diff --git a/cuegui/cuegui/plugins/LogViewPlugin.py b/cuegui/cuegui/plugins/LogViewPlugin.py
index d69f5cf80..96e5396d8 100644
--- a/cuegui/cuegui/plugins/LogViewPlugin.py
+++ b/cuegui/cuegui/plugins/LogViewPlugin.py
@@ -927,6 +927,14 @@ def _update_log_content(self, content, log_mtime):
             self._content_box.setPlainText(content)
         else:
             current_text = (self._content_box.toPlainText() or '')
+
+            # ignore decoding higher order bytes outside ordinal range(128)
+            # ex: umlats, latin-1 etc.
+            try:
+                content = content.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore")
+                current_text = current_text.decode("utf-8", errors="ignore")
+            except AttributeError:
+                pass
             new_text = content.lstrip(str(current_text))
             if new_text:
                 self._content_box.appendPlainText(new_text)