Custom Columns (Roadmap task feature request)

[mistaknly]

I know custom columns are in the roadmap. I just wanted to make a request concerning video files when you get around to working on it. (I'm sure others have other priorities...).

This obviously isn't so simple to implement for video files since nothing I've seen actually works so I would like to report what limited information I've learned from testing other products. You probably won't learn much but here goes....(again this is just for video files and have column title and what it is and some have samples)


++Windows Explorer (shell) mostly work but some formats (divx) don't show anything:
Frame Width
Frame Height
Length (not the "Duration" column which doesn't show anything for video)
Frame Rate (25 fps)
Bit Rate (audio bit rate)
Total Bit Rate (overall bit rate)

++Windows Explorer (shell) almost never work (a few work with mkv files)
Subtitle
Subtitlle tracks
Subtitles (I have no idea what this is as opposed to "Subtitle")
Video Compression (some mkv files work else nothing or some 32 character alpha numeric string).

++xplorer2 (these work but some have "?" marks as leading characters...)
Frame Width
Frame Height
Frame Rate (25 fps)
Length
Total Bit Rate (overall bit rate)
Data Rate (video bit rate)
Bit Rate (audio bit rate)

++Nomad.NET (These work fine and don't use alpha numeric strings as answers)
Hard Links (not video, I just thought I'd throw that in there....haha)
Width (Frame Width)
Height (Frame Height)
Bit Rate (audio)
Duration (same as Length above)
Channels (2 stereo)
Audio Sampling rate (48000 KHz)
Audio Codec (ISO MPEG Layer 3 Audio)
Video Codec (XviD Video)

I haven't tackled TC yet since I don't use it much but I do understand you can do some things.

So the point is, I can't find anything that is a fully functional file manager that supports all the video columns. This is extremely useful for those that need to do a lot of conversion and subtitle work. My right mouse button finger is really tired of clicking on MediaInfo and that only gives one file at a time. I would like to have all of the following columns be available and working. (I don't really understand what subtitles column information is there, I do know that mkv files report VSub in a few foreign films. I would say for my purposes subtitles aren't really a priority for sorting pre conversion. Subtitles are really a separate task from conversion and can't really be batched so I'll put the subtitle columns in brackets for now...)

Hard Links (not video, I just thought I'd throw that in there again....haha)
Frame Width
Frame Height
Length
Frame Rate (25 fps)
Video Compression (some mkv files work else nothing or some 32 character alpha numeric string).
Total Bit Rate (overall bit rate)
Date Rate (video bit rate)
Bit Rate (audio bit rate)
Channels (2 stereo)
Audio Sampling rate (48000 KHz)
Audio Codec (ISO MPEG Layer 3 Audio)
Video Codec (XviD Video)

[[[
Subtitle
Subtitle tracks
Subtitles (I have no idea what this is as opposed to "Subtitle")
]]]


I hope this is at least minimally helpful.....and I'd welcome feedback from those that know more than I do (not to hard I think....hehehe)

Thanks for a great product!

[mistaknly]

OK, I looked at TC now and there are several plugins that support all kinds of video columns. Some work better than others natch, but at least you can see most of the information. After looking at this body of plugin work for TC I certainly can understand why taking on all the possible video information would be daunting at best.

TCMediaInfo.wdx
media.wdx
mediainfo.wdx

These are the ones that I tried. The last one uses the "Mediainfo.dll" from the mediainfo program so with some work you can get pretty much anything you need. But it sure isn't "plug and play"....

Anyway, good luck with the shell implementation for custom columns. It should be fun !!

[admin]

Not that I plan to do this NOW, but just a thought: IMO the main reason of having info in columns is the ability to sort the list by this info. Do you really need this? Or would it be enough for you to have all the info in one "tile" (in Tile View)?