Thank you for your response!
I continued trying to find the reasons for my issue by compiling older versions via github;
with
git reset --hard $HCOMMIT
went back to some commits on May 31, 2015, where changes regarding DVR format strings had been made.
Before this day, everything was fine, afterwards the reported issue appeared.
It appears to me, that either commit
9037150d3c3bbfe4e5ccde39f0e8ede31a0f649e
or
59732e04b596903ec8fb7f1223b535340295c1d5
are responsible for my problem.
I might be wrong.
Regarding your suggestions:
the script is owned by user hts and is called with its path (btw.: no problems before May 31)
changing code pages (I suggested this at first) did not help.