode compliant to certain extent
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      08-08-2011, 12:05 AM   #22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by grimlock View Post
Damn, I'd be pissed with I were in Thailand, you'd think Bmw would've realized the popularity of Kpop/Canto/J-pop in SE Asia
No choice cos the market is too small (even tho BMW AG owns the only assembly plant in that area). Sales of BMW in Thailand & Indonesia is only around 1k units per yr each (HK over 4k units), so the market is too small to customise individual parts.
For HK, they lumped it together with TW & CHN so the market is much bigger, same with ROK & JPN. Whts surprising is SIN, they should've offered sth there as their volumes are not small & BMW Asia's HQ is there as well.
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