There is a problem in the MediaInfo library that occurs on files with an ID3 tag where the strings are saved in an ANSI encoding different from ISO 8859-1. The official tag specification allows using only ISO 8859-1 or Unicode encoding, but many programs previously ignored the specification requirements and saved tags in local ANSI encodings. The MediaInfo library strictly follows the tag specifications and recodes ANSI strings with forced application of the ISO 8859-1 code page, which, however, leads to the display of distorted text on incorrectly saved tags.

Since the author of MediaInfo refused to make any options for customizing the recoding of tags, the plugin uses its own method to correct the display of text from such tags. Text that is identified as incorrect will be decoded with your local system ANSI encoding. Of course, if the text was saved in an encoding different from your system encoding, it may still be unreadable.

Unfortunately, without access to the source text of the tag, the method does not guarantee the correctness of the encoding definition. Tags containing characters of Western European languages (for example, German) can be distorted, and this is possible for both correctly recorded ID3 tags and tags of other formats.

The fixing mechanism is disabled by default and is enabled by the option FixTagEncoding. In order to reduce the impact of the fix on the plugin's performance, the fields for which the fix will be applied must be specified explicitly. The following methods are used for this:

• for WDX — specifying process="fix_cp" in the sources node;
• for WLX — listing fields in the FixCodepage function.