Updates to Drax

2014-05-18 21:46 - Programming

Today I dusted off my barely existing Windows programming skills. I've been using Drax for a while to add titles and chapters to MP4 video files. It's a nice little tool, but I wished for a few features it didn't have: the .MP4 extension in the open dialog (rather than just .M4V), drag-and-drop to open files, and remembering the window position across launches.

As expected, it took some doing. It was open source, which makes changing it possible. But it uses features that don't come in the legitimately free Express version of Visual Studio, so I had to go for a demo install of the full version. Then I had to do a fair bit of cobbling things together. They depend on libmp4v2 but don't include it. The mp4v2 tarball is apparently missing critical files, so I had to grab them from source control. And tweak lots of little build settings, as both projects were designed with/for earlier Visual Studio versions.

Once I got it building and running, things were surprisingly easy from there, overall. I got all three of those features mentioned added start to finish today, without much of any experience to go on. Thank you Internet, both for having so much data at my fingertips, plus for answering my one question (which that data wasn't enough for) quite quickly.

The installer was one of the things that doesn't work in newer Visual Studio versions anymore, so I can't give you that. But you can grab a zip file of the drax executable, with my new features added.


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