Just discovered a cool feature of MC that I didn't know about and wanted to share it with others.
I've been cataloging my Anime Music Videos with MC for a bit now, and the hardest part was previewing the video whilst still being able to edit all the video files. I could do this in the playing now playlist, but this didn't suit my needs (I wanted to still listen to my music!
)... I've seen others wanting to preview videos whilst not in the playing now as well, well now you can!
Power up your favorite video player (I like BSPlayer, it has independent volume control, so I can keep it quiet whilst playing music) and put it in "Always on top" mode (ctrl-a with BSPlayer, ctrl-t with Zoomplayer and I couldn't find any for Windows Media Player, though I have a small program called Nail.exe that'll nail any window to the top of the screen) and position/size it to your liking then simply drag a file from whatever view you are in and drop it on top of your video... voila, instant preview mode!
I'm currently using MC10.0.35, so I don't know what previous versions do this successfully.
On the assumption this works for other programs I 'nail'ed notepad to the screen and dropped a video in it... luckily it bought up a 'file not saved' dialog from my previous file, otherwise it would have opened a 65meg video
I also tried explorer, using drag/drop and holding down the ctrl key allows you to copy the file to whereever you drop it.. but be careful, drag/drop without the ctrl key will move the file (if within the same partition), otherwise it's a copy) and not update MC (so MC will report the file as lost) then you'd have to move it back to where it came from or do a 'find and replace' on the filename field to update the location itself. I feel this is fine the way it is, otherwise when one accidently 'moves' a file using drag-drop and the database updated, you'd lose the info on where the file actually was.
JRiver: Maybe the standard 'drop' on explorer could be curtailed and only 'move' when the shift key is held down? (though I suspect this is explorer's domain and can't be changed).
Also, I can't find this in the help file (it mentions drag & drop -into- MC, not out of), will this be documented.. or stay undocumented because of the dangers of moving files around? I hope this feature stays, because it's so cool to quickly preview my videos in a window I can put whereever I like whilst still playing my music
PS: On further inspection - all my players have independent volume control
(winamp, wmp, bsplayer, zoomplayer)
except MC (edit: I must apologise, MC does have it... it's just a little hidden in the icon just to the left of the volume control
"Internal Volume") Plus, it's fun having all four players open and preview four different videos whilst listening to music with MC, though not a lot of desktop space left
PPS: I still prefer BSPlayer...
Zoomplayer has more functions, but bsplayer is move easily moved (by dragging any part of the playing picture) and resized (with the mouse wheel - zoomplayer can too, but doesn't feel as good) - both of which are important when previewing files if you want to quickly move the player around. (although BSPlayer still needs some work... haven't found the perfect player yet
)
PPPS: Cool... it works with smart/playlists too
Author
Topic: Tip: Video previewing without using PN or Fullscreen (Read 1119 times)