The BaseFile.sync_to_disk () method fails to properly write files containing non-ASCII characters because it doesn't explicitly specify UTF-8 encoding when calling file_path.write_text ().

Faulty Assumption: The rest of HandBrake's C code, particularly file I/O wrappers like hb_fopen, correctly assumes that any char* representing a path is UTF-8 encoded. Failure Point: The Shift-JIS ...

Because the default encoding in Python is UTF-8, and the bytestring that we got from encoding in Windows-1252 isn’t valid UTF-8. Now, you may ask, “Surely code point 146 is a valid code point in UTF-8 ...