Drama 3 Offload Studio: UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 1391: character maps to…

Fails on my Windows because of encoding. Below are the logs, but let me also share what my agent told me:

The root cause is a Windows text-encoding mismatch during UI startup.

The startup log (logs/api/start_small.js/latest:10) shows the model loaded successfully in 23 seconds, using 9.10 GiB of GPU memory. Startup then failed with:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 1391

At gradio_ui.py:22 (app/gradio_ui.py:22), the app reads studio_content.json without specifying an encoding. Python selected Windows cp1252, but the file contains UTF-8 emoji. I verified that the file decodes correctly as UTF-8 and parses as valid JSON.

Next fix: add PYTHONUTF8: "1" to the existing env blocks in start_small.js (start_small.js:8) and start.js (start.js:8), then restart through Pinokio. This enables Python’s UTF-8 mode (https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/os.html#python-utf-8-mode) and covers the other UI files read without explicit encodings.

No files were changed. The app is currently offline; the proposed fix still needs a startup check.

App: Drama 3 Offload Studio (drama3-offload-studio.git)
Repo: https://github.com/ThomasEricB/drama3-offload-studio.git
Generated: 2026-10-18T18:34:44.290Z
Pinokio: 8.2.2
Platform: win32 x64
Node: v22.21.1

Summary

System

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          "stdout": "Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.26200.9711]\r\n(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.\r\n\r\nC:\\pinokio\\api\\drama3-offload-studio.git>conda_hook & conda deactivate & conda deactivate & conda deactivate & conda activate base && hf download pentacoxian-dev/drama3-small-GGUF silence_codes.json LICENSE NOTICE --revision 4a3078e885344bb9b24d511cec389d2726854d15 --local-dir models/pause-fix && dir\r\nFetching 3 files: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 3/3 [00:00<00:00,  7.97it/s]\r\nDownload complete: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 22.1k/22.1k [00:00<00:00, 5.46kB/s]✓ Downloaded\r\n  path: C:\\pinokio\\api\\drama3-offload-studio.git\\models\\pause-fix\r\nDownload complete: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 22.1k/22.1k [00:00<00:00, 55.3kB/s]\r\n Volume in drive C has no label.\r\n Volume Serial Number is 9003-D0E0\r\n\r\n Directory of C:\\pinokio\\api\\drama3-offload-studio.git\r\n\r\n10/18/2026  11:28 AM    <DIR>          .\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM    <DIR>          ..\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 .clinerules\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 .cursorrules\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM                58 .geminiignore\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM               241 .gitignore\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 .windsurfrules\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 AGENTS.md\r\n10/18/2026  11:26 AM    <DIR>          app\r\n10/18/2026  11:25 AM    <DIR>          cache\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 CLAUDE.md\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             3,850 ENVIRONMENT\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 GEMINI.md\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            14,472 icon.png\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             2,261 install.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             3,110 install_mlx.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             1,324 install_small.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:25 AM    <DIR>          logs\r\n10/18/2026  11:28 AM    <DIR>          models\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM    <DIR>          offload\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             5,325 pinokio.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM               416 pinokio.json\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            42,763 QWEN.md\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM            31,723 README.md\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM               103 reset.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             3,054 setup.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             3,765 start.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             2,558 start_small.js\r\n10/18/2026  11:24 AM             1,187 update.js\r\n              22 File(s)        372,788 bytes\r\n               7 Dir(s)   9,601,695,744 bytes free\r\n\r\n(base) C:\\pinokio\\api\\drama3-offload-studio.git>"
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Logs

logs/api/start_small.js/1792348213787

Source: api / start_small.js
Lines: 26 total, last 26 included

[api shell.run]
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.26200.9711]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app>conda_hook & conda deactivate & conda deactivate & conda deactivate & conda activate base & C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\env\Scripts\activate C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\env && python ../offload/serve.py 42012
[pause] pause fix on: 143 silence codes, 10 frames
[space] loading Drama 3
C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\env\lib\site-packages\torch\nn\utils\weight_norm.py:144: FutureWarning: `torch.nn.utils.weight_norm` is deprecated in favor of `torch.nn.utils.parametrizations.weight_norm`.
  WeightNorm.apply(module, name, dim)
[small] drama3-small loaded from GGUF in 23s: 9.10 GiB on cuda:0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\offload\serve.py", line 152, in <module>
    from app import app  # noqa: E402  (loads Drama 3, then builds the UI)
  File "C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\app.py", line 24, in <module>
    import server
  File "C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\server.py", line 1110, in <module>
    from gradio_ui import mount_apps
  File "C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\app\gradio_ui.py", line 22, in <module>
    CONTENT = json.loads((ROOT / "studio_content.json").read_text())
  File "C:\pinokio\api\drama3-offload-studio.git\offload\branding.py", line 77, in patched_read_text
    text = read_text(self, *args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\pinokio\bin\miniforge\lib\pathlib.py", line 1135, in read_text
    return f.read()
  File "C:\pinokio\bin\miniforge\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 1391: character maps to <undefined>