AMC as Portable Application on Mobile Drives

[bad4u]

Hi Antoine.

I have been searching for a nice menu/launchpad for my USB stick, without buying a new U3 type one (at least some of them do not even run on Vista) or paying for a commercial software like Ceedo, which costs more than a brandnew 2GB U3 stick...

Now I found PortableApps and it's perfect for all kind of USB Flash Drives, Ipods, Mobile Harddisks.. it's free, open source software, lots of portable apps available (and all are free) and you can add every other portable application easily to the menu. And best of all, the application with backup utility needs less than 1MB of space, perfect even for older USB flash drives with only 128MB or less. Now I can take a lot of progs (Portable Versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and many more) with me and use them on every PC - at work, when visiting friends, ... - without leaving any personal data behind.

And you might guess my wish now

It would be THE PERFECT combination if the best movie catalog around could be installed as a portable app, and it makes sense, too. Would be great to take your USB stick to your friend or to work and start your catalog without the need of installing any software to the system.

Does AMC save files outside the program's directory ? And I just had a quick look on the registry and it seems that AMC does not write much entries here, does it ? Could it be run without writing values to the registry ? If so, it seems that it could be easily ported to a portable app.. (new installer, new installation path). Maybe you'd like to have a closer look at the PortableApps development section .

I wish I had the possibility and knowledge to do these things by myself, but unfortunatly I do not have any delphi knowledge (and compilers).

Do you see any chance for this ? Would be great :-)

[antp]

Hi,
AMC does not put anything outside its own folder. So it will work fine on an USB stick
The only thing that is in the registry is the uninstall info (that you do not have with the .rar version, but you can also copy the version installed on your PC) and the file format association (which is not required, and that you can have either by installing the program, or by clicking the "Associate" button somewhere in the Preferences window).

[bad4u]

I downloaded the .rar version (which I have overseen before) and it should be perfect for this purpose

Next I will try this Version as a portable Application from an USB stick on different computers, to see if there are any problems, but I have two more questions before:

1. When I set "automatically open following file" in "Preferences/Files" - is there a way to set a relative path to the catalog.amc file ? If not, there will be problems when opening a particular catalog automatically, as the drive letter will change on different computers.
2. Are the registry entries done only by the installer or will AMC change file associations after it has been started ? This would mean it leaves some "personal" data on the host system and portable apps should not do so.

If it works well, I will have a closer look on the NSIS (NullSoft Scriptable Installer System), that is used for the portable applications ...

[antp]

1. Actually I do not know... test and see if it works. If not I could try to fix it. Another solution is to launch the program with "moviecatalog.exe catalogname.amc" instead of using that option, if you can specify the parameters of the application.
2. AMC only write something when you click on the "associate" button. As far as I remember it never write anything else. Other things are written by the installer.

AMC's installation is done using Innosetup, a rival of NSIS, you may want to check the install script: it is the .ISS file included with the source code of AMC.

[bad4u]

Nice. Automatically open a specific catalog file seems to works with relative paths, but I will have to verify that on another computer tomorrow.

Launching the program with "moviecatalog.exe catalogname.amc" would be possible too, as PortableApps are loaded via a launcher and configuration file by default, but that means the program would be started with a specific catalog and the user could not change that from within AMC. So I'd prefer relative paths.

Question: Are there any starting parameters (or variables, paths, ..) that could be changed or set through commandline ? I didn't find anything concerning this in the helpfile, but it might be useful when starting through a launcher..

[antp]

Code: Select all

/prefs "filename.xml"

to specify the file to use instead of "prefs.xml"
(can be used to have shortcuts launching different options/language with only one version installed)

Code: Select all

/tr_show_errors

shows errors found in translation file (not very useful in your case )

[bad4u]

Thanks

[ClaytonAguiar]

Hi,

I trying the following at the "auto open catalog file":
.\catalogs\clayton.amc

The program indeed opened the catalog at my USB stick. But...

(BUG)
When I used Movie -> Get Information -> From File, ANT changed the "current directory" information to the folder where the AVI's were stored (in my case, the DVD-R drive).

When I clicked "Save", it warned me that couldn't save the catalog to the DVD-R disc (read-only media).

Get a worse scenario: If these movie files were on a writeable disk (HD, for example), clicking "save catalog" after each "Get information" would put a version of the catalog file of each folder where I placed a video.

(/BUG)
(SOLUTION)
Solution: At startup, if this attribute is set, check whether it is a relative or absolute path. If relative, expand it internally. But don't save it to the preferences, or you'll lose the portability (as a USB stick will be assigned a drive letter for each PC you plug it).
(/SOLUTION)

My first contribution for this really useful software.

[antp]

replied on viewtopic.php?p=23692#23692