Hallo Alexander,
Please look at http://www.free-x.de/utf8/
The last version of utf8 patch is for vdr 1.4.3 the next version for 1.4.4 will be soon there.
I'm interested in the patch, given that all my other Linux computers use utf8. However, I'd prefer to use the built-in bitmap fonts of vdr, for two reasons:
For one, I fear that Freetype could use too much processing power. Secondly, I would expect the rendered glyphs to look bad in the interlaced output of vdr -P'softdevice -vo dfb:mgatv' (TV output of Matrox G450).
Do you have any thoughts on this? How hard would it be to combine all VDR font bitmaps to one that would use Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane? Presumably, it would have to be a sparse data structure, since most code points of the BMP are not present in the bitmap fonts nor used by DVB-T senders.
Marko
PS: I saw one Russian (or Bulgarian or some Cyrillic) and one German comment being added by vdr-1.4.3-utf8-0.1.3-rc1.diff.gz. Maybe it would be better to translate them into English.