| 2008-12-31 | Happy New Year!! |
Hi all, I wish you merry christmas and a happy new year!! Project Status: |
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| 2008-11-01 | Media Explorer: Internal BETA Test |
The Media Explorer project has become quite mature lately. Lots of cool special features, nice UI, good performance... Some features are still missing to make it public (especially the missing proper playlist support is holding me back from releasing it), but the base functionality is all there and working! Lately I added an auto update function, which is working out really great! I decided to start an internal BETA Test to get some early feedback, now that auto update functionality is available! If you are interested in participating, please drop me a mail and I will send you the link to the beta test website! |
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| 2008-11-01 | Media Explorer: First Impressions |
Cover view for Audio Folders:
Video Playback:
Split-Screen View:
Popups on Track Change:
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| 2008-05-04 | FF Projects still alive: Media Explorer Project |
Some people have been wondering what's going on here, why there has been no single update for a long time. No, I am not dead, nor have I stopped developing! I am currently quite heavily working on a totally new project, which I am so excited about that I do almost no coding at all for the old projects. So, what's it all about? Media Explorer I do not have an official name for it yet, for now I will call the project "Media Explorer". As the name suggests, this will be some kind of combination of a media player with an explorer-like file navigation interface. The reason for developing this is that I am not satisfied with the current way of working with media files. I thought about what makes a program easy-to-use and came to the conclusion that the amount of mouse and keyboard interactions needed to achieve an action almost directly translates to ease-of-use. All video players and all audio players currently available rely heavily on having a Windows Explorer running in the background which is used for navigating the file system. This requires constant switching between applications, alt+tab, mouse drag-and-drop between windows, etc... This is not at all a comfortable solution. The alternative it to use the "Open file" dialogs which require you to drill through the same folder structures over and over and are also not really comfortable. The Windows Explorer as well as the Open file dialogs are simply not optimized for navigating media archives! For people with only small amounts of media files the current situation might be acceptable, but for people with big archives and media files in various locations (local files, external drives, network drives) the situation is far from optimal. I also had some other ideas in mind that are only possible when having a file navigation interface. For example I want to be able to play music directly from compressed archives in my download folder, without the need to first extract them or have temporary files being created somewhere. Some features that are working right now: User Interface: - Single click UI behaviour File System: - ZIP + RAR support: play music, view images and read text files directly
from compressed archives - no temporary files created, the content is
directly streamed from the archive with almost no delay at all! Video Features: - Video engine rebuilt from ground, many optimizations compared to FFPlayer's
engine Audio Features: - Uses the extremely resource friendly "BASS" audio engine
(www.un4seen.com)
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| 2008-05-04 | FF File Time v1.1 |
There was an issue with FF File Time that prevented the "Modify file time" (add/subtract) function from working with various regional settings. This should be fixed now, so it should now work for any windows language version! |
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| 2007-11-16 | FF Copy v0.93 |
I just received a bug report, the menu item "Create new Copy Task" from the main menu created a move task instead of a copy task. This has now been fixed. |
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| 2007-11-09 | FF Copy v0.92 |
Some fixes to FF Copy were needed: - changed: "Resume Selected" will now start transfer if not
currently transferring |
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| 2007-10-27 | FF Copy v0.91 |
Although I tested v0.9 (which was released yesterday) quite much, I seem to have built in some bugs after the successful tests. So here comes a quick bugfix release. It also brings two new features, of which one was suggested just yesterday and was easy to do. The program title bar now displays the overall progress, speed and time estimation of all tasks in the list. The Auto Clear Completed option was fixed and enhanced: You can now enable "Auto Clear Completed", which removes completed tasks on program startup or after ALL tasks have been finished. Or you can check "Immediately Clear Completed" which will remove completed tasks immediately.
The complete changelog: - added: overall progress, speed and time estimation in title bar |
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| 2007-10-26 | FF Copy v0.9 |
I did a complete rework of the core of FF Copy lately, to allow it to be much more flexible than before. One of the main new features is the possibility to not only copy but also move files with FF Copy. If you transfer multiple files, they will now be shown as one single entry in the transfer list with overall speed and estimated time for the complete transfer. This makes it much easier to handle big transfers. Next big feature is the possibility to "Force Start" transfers which makes the transfer start immediately, no matter if other transfers are running. So now you can chose to run transfers in parallel (although it is generally not recommended due to speed reasons, only do this if you are sure the transfers go from and to different physical drives). The new version is also designed to fully support Windows Vista if UAC is enabled (see last news post for details on Vista UAC problems). I have tested the new version quite intensively, but the core is completely re-done so please report any bugs that might occur!!
The complete changelog: - added: multi file actions will now be added as one single task with
total speed / estimated time |
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| 2007-10-22 | Windows Vista UAC Issues - FF Player v0.97 |
Windows Vista UAC After installing Windows Vista i was instantly annoyed by the constant security popups, so I disabled the new Windows Vista "User Account Control" (UAC) to get rid of them. What I did not know was that Microsoft put a whole lot of new restrictions to programs that run under an UAC enabled account. As I disabled it from the beginning I did not notice any problems with my applications running under Vista. After receiving some bug reports which I could not explain I started wondering, digged around in the net and found out about the UAC system. It took me some time but now I managed to get my programs fully compatible with Windows Vista UAC by changing install mechanisms, registry paths and some other details. FF Player is the first to be released in a fully Vista compilant version. All new releases will come with a setup.exe that asks for admin rights for installation, the plain .msi files don't work with UAC enabled. I will soon update all tools with new, UAC compatible versions. I have a major reworked version of FF Copy in the making which is coming soon!
FF Player v0.97 There were some smaller issues with the new Directory Mode (which I generally like very much). It now respects the RepeatPlaylist setting and should behave correctly with any files. One other big issue i noticed is that you could not drag files into FF Player window if they come from a read-only path. I changed the drag+drop icon from "move" to "link" and now windows is happy with it. Stupid windows API does not let me use the "move" drag icon cause it thinks I want to "move" the files from the write-protected drive. Great one, made me laugh! :) I also added some previously hidden settings to the preferences screen. Now you can select the video sizing strategy used for videos, in fullscreen and windowed independently. And I added tooltips to most of the preferences settings to better explain the functionality.
Here is the full changelog: - added: change the windowed and fullscreen video sizing strategy in
the preferences (was a hidden registy setting before) |
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| 2007-09-27 | FF Player v0.96 |
I did a whole lot of changes, but the main new feature that I added is the Directory Mode: If the Directory Mode is enabled in the settings and only a single file is opened, the player will resume with the next file from the current directory on file end. Also, if pressing the previous/next buttons, the previous/next file from the directory is played. This is pretty handy for lazy people like me who like to double-click a single file but don't want the player to stop after it finished! I also added an Auto Toggle Playlist option, which hides the playlist if only one file is opened and shows it if multiple files are opened. This is useful in combination with Directory Mode as it makes it easy to determine if the player is using the Directory Mode or actually uses the playlist. Next big improvement is the possibility to directly select video/audio/subtitle streams from the player when for example the Haali Media Splitter is used for .mkv or .ogm files. On such files, you had to use the splitter's own system tray icon for stream selection before. Technically, I use the IAMStreamSelect interface, which is also supported by some other splitter filters (some Mpeg Splitters also support, but the original Microsoft MPEG-2 Demultiplexer does not although the interface was designed by MS). Useful for movies in .mkv or .ogm container format with multiple languages and subtitle streams. The audio/video/subtitle context menus are now hidden if there are no such streams in the file.
Here is the full changelog: - added: Directory Mode: resumes playback with next file from directory
if only one file is in playlist |
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| 2007-09-15 | FF Player v0.95 released! |
I managed to add the new Windows Vista Renderer ("Enhanced Video Renderer"). This new renderer buffers several video images to allow smoother playback. Old renderers have to wait for "Vertical Blank" (time of next display image), if a video frame came just after a VBlank, it is delayed until next VBlank. EVR has several images in cache, allowing it to better sync to the monitor's refresh rate. Especially during panning/scrolling of the video, the EVR is noticeably smoother than the old Video Mixing Renderers. Only downside is that it takes some more time to switch between windowed and fullscreen mode but the smoother playback is definately worth it imho. Other changes apply to the UI behaviour that was optimized in some areas. The system tray icon now behaves more intuitive to mouse clicks. The playlist fades in during fullscreen mode only if the cursor is very close to the left display edge. The "play previous item" button now behaves more like winamp style: If FF Player is playing a file and the current playback position is bigger than 5 seconds, the player seeks to the beginning of the file. In any other case it skips to the previous file. |
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| 2007-09-04 | FF File Time Released! |
The newest addition to my little tool collection has just been released! If you ever have the need to change the time stamps of your files or made pictures with your camera set to a wrong time, this is the right thing for you! It allows you to easily change the time stamps of one or multiple files in different ways. I also managed to get read and write access to the 'EXIF' header that is stored by almost all digital cameras in JPEG or TIFF images. You can reset the file modification time to the time in the header and you can also change the header time as you please. Check out more details here. |
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| 2007-09-01 | Back from vacation, FF File Time and Donations page |
I have been on vacation for about 4 weeks, visiting Italy. Great country, fine weather, beautiful landscapes, beautiful women. Especially the "Toscana" was very great. I can just recommend you visit Italy, too!! I am just working on a tool to change / fix file times. Reason for this is that I had the clock in my camera was off by 10 minutes during the vacation. When mixing my images with those of my friends and sorting by modification time, things get out of order. So I need a tool for increasing all modification times for my images by 10 minutes. When I rotate the images that were taken vertically, the modification time changes, too. I will try to make it possible to reset the modification time to the original time stored in the Jpeg EXIF header. If it all works well I will release it here too, as I could not find anything like that in the web. I finally made a donation page, listing all ways to donate and a "Hall Of Fame" for all donators. I also made a new PayPal button that starts in english, so anyone should now be able to donate (I thought the country would be selected automatically but it was hard wired to german). |
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| 2007-05-26 | News and Updates to FF Player and FF Copy |
Hi there, long time again since the last update here... Donation: Zac was so kind to donate $20 for my development. Thank you!!
FF Player v0.94: I just released a new version of FF Player. I did a whole lot of internal changes to FF Player that you most probably will not notice. As the last official update is quite long ago I have to admit that I do not remember exactly what I have changed inbetween ;). The main new feature is Windows Vista compatibility. There were some changes to the way of registering file extensions and I found some other issues that had to be fixed for Vista. The new Enhanced Video Renderer is not included in this release, I hope I can bring it in the next release. On some systems the screen saver was deactivated properly but the energy saving was not, resulting in the screen shutting off during playback. I was not aware of this as it never happened on my system. Please report bugs, I cannot fix what I don't know!! This has been fixed now by using a new way to disable the screen power saving, so during fullscreen playback you won't get any screen saving or display shutdown with the new version! Announcement: Advanced file buffer for FF Player in development! I guess you all know the problem: CDs and DVDs tend to be hard-to-read at the end of the disc. When playing back directly from disc, everything runs smooth until the end of the movie. Suddenly the movie starts to hang, sound begins to stutter horribly (damn I really hate this). This can also occur on scratched discs where playback hangs shortly while reading the scratched area due to drive speed-down, recovering once the scratch is over and the drive speeds up again. Also, when playing high data rate files like HDTV movies over WLAN, the bandwidth sometimes is not high enough, causing temporary delays/hanging during high motion parts. I always said to myself that players *should* read much more data ahead of playback, so that a temporary slow-down of reading would not interrupt playback. But sadly no player would do that. Until Now. ;) Lately I have been working hard to find a way to do that kind of intelligent pre-caching of huge masses of data for the decoding engine. The problem is that this requires writing a custom DirectShow "file source filter" to feed the data into the DirectShow engine. This is a hard task and involves writing lots of code to satisfy all DirectShow interface methods. Additionally, it requires you to manually detect the media type of the file to play. File extensions don't help there as often files are named wrongly, so you have to look into the file manually, read beginning and end to determine different file formats. I was successful to do all these tasks and now I do have a working prototype of the file buffer!! I also made it fault tolerant: I can play a file from a network source and un-plug the network cable. If it is reconnected before or shortly after the buffer is empty, playback continues without any error! This is also great for WLAN for example where connections can break down shortly which normally causes the "file handle" to become invalid and makes players stop or crash almost immediately. Currently, I am re-writing the buffer in native C++. Damn I hate C++ it is so damn complicated compared to .NET! The prototype was written in .NET which sadly caused some speed issues with certain codecs :(. MPEG2 TS files are read in tiny 188 byte packets typically, so for every 188 bytes a transition from C++ (DirectShow) to C# (my file buffer) and back to C++ happened which heavily slowed down the playback of HDTV TS files. Other formats are read in much larger blocks of ~20-30kb where this transition is not an issue at all. The buffer supports most but not all file types. Not supported are especially WMV and ASF, as Microsoft was so kind to use a special file source filter for them that not only provides data but does part of the decoding (splitting the file into video and audio stream) and I will not do that myself for sure. Thanks Microsoft for not using the standard (MS DirectShow!) way of decoding on their own file formats. The new C++ version of the buffer seems to be basically working but I have not tested it properly and it is also not integrated into the player yet. I am using a very basic test-player currently for developing and testing. I cannot say when I will have the buffer released with FF Player as my job does not leave me too much free time, but it will definately come!! Stay tuned!!! :)
FF Copy v0.82: There were some issues with FF Copy which I fixed in the new release, take a look at the changelog for details. The buffer algorithm was improved to allow very fast transfers on local harddrives or local network. I also added a basic dialog allowing you to overwrite or ignore all destination files if they already existed, this is implemented a very cheap way and will be improved later ;). I know I did some more changes but I also do not know exactly what I changed as I did this a while ago. |
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| 2007-03-03 | First donation received! And Web-stats! |
Wednesday was a big day for me: PiXeL was so kind to donate $20 for my projects! Thanks again!! After half a year of making my projects public, this is the first donation I received. I must say that I am a bit disappointed by this fact. It's not like I expected to make money with this, but I thought that a few more people would decide to donate a small amount for all my work, to show their appreciation. Still I am glad that at least one person now did donate! Although my programs are free, I have spent countless hours of my freetime working on them. And it's not like only hand full of people use them: I took the time to sum up the statistics from this website and counted a whooping total of 15.174 downloads!
Here are the stats, summed up until (including) 2007-02-28: Downloads:
Website Visits: 20.421 (average visits per day in februrary: 119) Pages served: 84.745 Transfer volume: 8.169.784 KB (yepp, that's 7.79 GB of data, about 400kb/visit, half of it are images served from FF Player page) Remember that these are only the direct downloads from this website, so all downloads from mirror servers (www.videohelp.com for example) are not included.
I knew from peeking into monthly stats that downloads would be somewhere in the thousands inbetween but I didn't think that it were so many! I am really glad that (despite me) so many other people like my programs and find them useful. I'd also like to say thank you for all your feedback at this point!! Getting mails regularly with feedback, feature suggestions and bug reports really keeps me going on! Keep them coming! And if you like my work, please consider donating for it if you have some bucks over. I'd be really thankful for that. I will make a donations page with a "hall of fame" where you will be listed! :) |
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| 2007-02-12 | FF Copy v0.81 / Windows Vista |
FF Copy v0.81: I accidently broke the data bindings in v0.8 which caused some issues as settings were not saved properly. This has now been fixed, sorry for any problems caused!
Windows Vista: Finally Microsoft released the long announced Windows Vista to the public. Despite the new fancy user interface, there have been a bunch of improvements that made it worth a look for me. One thing that interested me most: Vista ships natively with the .Net Framework 3.0, the new Vista GUI Elements are all part of .Net 3.0. That means that all .Net 2 / 3 Applications should be able to run "out-of-the-box", without the need to install the Framework (which kept some users away from .Net applications). So after installing it, I checked out my programs with Vista. And it does really work! FF Copy and TSSplitter run without any changes under Vista. Only FF Player has some smaller issues. First is the fullscreen mode not working properly. I used some tricks to hide the mouse cursor that don't work under Vista, causing 100% CPU load in fullscreen mode. The other problem is that Vista uses a new technique for registering file types. So I will have to make some smaller changes to FF Player to make it work with Vista. Ah, and Vista ships with a new Video Renderer (VMR 10) that is optimised for Vista. I will try to make it available in the next release of FF Player! |
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| 2007-01-19 | FF Player v0.93 released |
Mainly the explorer integration was broken in the last release, this has now been fixed. FF Player v0.92 had an error during startup which was fixed immediately. Changes: |
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| 2007-01-16 | FF Player v0.91 released |
There were some problems with specific video codecs, where FF Player did not detect the right aspect ratio resulting in a stretched video window. Now I read the aspect ratio a different way, which seems to work with any codecs! Changes: |
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| 2006-12-22 | FF Player released !!! |
Finally, I am releasing the long promised FF Player!!! :-D The motivation to develop FF Player is that I was not satisfied with video players available. Most lack important features, some offer great features but have the features hidden deep inside their option menus and are generally hard to use. So I started developiong a small, easy-to-use DirectShow-based player that offers all features I need. Inbetween it has many advanced features, a great Windows Explorer Integration and has proven to be fast and stable, so I decided it is time to release it to the public. As it is pretty mature in my optinion, I will start with a version number of 0.9 for FF Player. Remeber that although I have been personally using this player for a long time, this release is still considered BETA as only few people have used it until now. If you experience any problems or have feature suggestions please send me a mail! I can only solve problems I know! :-) Go to the FF Player Website for downloads and further information! Some Impressions:
Normal playback window (with Playlist)
Different visual styles... |
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| 2006-12-22 | FF Copy v0.8 |
I fixed a bunch of issued inbetween and added a dialog to show progress while adding files (which could take long) Changes: |
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| 2006-07-26 | FF Copy v0.72 released! |
I did two changes to FF Copy: - Explorer contect menu was not shown when the path of the directory
was too long (fixed). |
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| 2006-07-18 | FF Copy v0.71 released! |
I accidently built in a bug into FF Copy v0.7 short before the release, that caused error messages to appear when a broken download is resumed. Sorry for that. With v0.71 this misbehaviour is fixed. Enjoy! |
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| 2006-07-16 | FF Copy v0.7 released! |
The most important change I did was integrating FF Copy into Windows Explorer. Now you can drag a file with the right mouse-button and release it at it's destination. You will get a ContextMenu entry "Copy with FF Copy". Selecting this will cause FF Copy to start up (if not already running) and add the file to the download queue. This makes handling FF Copy much easier I think! |
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| 2006-07-10 | FF Copy released! |
FF Copy is some kind of Download Manager for Windows. If you think "there are hundrets out there, why a new one?" well, the difference is, that FF Copy is intended for copying files within the Windows Filesystem. So now you can cueue up files which will be copied one-after-another. If you for example copy MP3s and download multiple MP3 folders at once, the speed can suffer from this. Using FF Copy will prevent that by downloading only one file at a time. FF Copy also allows you to start, stop and pause and resume downloads. It will even allow you to resume broken downloads (if the network connection was lost). This can happen quite frequently when using a VPN (for example with the easy-to-use hamachi). Features:
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| 2006-06-26 | TSSplitter v0.9 released! |
TSSplitter is intended for splitting large MPEG2 Transport Streams to burn them to DVD. The advantage compared to other similar tools is that you can later join the files and get a file that's 100% like the origninal source file, so you get no klicks or image glitches on the join position, and you can for example re-seed the file via BitTorrent. TSSplitter also lets you preview the beginning and ending of each partial file, so you can check that the file is not split in the middle of a sentence. You can select from different naming schemes for the partial files or make your own scheme. Features:
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© 2006, Lukas Fellechner
