How do you play an audio file with a non-ASCII file name in Python QT?

Question

I haven't worked with python in a while so excuse me if I made some obvious mistake.

I am creating an application in QT with Python (PySide6) where a list of words is displayed, and the user can select a word from the list and hear the audio of that word. The words are in a language that uses non-ASCII characters and all the MP3 files for word pronunciation are named with the word (example: 祖母.mp3).

Right now, the code for my main window looks something like:

class MainWindow(QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__()
        self.ui = MyUserInterface.Ui_MainWindow()
        self.ui.setupUi(self)

        # some setup for the word list

        self.ui.wordList.itemClicked.connect(self.onItemSelected_WordList)


        self._audio_output = QAudioOutput()
        self._player = QMediaPlayer()
        self._player.setAudioOutput(self._audio_output)
        self._player.errorOccurred.connect(self.player_error)

    def onItemSelected_WordList(self):
        currentItem = list.currentItem()
        word = list.itemWidget(currentItem).word

        self._player.setPosition(0)
        self._audio_output.setVolume(100)
        self._player.setSource(word.audioPath)
        self._player.play()
        print(self._player.source())

self.ui.wordList is a QListWidget and each widget in the list contains a Word object. The code for my Word class looks like something like this:

class Word(object):
    audioFolderPath = "C:/path/to/the/audio/file/"

    def __init__(self, wordInfo):

        self.text = wordInfo[2]
        self.meaning = wordInfo[6]
        self.audiofile = self.text + ".mp3"
        url = QtCore.QUrl(WordInstance.audioFolderPath)
        self.audioPath = QtCore.QUrl(WordInstance.audioFolderPath + self.audiofile)

Let me run you through some things I tried to narrow down my problem:

The variable audioFolderPath is an absolute path, as the files are not in the same folder as my project. I tried copying an audio file to the folder of the project and using the relative path instead of the absolute path. That did not work.
I then tried changing the name of the audio file so there were no non-ASCII characters and using a relative path. This worked.
I then tried using the absolute path again, but with no non-ASCII characters in the file name. This also worked.

So, to conclude: It worked with a relative path, ASCII only. It worked with an absolute path, ASCII only. But it worked with neither path with non-ASCII characters in the file name. I tried using urllib.parse.quote() to encode the file path but this didn't work either.

It wouldn't be that hard to rename the files to something that is ASCII-only, but I would prefer not to. My googling couldn't find a solution, so hoping for some help here :)

You need to provide a proper [mre]. – ekhumoro May 31 '23 at 12:17 — ekhumoro, May 31 '23 at 12:17

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 01 '23 at 11:36

It was a bug of FFmpeg library bundled within an old PySide6 version. It will be fixed if you upgrade PySide6 to the recent version(6.5.1 at the moment) like the following.

> pip install --upgrade PySide6

If you want to stick to the old version, you can try a different multimedia backend, like this.

import os
os.environ['QT_MEDIA_BACKEND'] = 'windows'
...
from PySide6.QtMultimedia import *
...

How do you play an audio file with a non-ASCII file name in Python QT?

1 Answers1