Newsticker and special characters

Hi,
I have implemented the (terrific) simple flash/php-newsticker into my website and it works perfect except for 1 thing: I am not able to use special characters in the title (like é, á, ï, etc), not even when I transfer them to asci.
Whenever I put one in, it is replaced by a little boxlike symbol. Since these special characters are common in our language (dutch), it is really necessary that this works properly (looks a bit sloppy, that bunch of little boxes in the text... ).

Any suggestions are most welcome!

TIA
Joke (NL)

You must utf8_encode your string before sending it to Flash.
utf8_encode(string)