Treat transcript content as unicode strings and convert them at any edge where we encounter them. One decision made here was to not update edx-val it treats transcripts as byte but is much closer to the actual files so it makes more sense over there. But within the platform they are generally passed around as serialized json and so it's much better for them to be unicode.
common ------ This directory contains common code shared between LMS and CMS, such as Mako templates, CSS, and Coffescript.