I spent a few day with patching LinuxMCE database connection to pass UTF8 option to the server. But without luck. However I found a way to configure mysql server to skip client’s request about charset and send all data in the defined one. To do that just add following lines in the my.cnf file under mysqld section: [mysqld] init_connect=’SET NAMES utf8; SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci;’ […]