Version 3.97 ( - CURRENT VERSION - ) (Release date: 2005-04-22)
* New "Browse Subfolders" dialog, when folder end/begin reached (CTRL+B)
* New JPG Transformation dialog option: Apply EXIF date/time to new file
* Zooming for videos added
* Option to show EXIF data from TIF files
* Support for Adobe DNG format (Formats PlugIn, thanks to Dave Coffin)
* Support for FITS format (Flexible Image Transport System, Formats PlugIn)
* Support for PIC format (Softimage PICT, Formats PlugIn)
* Support for WAL format (Quake 2 textures, Formats PlugIn)
* Improved multiple monitor support
* Batch scanning and Acquire merged into one menu
* Some loading bugs fixed, thanks to Bruno Rohee
* New PlugIn: PNGOUT (Optimized PNG saving, thanks to Ken Silverman) * Changed hotkeys: CTRL+Home, CTRL+End = load first/last file in directory
* New hotkeys for Fullscreen display options (keys: 1, 2, 3, 4)
* Number of MRUDs extended to 10
* Some menu/properties rearrangements (Fullscreen, View->Display options)
* Thanks to Michael Ofner for help file updates/fixes
* Most PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
* Some minor bugs/features fixed/added (crop, MS PNG bug, print dialog)
Minion at
Awesome. Now if only the author would implement animated gif playback in slideshow mode. All my animated hentai gifs are useless!
Awesoken at
Well, it's about time : ) Thanks for the tip, Mxx. I put a slightly updated version of PNGOUT.DLL at my site. It includes all the little bug fixes since 02/20/2005 (which is when I last sent Irfan an update).
Irfanview 3.97 at
Win98 Trouble w/Irfanview 3.97 PNGOUT plugin
Just tried your plug-in, having trouble under win98.
I have compared command line PNGOUT and the
Irfanview implementations. Both seemingly produce
identical output with my test images (and default settings).
Unfortunateltly, the PNGOUT setting dialog appears
scrambled in win98. Specifically, many settings seem to
be on buttons that float over windows other than the
actual PNGOUT settings window . You have to see it to
understand.
counting_pine at
Re: Win98 Trouble w/Irfanview 3.97 PNGOUT plugin
Irfanview 3.97 said
Unfortunateltly, the PNGOUT setting dialog appears
scrambled in win98. Specifically, many settings seem to
be on buttons that float over windows other than the
actual PNGOUT settings window . You have to see it to
understand.
Wow.
Yeah, you're right. I'll post a screenshot up for people who don't have Windows 98:
http://img144.echo.cx/img144/4499/irfanviewbug5fm.th.png
Awesoken at
PNGOUT is in IrfanView
Thanks for the tip. Irfan and I tested things on Win2K and WinXP... but neither of us must have tried Win98. Anyway, I fixed the problem and updated PNGOUT.DLL on my website.
Irfanview 3.97 at
Irfanview 3.97 New DLL ..still same symptoms under win98
I tested the latest plugin on 2 different Win98 machines. The old version was bad on both, and the new version works fine on both. The only thing I can think of is that you didn't install the plugin correctly... such as updating your internet cache, or copying to the right directory. Did anyone else have luck with the latest plugin in Win98?
counting_pine at
Re: Irfanview 3.97 New DLL ..still same symptoms under win98
That's the MD5 for the first pngout.dll that Ken posted on his web site. The MD5 for the second one is 84fcc59834f4cd9ddcc9e0dac4ecb9d3.
The second one works OK on my Windows 98, still with the same teeny-tiny title bar, but I'll be putting that down to Windows 98 eccentricity. Thanks for the fix.
Perhaps Irfan should do another release. Most people will be getting the dll in the plugins pack from his web site.
TX at
counting_pine said
Most people will be getting the dll in the plugins pack from his web site.
Most people aren't masochists to the point of hanging on to such utter tripe as Win98.
Edit to clarify: I realize that Win98 can be useful for doing direct I/O stuff, but any amount of usefulness gained from that in no way makes up for how bad the OS really is.
Win98 at
Win98SE and Kerio Personal Firewall Trouble
Downloaded and installed your new PNGOUT.DLL,
for use with Irfanview 3.97.
When setting dialog is displayed, it causes a Fatal error in my
Kerio Personal Firewall (Latest freeware version from Kerio).
As Kerio is crashing it additionally reports trouble (fatal
errors) in modules ASSIST and REGEDIT.
This is a hard error as it occurs every time run
with any test image I choose. KERIO is a free
shareware firewall download. Default installs
with Win98SE, Kerio and Irfanview. No
other software running or loaded at the same
time.
Hope this information helps.
Awesoken at
PNGOUT is in IrfanView
Your firewall software probably doesn't like the fact that I'm using SetWindowsHookEx(). I'm using this function in a non-evil way, but I'm sure your software just assumes any use of this function is bad. It was the only way I could make the dialog box "modeless" without forcing Irfan to make unwanted hacks in his own code.
For those who don't know, there are 2 main kinds of dialog boxes: modal and modeless. A modal dialog box is the kind that beeps at you when you try switching to another window. It forces you to close the window before doing anything else with the program. A modeless dialog box gives you the freedom to switch windows while active. Obviously, a modeless dialog box is more friendly to the user, but it requires some additional callback functions that can only be activated in the main program's message loop. As this is a plugin, I don't have access to that. This low-level hackery was the only way I knew how to make the thing behave as modeless.
Since I have no interest in detecting the presence of anti-virus software at run-time, the best option is to ruin it for everybody by making the stupid thing always modal. That's what I get for trying to be clever. Today, it seems the WIN32 API (or whatever's left of it) is being actively redefined by anti-virus software - and that's really sad.
I updated PNGOUT.DLL on my website again so it only uses a modal dialog box. Please let me know if this fixes your problem with the Kerio firewall.
win98 at
All win98SE problems appear resolved
That last version seemed to do it.
No scrambled dialogs or crashes/messages
from firewalls.
All looks good and functional
Thanks for your great program
counting_pine at
PNGOUT is in IrfanView
Does this mean that Kerio can be brought down by a simple API call? Seems like a ridiculous vulnerability to me.
KillerQ13 at
counting_pine said
Does this mean that Kerio can be brought down by a simple API call? Seems like a ridiculous vulnerability to me.
You'd be suprised at how easily plug-ins can break the host application. Almost any fatal error within a DLL will kill it. The only way around this is some unique error handling or running the plug-in in a seperate process, which many host applications don't handle.
More Windows 98 bashing: I seem to recall that kernel32.dll would crash on applications quite a lot.
hawkeyefile at
or buy winnt/2000/xp pro
GothOtaku at
Regardless of how bad 98 was it's still required to run many applications which is the only reason I kept it for so long. I wish I still had a 98 box sometimes since XP doesn't like running programs that mixed DOS and Windows libraries.
masterlee at
Also GBA Flash XTreme dosen't work on 2k
Awesoken at
Let's stay on topic now. If you want to discuss the pros and cons of operating systems, please use the "Idle Chatter" forum.
counting_pine at
I have a small feature request for the plugin:
Please could you include an option to stop the save progress dialog box closing at the end of compression?
Maybe it could be something like on Internet Explorer's download dialogs, where there's a check box saying something like "Close this box when download completes".
Awesoken at
Request granted; PNGOUT.DLL updated on my site. I put the close option in the save options dialog instead. I realize it's less intuitive that way, but it avoids the problem of the dialog closing too fast and not having a chance to deselect it.
I know you're going to ask "why not put a checkbox in both dialogs". Well, the reason is because it would require special synchronization code. Each dialog runs in its own instance and I didn't want to mess with that today.
counting_pine at
Thanks!Awesoken said
I put the close option in the save options dialog instead. I realize it's less intuitive that way, but it avoids the problem of the dialog closing too fast and not having a chance to deselect it.
Well I'd have got past this by having it unselected by default. And if it was selected, I would deselect it by compressing a large file (I use a similar method in IE). But I appreciate it's not a very sophisticated workaround:)
Erm... Bad news, while playing with the latest update, I've discovered a bug (!)
When you have the Save dialog box and the PNGOUT option box open at the same time, if you click 'save' or 'cancel', the Save box disappears, but the two Options dialogs remain open. If you clicked 'save', it won't start saving (or display an 'overwrite' prompt) until you OK the PNGOUT options.
Worse, if you select another file type, which would normally make the 'PNG/PNM/ICO save options' box disappear, the whole program crashes.
This problem also sort of occurs with the modeless version.
Awesoken at
Well, I think I found a solution... although it involved a little reverse engineering so I hope it works. I found a way to disable input in the "Save Picture As ..." dialog when "PNGOUT save options" is open. It's not the ideal solution, but it's the best I can do for now. I updated PNGOUT.DLL again, and I'm sure you'll let me know if this doesn't work. : )
counting_pine at
It works for me; when the PNGOUT option box is open, the only thing I'm able to do with the Save dialog is move it around.
Hopefully any Kerio users will be able to report similar success:)
Kerry at
I'm absolutely delighted with the integration of PNGOUT and IrfanView. For palette images it's a lot more convenient than setting transparency with a GUI tool and then running PNGOUT from the command line. I downloaded the updated PNGOUT.DLL to try it out on my old Windows95 machine which I use for backwards compatibility testing. No problem with the options dialog and progress bar. You can see what the options dialog box looks like on Win95 at:
Actually, the reason I use Win95 screenshots is because it's a lot easier to adjust them to exactly the same width. I only had to shave one pixel off the width of the PNGOUT options panel. It's a bit more fiddly to do the same with XP screenshots and a lot of people are still using Windows9x/2000. Ken, you're welcome to use the screenshot on your updated tutorial if you'd rather not spend time preparing a Windows XP screenshot.
There are two features of IrfanView which I find a bit frustrating. Every time I install a new version of IrfanView I have to set the PNG compression level to 9. The zlib default compression level (or is it libpng's default?) appears to be 6. This must date back to the early days of PNG development when i486's and clock speeds measured in tens of MHz were the bees knees. Even my old Windows95 machine doesn't blink at level 9.
The second thing is PNG transparency in non-palette PNG images. In my tests I noticed that IrfanView 3.97 converted 24_bit PNG images to palette images if they contained 256 colors or less. But above 256 colors it inserted a tRNS chunk in 24_bit images. That's valid according to the PNG spec, but Internet Explorer ignores tRNS in non-palette images. You can find the three test images I used (non-optimized) at:
Of course these quibbles are nothing to do with PNGOUT. Thanks for developing a really great utility!
Kerry
:-)
blausand at
Re: PNGOUT is in IrfanView
Kerry said at
I'm absolutely delighted with the integration of PNGOUT and IrfanView. (...) There are two features of IrfanView which I find a bit frustrating. Every time I install a new version of IrfanView I have to set the PNG compression level to 9. (...) The second thing is PNG transparency (...)
Of course these quibbles are nothing to do with PNGOUT. Thanks for developing a really great utility! Kerry :-)
Dear Awesoken!
Although i seem to be a bit late, i want to explicitely agree with Kerry: PNGOUT in IrfanView is a great blessing. I just pulled a ticket from Irfan's support site due to the untold filtering of his built-in .PNG-exporter: It just has to be made clear that Irfan's Standard PNGs are NOT lossless to the Original, don't you think? I supported to integrate your PNGOUT-PlugIn as the default, totally unregarding any licensing issues... what would you think op that? In that context i'd like to kindly ask whether you might put an eye on the performance of PNGOUT.dll, because it can still turn out to be quite time-consuming to use the PNGOUT-PlugIn.
Thanks for everything, Awesoken! blausand
Awesoken at
don't you think?
It doesn't matter what I think. Irfan does what he wants.
put an eye on the performance of PNGOUT.dll
You think I don't know how to optimize? I obsess about it every second of my life. Sorry, but there isn't much room for improvement in PNGOUT.
Kerrypng at
It just has to be made clear that Irfan's Standard PNGs are NOT lossless to the Original, don't you think?
That's true if you use IrfanView to reduce the color depth from 24-bit (True Color) to 256 colors for a palette image. I do it a different way. I have a whole collection of PNG image tools. When I use Web Image Guru to reduce the color depth it does some very sophisticated processing. It counts the number of pixels of each color and keeps the most frequent colors identical to the original. Of the remainder it checks how close they are to other 24-bit values of a similar hue. If they are within a very tight margin, it combines them. If the total is more than 256 hues, it averages the least frequent ones until it gets down to 256 palette entries altogether. I assume it's an iterative process. To the human eye, the differences among the least frequent colors are usually not noticeable. The lossiness is only obvious with smooth gradients. For gradients I use dithering.
Web Image Guru is a commercial product, and although I haven't experimented with the others, it's possible that some other free image tools can make a better job of color reduction than IrfanView. Once I have a suitable palette image I save it in Windows Bitmap format and open IrfanView.
...it can still turn out to be quite time-consuming to use the PNGOUT-PlugIn
If you are willing to spend $14.95, the PNGOUTWin optimizer takes advantage of multi-core CPUs to do parallel processing. More info: http://www.ardfry.com/pngoutwin/