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Old 28th December 2005, 17:12   #230  |  Link
chiklit
The Ultimate Lens
 
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Baltimore, MD
Posts: 13
This is my first post here so hopefully you won't find me to be a nuissance.

Anyway, I just tried the program out and while it seems like a good concept, I'm not to sure about the implimentation.

Some gripes I have with the program:
  • It requires .NET (I'm glad they at least partially got rid of this in Delphi 2006, but no such luck for VB). IMHO .NET is just some bloated thing Microsoft invented to try and intigrate everything but it just seems to bog prorgams written in it down.
  • Everytime you do something for the first time a help windows pops up right in front of the window you were just about to work in. This doesn't really seem necessary since there's a help button on almost every form and makes using the program for the first time really annoying.
  • When it crashes it doesn't ask where to save the debug file. I don't know about everyone else but my desktop is not a place where I'd put a file I actually want to find :P
  • This might be because I downloaded the source instead of the release, but once I tried to load a file for the first time it poped up asking me to download a bunch of programs. Most of them I already had installed but it either found the wrong version or didn't find them at all. It would be nice to be able to simply tell it the directory for each of the apps in addition to being able to download them. A download all function would also be nice. If this is different in the non-source release then just ignore this.
  • When you do something there isn't much indication that what you did had any effect. Like when I uncheck resize the resize options don't disable themselves and still allow me to change them leading to some confusion as to whether or not resize is actually disabled. Same with crop when you disable it the cropped size is still shown as different under the input file instead of the same as the original.
  • The interface is a bit counter-intuitive at least for me. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I needed to use the next button to go forwards, I was looking for an 'Encode' button and though the next button was just to go to the next hint down at the bottom.

Now for the bugs I saw:
  • This might not be a bug but even though noise and subtitle are shown on the filters setup box they don't show up in the list on the main form.
  • When it asked me to perform a compressability test it poped open a dos window but even after a few minutes it didn't seem to be doing anything so I ended up aborting.

Suggestions:
  • It's sort of difficult to tell what encoder and muxer your using you should probably use a check menu to indicate what encoder/muxer your using. It would also be nice to have the option to change these from the main form without having to go to the menu since it's one of the most often changed settings.
  • It'd be nice to have the program recgonize irregular resolutions from the uncropped/resized original instead of just on the resize adjuster since it still let me encode even though x264 said that since one of the demensions was not divisible by 16 it might effect the compression.
  • Since you already have the box at the bottom indicating what all the buttons do you should probably also have a tooltip on the labels for things like quality and compressability saying what the numbers there indicate.
  • This might just be this one error, but when you have crop disabled and then go to crop in the menu instead of saying that the filter setup doesn't allow cropping it should say something like "You must enable crop in the filters list first." Or when you uncheck crop in the filters list disable crop in the menus options.
  • There doesn't seem to be a precise way to adjust the cropping. You might want to do something like in virtualdub with cropping so you can adjust the values more precisely.
  • I don't really know why this occurs so it might be a bug but when you switch to x264 in the encoder menu it also switches to mp4 in the muxer options if this is a bug then ignore this, but if it's a feature then the menu option should probably only do what it says since having it change both the encoder and the muxer when you only expect it to change the encoder is a bit confusing.

Sorry if I came off as a bit over critical and I understand that the program is still in testing but hopefully you found some of my suggestions useful.

Last edited by chiklit; 28th December 2005 at 17:17. Reason: Adding bullets to list.
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