The Kodi media player doesn't fare well in displaying non-latin characters in the default font of its default skin. We have to supply a font which can display Unicode characters properly (especially देवनागरी characters in my case).

First of all, huge thanks to "linesma" over on Jellyfin Forum for their detailed explanation of this.

The only problem is that the above guide covers how to do it on other platforms, but I am using a Mac. Therefore file-destinations change a bit.

  1. From the above guide, ensure that your font file is named arial.ttf
  2. Copy that arial.ttf to ~/Library/Application Support/Kodi/fonts/ directory
  3. Now you can go to Kodi and change the font used to be "Arial based"

Here's a small before-and-after:

Kodi trying to show a देवनागरी movie title with its default font
Kodi trying to show a देवनागरी movie title with its default font
Kodi successfully rendering देवनागरी movie title after updating the font
Kodi successfully rendering देवनागरी movie title after updating the font