Jason Carr

Thanks @kmoney, I just fixed this for the next beta.

I may add more advanced features later, but for now I need to focus on bugs for 7.5. Also, it's easy to turn off the startup sound if you don't want it.

@CTRL-ALT-DEFEAT Did you have background music enabled, or prioritize music over video audio? Background music is different, so I need to confirm.

The new beta is out @dmjohn0x. Also hoping we can use your intro video as the demo for our news video this week.

I just solved the taskbar issue. When Big Box is run, I run a separate process that waits for Big Box to exit, and then makes 100% sure that the taskbar is back, whether Big Box closed cleanly or not. So that's solved for the next beta.

Awesome, thanks for helping me get to the bottom of it. That really helps narrow it down. Great to hear, @Maddoc1007.

My hunch is that this is only happening in LaunchBox now; sorry for the never ending questions, but have you seen it crash Big Box since yesterday's beta?

Thanks Martin; I'm not killing explorer, though, only hiding the taskbar. I have an idea as to what to do though using a separate EXE, so I'm on it.

Thank you @Manuel Leiria. Did you get that in LaunchBox or Big Box? Have you seen that error specifically in both or just one?

I see. I'm trying to put out an official release on Friday though, so if you could test the previous scenario, I'd really appreciate it.

Oh, one last thing. There's this as well: - Improvement: Big Box now hides the taskbar while running in order to prevent it from showing while switching between the startup video and Big Box, and while running games That will come in really handy I think, but it also scares me, because if Big Box crashes, you'll have no task bar. I'm currently not sure what to do about this. I know Rocket Launcher annoys me sometimes because if it crashes you're often left with a completely broken desktop, which I'd like to avoid, but I don't have any quick solutions. I might try and put another EXE next to it to detect if that happens and recover.

Alright guys, beta 7 is out. For starters, I fixed the errors from @DOS76 and @Norfair regarding the audits. However, I haven't been able to identify @Manuel Leiria's null reference issue, so please let me know if anyone else is able to replicate it. My understanding is that it is related to prioritizing music over video audio, but I have a hunch that it might be unrelated. @Manuel Leiria, can you confirm either way? Secondly, @dmjohn0x inspired me late last night to implement startup videos, and they are now included in this beta. He had a video built that's pretty awesome, and it's available in his thread here: I'm using VLC (just using the app directly) to play the startup video full screen, and then I'm killing VLC once it's loaded. It's not a perfect solution (especially since VLC does take some time to load sometimes), but it does seem to be working pretty well. To use it, just put a video in LaunchBox\Videos and name it Startup.mp4. I haven't allowed customizing the video path because it would slow down startup (the video is played before any of the settings are loaded). Also related to the startup videos, there's a "Minimum Startup Video Duration" setting in the Big Box General options that will force showing more of the video if Big Box loads too quickly. Finally, some bug fixes: - Fixed: When switching games views in Big Box, sometimes CoverFlow images were re-generating and taking a while to show up (due to conflicts with the previous view) - Fixed: VLC has been changed to always use the LaunchBox\VLC\vlc.cfg file for configuration instead of no configuration or the system's default configuration Note that the VLC configuration file change should at least now allow you to specify DXVA if you want further performance increases and your system supports it (see earlier on up the thread). It's not exactly easy to change though; you'll need to modify the vlc.cfg file in a text editor and change the "avcodec-hw" line to "avcodec-hw=dxva2". Make sure you remove the # that is in there by default. In the future we may provide a proper setting for this, but this is at least a step in the right direction.

@Maddoc1007 I get you, makes sense. I just figured there was something I was missing. Agreed that it would be useful, but I won't be able to get it into 7.5. @spycat You got it, that's exactly what it's doing. It delays loading some of the extra metadata databases until they're needed in order to help with the startup time. @shinra358 Yes, of course that's how we'll implement the folder structure. That's not the problem and doesn't make it any easier to implement. We'll need a bit of restructuring in the code, and also a migration process of sorts since the videos will be expected to be in a different location. It's nothing I can't do in a couple days, but currently there are higher priorities on the list.

I'm not fully following here. You're saying you already see a performance increase when turning the videos download to 0% volume? Why would we need to actually mute them then?

Well random videos first requires us to support multiple videos, which we don't yet. We do support both the game theme video and the game play video, but in that case the user probably wants to prioritize the game theme video. We need to restructure the videos to allow for several videos per game before we can tackle random videos, which requires us to change how they're stored on disk, so no, it's not a quick thing to do.

Have you been able to replicate this again @Manuel Leiria? Sadly I haven't been able to replicate it today.

Thanks @Opaklopper; I have the German translation updated for the next beta.

Well, I have it working natively already (without any settings or anything), but Big Box loads way too quick to end up seeing much of the video. We'll probably have to put in a setting for delay, methinks.

Last try: start "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --fullscreen "F:\LaunchBox\Intros\BigBox_Retro1080.mp4" If that doesn't work, I give up for now. The command prompt is shown because it's a batch file, so that'll be there no matter what you do (which is why native would be better).

Gotta admit though, you've inspired me to do some late night coding. We might see a beta with it supported natively pretty quick here.

Oh, try like this: start "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe --fullscreen F:\LaunchBox\Intros\BigBox_Retro1080.mp4" Does that work?

Are you using a %PATH% environment variable? Honestly, I would just stick to using the full path since %PATH% is system-wide.

Basically you just need to provide the complete path to VLC, like this: "C:\Program Files\VLC\VLC.exe". That will probably help.

Hi @dmjohn0x, that's pretty awesome. Try appending the --fullscreen command line parameter to the VLC line. I think just putting that at the end of the line should work.

Hey all, I just put out version 1.1 already lol. I added a bunch of features (and one fix) this past weekend and things seem to be working well enough. Here's the change log: - New "Move to Top" and "Move to Bottom" options are available under the Edit menu - New "Insert Separator" option available under the Edit menu - Each application can now have a separate set of commands for configuring the application - New explicit "Run Selected" and "Configure Selected" options are available under the File menu - New "Browse and Run" option is available under the File menu - New "Lock" option is available under the File menu to help prevent accidental changes - Changed the batch file process to better support DOSBox and older versions of MS-DOS I updated the download link in the main post, and here it is again: http://bit.ly/LBXDOS11 Happy MS-DOS.