In case you don’t know yet, Boxee is a free media center software where you can watch your movies, series, doramas or any media file (even music) supported. But the real magic of Boxee is its interface really easy to operate using just a remote control.
But if you are like me and like to rename the files to their original names using the original language’s script (eg.: もののけ姫 instead of Mononoke Hime, or 千と千尋の神隠し instead of Spirited Away), you will end up with a lot of block characters because the current font (as of Sep 23rd, 2010) used by Boxee doesn’t support some characters.
Boxee original font MuseoSans and the unreadable block characters.
I provide now a detailed simple solution to this problem, which I’ve found on a thread on Boxee forums. By the way, thanks Damien!
First, navigate to [HD's NAME]/Library/Fonts and choose a font that displays correctly the type of text you are trying to get Boxee to read. I believe Arial Unicode.ttf can deal with lots of different characters, including Japanese. But I’ll use ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3.otf, which I think is prettier than Arial Unicode to display kanjis. Copy the chosen font.
Now navigate to ~/Applications/Boxee.app/Contents/Resources/Boxee/skin/boxee/Fonts (If you don’t know how to navigate inside Boxee.app’s folder, right click it and select Show Package Contents). There are 2 fonts among them called MuseoSans_500.ttf and MuseoSans_700.ttf. Make sure Boxee is closed at this moment and change their names to MuseoSans_500.ttf.backup / MuseoSans_700.ttf.backup or something like that, just in case you need to undo the changes. Now paste 2 copies of the chosen font from the step before into this folder and rename them to MuseoSans_500.ttf and MuseoSans_700.ttf (just procceed in case the system asks if you really want to change the file’s extension).
Profit! Now the next time you open Boxee, you will notice that the font changed and it is now able to render Japanese text properly.
Below are two screens showing how’s like using either the Arial Unicode or ヒラギノ明朝 (Hiragino Minchou) one.
Boxee's screen using the font Arial Unicode
Boxee's screen using the font ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3