What do you want to see next in Media Preview?

[theoneofgod]

3 things.

1. I don't have win 8 but I will move to it and other people are already there. Win 8 support.

2. Multi-core support so it takes A LOT less time to get the thumbs.
*** edit: better multi-core support

3. An options to stop caching when you come across a screwed up file. I don't know how many times in only the last two weeks that one file being messed up and no thumbable has locked up the rest of the files from getting thumbnailed and jacked up other folders. It should just skip files after it finds problems instead of trying it ad nauseum and forcing you to restart and deal with the file so it doesn't screw it up again.

2). The bottleneck for generating thumbnails should be the drive i/o not the CPU.

For the most part but I think that he has it figured out, right below your comment. Computation seems to be the biggest issue when you have a faster HD.

@krackaboi: thanks for your really interesting suggestions.

1. Media Preview is already working on Win 8+. But there's this annoying cache issue where the system wipes out the thumb cache too frequently. I made an attempt to fix this with a Level 2 cache with the latest beta, which is working for me.

2. I don't know if a better multi-core support would improve that much. The slowness of Media Preview isn't actually coming much from the video frame decoding, but mostly from the luminance and entropy calculations. I don't think I can improve the entropy method. However, the time taken to compute luminance is currently directly proportional to the square of the requested thumb size (the used algorithm has a quadratic complexity). With some better maths, I could probably improve this to get it run with a linear or even logarithmic time instead of a quadratic time.
But for this, I would need to delve back into advanced maths topics, and I currently don't even have time to improve the L2 cache...

3. It's a really sensible request, and it should be really easy to implement it with the L2 cache enabled. I'll be sure to include this with the next beta when I get time to work on Media Preview again.

Thanks for your reply and thanks for keeping up with this great software! You seem to know what's going on and have the technical know-how to do this and find work arounds. I myself don't know much about the technical aspects of this. One other thing. Does the multi-core support work by doing one file at a time or does it work by doing multiple files at a time? I'm just wondering what the difference would be for speed of doing multiple files.

Again, thanks for your very personable response.

Right. But say you had a directory with a hundred 10GB video files and Media Preview was sent 10 of them at a time to generate a thumbnail, surely this will bottleneck most drives only and really would not be improved by having multi-core support. What would be better if instead of multi-core support, improve what is decoding the files to create the thumbnails. I'm sure there are many things that would improve thumbnail generation before multi-core support. As BabelSoft said, the program is completely reliant on Windows requesting thumbnails so the example above is rather pointless

[krackaboi]

@krackaboi: Doing multi-core support for multiple files at once would actually accelerate rendering globally. The thing is Media Preview is a shell extension, and is thus called by the system, which sends a thumbnail request for one file each time. So, Media Preview is only notified of new files one after the other, never as a file set, and then can really only improve multi-core processing for a single file. The system could probably decide to call several instances of Media Preview on several files in parallel, but it never does so and for good reasons: shell extension is a general purpose mechanism, not specialized for video-processing, so the system cannot decide if this kind of optimizations can sensibly or even safely be used for each registered shell extension.

You definitely have experience with this. Thanks for the explanation on this.

Not that this would be too interesting to you but I tend to mass download some webm files from some chans and go through them. I don't really like talking to the people or reading the comments so I just look at everything on my system. The way some of them encode things makes some thumbnails not to show up. I end task on dllhost when it maxes at 25% and gets stuck on those particular ones. I have to delete them right after ending task so it goes on to the other ones. I end up with a lot of them files and it takes a bit to render everything.

I'm a heavy user but I'm not saying it's your problem. I'm mentioning this just to clarify some of the stuff I've said before.

Thanks much again for this great software!

[BabelSoft]

Next time you go over a file letting Media Preview stuck, can you send it to me? I'll see if anything can be done so that a preview get generated.

[omniplex]

Don't hesitate to elaborate.

On your say so I've voted for more image formats, because I expect that you'll anyway support whatever libavcodec supports. Hopefully this includes BPG (better portable graphics) soon. Even the mozjpeg folks think that BPG is better than JPG / WebP / JP2 / J2K / JXR.

[onyxwave]

@BabelSoft I wanted to start off by saying that this is a pretty solid piece of software that you've put together here. I wish there were many more small independently written Windows apps so well thought out for stability, compatibility and performance efficiency. You most definitely have a donation coming your way from me.

When if came to which I wanted to see implemented the most from the choices, I voted for "Media file metadata / property display within Windows Explorer's details pane".

Though, I would like to say that many of the other ideas are awesome as well, so I'd like to see them implemented in this order:

1. Icon customization to ease file format recognition (1 different icon for each format) and individual file content (icons to tell if is stereoscopy, has subtitles, has metadata, etc.)
2. Thumbnail manual selection on individual files
3. Animated preview for video files using overlays on thumbnails or displayed through a mini-player within Windows Explorer's preview pane
4. Support for more image file format
5. Support for document file formats

However, there is one thing that I would like even more than all of these options which unfortunately wasn't something that I could vote on. When I went through the Media Preview Configuration dialog, I didn't see a setting where I could change the sizing of the image that gets displayed in the Windows Explorer Preview Pane. It looks like when a Preview Pane thumbnail image is generated by Media Preview, it seems to get a maximum resolution image size, which I assume is between 96px and 256px resolution. Instead, I'm thinking that the Preview Pane thumbnail image size should be based on the resolution of the file itself. When it comes to media file types that Windows supports by default in the Preview Pane, it seems to base the Preview Pane thumbnail image size on the resolution of the file itself, so that it preview changes in size based on how large you make the Preview Pane up to the resolution size of the media file. Let me know if further clarification is needed in case I haven't quite gotten my feature request across clearly. lol

Other then that small thing, this app is absolutely amazing! Keep up the great work and great support!

Thank you.

[BabelSoft]

@onyxwave: I see what you mean with the Preview Pane. Actually, this issue is related to the request #3. Media Preview doesn't fully support the Preview Pane yet. Thanks for your inputs. I'll see what I can do later in May.

[km77]

Thumbnail manual selection on individual files

THAT would be really great!

p.s. Media Preview is awesome

[Dolmatov]

New GUI Icaros.
The program begins on appeal ahead of the project, though not identical to the functional and I still have not opposed to translate the program.

[BabelSoft]

Well, the author of Icarus finally found a way to do a good looking UI. It seems like he spent a lot of time with the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) by trying making an innovative UI, and finally gave up by simply following the trend of Windows 8 applications.

Despite he said some months ago that it was impossible to do, he also added a new feature by copying (once again) what was done in the latest beta versions of Media Preview: add a cache separate from the system cache. Well, it seems like the only thing he didn't figure out is how to properly detect uninteresting frames. He could find a way to detect black and white frames, but not every kind of mono-coloured frames as Media Preview already do through luminance or too simple frames as Media Preview do through entropy. Or maybe he decided not to implement luminance and entropy as he found some ways to do them but it was too slow for his tastes.

Well, to tell the truth, I didn't work on the Media Preview source code for quite a while. I'm not really interested anymore into updating it as it works well for what I need (thumbnailing on Windows 7), as I don't get paid to work on it, and as any new functionality finally get copied into Icaros. I may update Media Preview again and properly implement the L2 cache if I decide to migrate towards Windows 10 and there is still the cache bug as in Windows 8.

Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate the author of Icaros for persevering on updating it and finally changing it into a decent application that doesn't crash much after a few years. I think he started it when he was still a student, that's why Icaros began as a really crappy application. Well, he took a lot from Media Preview, but this is how people behave and this is how it always happens when you put something on the Internet .

[theoneofgod]

I'm happy using Media Preview