Preferences
General display
Icon set: Allows you to select the "theme" of the icons that will appear in the toolbars. These themes are simple bitmap (".bmp") stored in the "Toolbars" folder. Some sets are provided with the program.
Color type: Specifies how toolbar icons should appear when mouse is not over them. Available values are "Automatic", "Greyed when inactive" (Windows 98/2000 style), "Blended light when inactive" (Office/Windows XP style), "Blended dark when inactive" or "Always colored".
Office XP style: Gives to menus and toolbars the same appearence than in Microsoft Office XP.
Images in menus: Display images on the left of menu items. These images are the same than the images used in the toolbar.
Soft borders for Movie List, Movie Information Panel and Picture Box: When enabled, the specified items in the main window appear with a "less lowered" border than usual. This may look better if you are using Windows XP with a visual theme.
Display logo: Application logo (splash screen) is displayed at startup.
Customize toolbar
You can select which icons should be displayed on the main toolbar. See this page for more information on each icon.
Files
Always create a backup copy: Each time the catalog is saved, the old file is renamed as ".bak".
At statup, automatically open...: Allows you to specify a file to open instead of creating a new file at startup. The option "Re-open last used file" opens last used file instead of specified file.
Number of recent files to display in menu: Last files that you used are displayed in the "File" menu, above the "Exit" item, to allow you to quickly re-open these files. You can select here the number of filenames that have to be stored in the history.
Repair files associations: Rewrites to Windows' registry values that allow to open .amc files with ANSYsoft Movie Catalog by double-clicking on then.
Store loans history: Records all loan changes (in/out) in a text file, using a tab-delimited format (so you can open it with programs such as Microsoft Excel). By default the file is stored in the application's folder, and is called "Loans history.csv". The same file is shared by all instances of Ant Movie Catalog so you can have problems if you use the loans window in several instances (this will be corrected later).
Movie list
Checkboxes: If this option is enabled checkboxes will be displayed in the movie list in the main window. The use of these checkboxes is free: e.g. they can be used to indicate which movies you've seen, which ones you already have, or anything else. These checkboxes can be used as filter for exportation, printing or scripting.
Hot track: Underlines items of the lists when mouse passes over them.
Enhanced scrollbars: Uses enhanced scrollbars for Main Window and Loans Window lists.
"Movie Number" column: Shows or hides the column containing the movie numbers on the left of the titles in main window. If you do not use the numbers, hiding this column makes more space available on the screen for other info.
Do not make a group for values that would be alone in this group: When using the "Group by..." function, if this option is enabled a group is created only if there are two or more movie that have the same value for the selected field. All the other movies appear together. This can be quite useful if you group by Number or Media Label.
Put these movies in a special common group: Create a "other" group with these movies rather than putting them directly in the list.
Put movies with empty values in a special common group: When using the "Group by..." function, if this option is enabled a group called "none" is created for the movies that do not have a value in the field used for grouping.
Display groups count: In "Group by..." mode, displays the number of movies in each group near the group name.
Full expand by default: When the "Group by..." function is enabled, this option opens all the groups when refreshing the list.
Confirm Delete: Ask for confirmation before deleting a movie from the list.
Confirm Undo: Ask for confirmation before undoing changes made to a movie.
Shortcuts, Previous/Next movie: Allows you to define a shortcut to jump to previous or next movie without loosing the focus of the current field. It is useful to modify one field accross lots of movies without needing to use mouse to select next movie. Default key is Ctrl + Page Up/Down, which is the same as Ctrl + Numeric pad 9/3.
Title formatting
Title to display:
- Original title: Display only original title.
- Translated title: Display translated title if available, otherwise original title is used.
- Original title (Translated title): Display first the original title, and then the translated title if available.
- Translated title (Original title): Display first the translated title, and then the original title. If translated title is not available, only the original title is displayed.
- Label: Displays the contents of Media label field.
Put the following prefixes at the end: You can specify here the list of prefixes that will be placed at the end of the movie name (e.g. "The Matrix" will become "Matrix, The"). By default the list has English and French prefixes.
Simply enter the prefixes, one per line, without space or quote (a prefix will be recognized if, in the movie title, it is followed by a space or a quote).
I will not included other langues for the moment, because it can cause problems, e.g. "Die" in German ("The") will display the movie "Die hard" as "Hard, Die", which is not correct. But you can change the prefixes yourself to make them match to your language.
Movie information
Ask for number: When a adding a movie, a window will allow you to select the number of the new movie. If the option is disabled the number of the movie will be the default value, which is highest movie number + 1, except if you change the next option:
Use first available ...: Will use as default number the first available number instead of highest + 1.
Open "Get information ... window": When you add a movie the Script import or File import will be opened.
Edit default movie values: Displays another window, allowing you to modify the values that are already filled when you add a new movie in the list.
Rating - Do not display decimals: If this option is enabled the rating will be an integer number like in older versions.
Background Color: Allows you to select which color should be used as background of the Picture Window. e.g. It may look better with a white background if your images are made to be used on a web page with white background. Defaut value is BtnFace, which corresponds to the color of Windows' dialogs and buttons.
Fit picture in window: Zoom/Shrink picture to avoid scrollbars in the picture window.
Drop-down lists
Same options for all lists: Keeps the same options for all the lists.
Auto-sort items: Sort list contents alphabetically
Auto-complete while typing: If enabled, when you type text in a drop-down list in the main window there will be a "suggestion" of a matching value, like when you type an address in a web browser. This feature may cause problems if you have several items that are similar.
Use values of current catalog instead of predefined lists: Does not use the values entered for the lists, but searchs in the current catalog for values to display in the lists.
Automatically add values not in list: If the contents of a field is not in the list of this field, the value will be added to the list (e.g. if you enter a country that is not yet in the list, the program will add it to the list).
Edit items: This allows to edit the contents of the lists.
Media files importation
Get information from files: Allows you to specify what to do when a video file is dropped on the main window (e.g. from Windows Explorer) or when the user asks to get information from files (from the menu).
- Import media label: Take the volume name of the drive where the file is and put it in the "Media label" field.
- Import filename as title: Put the file name in the "Original title" field.
- Import full path in the URL field: Put the file name and it's whole folder path.
- Import size: Read the size of the selected files. The sum can be computed or simply written with a "+" between each size, depending of the selected option.
- Import length: Read the length of the file (in minutes) and put it in the "Length" field.
- Use internal engine ...: By default, MediaInfo.dll is used for all media types except AVI, because Ant Movie Catalog has it's own engine for that, which is much faster but less accurate.
Info to take from video & audio strams: Put these info in the fields with the same names. For AVI files if you use the internal engine, the codec names are defined in the "Codecs.ini" file.
Picture importation
Importing pictures from external sources: When you import an image, there are several ways to associate it to the movie:
- Store picture into catalog: Keeps the picture file inside the catalog; this works only when the catalog uses the ".amc" format and not ".xml". Depending of the size of the pictures, this may create a very large catalog, so it will use more memory and take more time to load. With large pictures I really recommend to not use this option.
- Copy picture to catalog folder, and link it to catalog: Copies the picture file to the folder where the catalog is stored, and then creates a relative link to the picture (so it only stores the picture name).
- Only link picture: Only stores the path to the file in the catalog. The "Make relative path" option can be used if the catalog folder and the pictures folder are near, for example if the catalog is in "my documents\catalogs\movies.amc" and the pictures in "my documents\my pictures\posters". This allows you to not care about where are the folders "catalogs" and "my pictures". On the other side, if you want to be able to move the catalog without moving the pictures, you shoud rather not use relative paths.
The same options are displayed in the "Select picture" window.
The third option is not available for scripts in the current version since only "local" links (against "internet" links) are possible.
The pictures stored in the same folder than the catalog are supposed to "belong" to the catalog and so they are deleted when they are not used anymore by a movie (e.g. if you associate a new picture to a movie, the old one is not useful anymore). If you do not want this behavious, I recommend you to manually place pictures e.g. in a "Pictures" subfolder when you want to add them to the catalog, and then use the relative links to keep the catalog and their images "movable".
Search on internet
This allows you to customize the "Search on internet" menu. It contains the addresses of websites. When you select an item of the menu, it launches the browser to go to the site. It inserts current movie's title where you put a "%s" in the URL.
Names have to be unique. If you want to put separators you have to begin their name with a "-" ; then the address is ignored.
Scripting
Auto-run last script used: Runs the last used script when the scripting window is opened through the "Get information from script" command.
Use proxy when accessing to internet: Allows you to specify proxy server information if needed.
Keep connection alive: By default the connection is closed after each request (page or picture). If this option is checked, the connection will not be automatically closed. This may a little speed up the speed of the web requests, but I kept this as an option because lots of people had problems when the connection was kept open. If you get error messages like "Connection closed gracefully" when activated, do not use this option.
Export
Automatically reload last used template: Keeps the name of the opened template so it will be open next time the window is shown.
Line breaks will be replaced by ...: Allows you to modify the tag used to insert line breaks. Since it is the only tag that the program does not take from the template, you can define it here. If you want to use HTML you will probably use the default <br> tag, but you may want to use <br /> for XHTML or XML. You can also simply leave this field empty if you do not want to remplace linebreaks by something else.
Force picture size by adding attributes: Allows to specify a value for HTML attributes height & width. If you leave one of these fields (or both) blanks, the attribute will not be added.
SQL Date format: Allows to define which format has to be used for the date when exporting to SQL commands. If you leave the field empty, Windows' default short date format will be used. Mask characters are those used in Delphi: yy and yyyy = year (on 2 or 4 digits), m and mm = month (without or with leading 0), d and dd = day (without or with leading 0), and characters than should stay unchanged must be enclosed in quotes (e.g.: yyyy'/'mm'/'dd).
Remember filename of last exported file: Use last file name as default instead of catalog name.
Open exported file when export finished: Launch created file after export.
Individual pages and pictures filename style: Allows to specify how the program has to create to filenames of the multiple files that come with the exported file.
Example, if you export the file "My movies.amc" to "My list.html":
Exported filename + Movie number Catalog name + Movie number Movie title my list.html my list.html my list.html Full list my list_1.html my movies_1.html matrix.html First movie my list_2.html my movies_2.html starwars - episode one.html Second movie etc... Extension to append: Allows to force another extension for the individual files. This may be usefull if for example your main list is a .html file, but you want .php files for each individual movie pages. If this field is blank the main file extension is used for individual files.
Add zeroes in front of low numbers: If enabled, small numbers will be left-padded with zeroes so they are properly sorted with all file managers (only Windows XP Explorer seems to detect numbers in filenames for sorting).
Copy images to the same folder than the exported file: Extracts or copy images from catalog to the same folder than the exported file.
Copy only if target file does not exist: If enabled, the image of a movie will not be copied if the filename of this image already exists (only filename is compared, so the image will not be overwritten even if it is different).
Folders
You can define here the behaviour of the file selection dialog boxes for:
- Loading or saving catalogs
- Selecting a picture
- Exporting
- Loading or saving html template
- Importing
- Getting information from files
- Saving graphic
- Loading or saving script files
The option "Same options for all Windows" allows to define the same default folder for all windows.