? for Gavin, what is the status of LDJ?

[QuickCarl]

I have been one of the missing in action... waiting for all the pieces to come together befroe I submerse myself again. Your DLJ implimentation is an important part of my Win32 and PPC CCFs.

What is the scoop? -Carl

[Ben S]

Hi Carl,

Gavin is currently away in Europe for a few weeks. LDJ works for me, but I'm thinking Gavin or I will want to tweak it to take advantage of some of the RC7 stuff.

[brockgr]

Yep sure will - once I work out what gold dust is hidden in RC7. So far I have found line wrapping. - Gavin

p.s. I think I had more messages for me to read here than I did in the office - I think that's a bad sign....

[sdellutri]

Have you guys ever checked out the Extreme Movie Manager (as an alternative to DVD Profiler)?
http://www.binaryworks.it/extrememoviemanager/index.php

Looks like it does a better job of managing and handling media locations in their gui. You can track if you have a movie in Divx or on DVD or some other format, automatically search for the path to the movie files, and get the same benifits of movie cover images, descriptions, genre ... that you get with DVD profiler.

I wonder if there is an easy way to use this either in addition to or in replacement of DVD Profiler. Its great for someone that has a large library of DVD and Divx files.

[QuickCarl]

Gavin - any news to report WRT LDJ?

[brockgr]

Guys,

A week as passed already and I have done nothing - sorry.

Extreme movie manager looks interesting. I am really searching for something other than DVD Profiler. The problem is that LDJ needs data - not a GUI. DVD Profiler works great for US/European users who like piling in lot's of data. Sadly, I'm in Japan so none of my DVD's are in their database, and I'm just to lazy to type the stuff in.

Anyway, I'll keep the DVD Profile export stuff for now - it seems to be what most people need. What I plan to do is have a way of linking the information found by searching the disk, to any extra information found in DVD Profiler.

Let me continue hacking with the code - what is eveyone waiting for?

BEN: One querstion - any progress on the JPEG renderer? I'm still converting images at LDJ startup which may annoy people with large DVD collections.

Gavin



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[Ben S]

Gavin, do you mean the ability to reencode the jpegs as png on the fly on the server side in Girder?

I don't think there is any way for me to increase jpeg loading/parsing performance on the PPC for now, unfortunately.

[brockgr]

Ok - anyone know a lightweight utility (Public domain of some kind) that I can use for converting JPG to PNG. I'm using Image Magick, but it's huge.

Gavin

[maxtrash]

irfanview works like a charm. It has a batch-function for converting that also works from the command line.

Example for conversion:

i_view32.exe c:\*.jpg /convert=c:\*.png

it's freeware and an 800KB download which isn't too bad these days

[brockgr]

Thanks for the pointer. It looks a good alternative - and the download is a little smaller. I'll have a play - Gavin

[Ben S]

I just tried it, and it's extremely fast. I wonder if I can convert the large/xlarge MC Images to png for faster Album Covers as well?

Let me know how I can help, Gavin.

[maxtrash]

I tried it myself. It works somewhat unexpectedly in that it spawns a proces, e.g. after typing the command I got back control right away. I then tried it again (thought it hadn't worked). The computer was obviously slowing down and after taking a look at the task manager it turned out it was running some irfan proces twice! Just something to keep in mind.

[brockgr]

I had a play with Irfanview and it kept crashing on trying to do image resizes when called from LUA - very strange.

Anyway, for now I have stuck to convert, but wrapped all the conversions in a batch file.

Full details here (http://www.netremote.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2861#2861)..

Gavin

[maxtrash]

don't know if you were using irfanview with wildcards or file by file like you do with convert. In that case irfanview might crash because of too many parallel processes. But never mind, if convert works who cares?

[brockgr]

Actually convert didn't work - duh... Ben found that you need to run the full Image Magick installer, and that is more bloat than I want. I'm revisiting irfanview this afternoon.

Gavin

[Rob H]

Gavin,

Did you get IrfanView to work? I ask because I've just managed to get it going here.

I changed Private.resize_tool to refer to IrfanView and made the following script changes :-



write(bat_fh,
'"'..%Private.resize_tool..'" '..
'"'..dvd.cover..'" '..
'/resample=(0,'..%Private.SmallImageHeight..') /one /aspectratio '..
'/convert="'..small_file..'"\n'
)
write(bat_fh,
'"'..%Private.resize_tool..'" '..
'"'..dvd.cover..'"'..
'/resample=(0,'..%Private.LargeImageHeight..') /one /aspectratio '..
'/convert="'..large_file..'"\n'
)


I used /resample rather than /resize as it make a much better job of the images, but is a little slower. The key is to use the "/one" option to ensure that there is only one copy of IrfanView running. I put the heights in two variables because I'm actually using sizes that are different to the standard for use on a 1024x768 CCF.

I also added this line just before the loop




write(bat_fh, '"'..%Private.resize_tool..'" /killmesoftly\n');

which closes all running copies of IrfanView