Requested Support for Windows Imaging Component

[Guest]

There are two important features I would like to see in IV. Compared to all the little, tiny tweaks I see on this forums, those two are really big and would catapult IV into modern age (it's been the same program for what, a decade - and it's still the best ^_^)

1. WIC support or emulation. That includes GPU acceleration, dual/quad/xxxx- core support and image prefetching. You should try FastPictureViewer 1.0 to see what I mean - all those features means a difference from 2-3 seconds for picture load on modern PC down to basically instant.

2. Unicode support, thank you. There are very few image viewers that do it properly and contrary to popular opinion not everyone lives in US, thus needing this feature badly.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I changed the thread title as the previous title was useless for someone searching the forum.

Also, one of those feature requests already exists. Unicode support is now available in IrfanView 4.20 by enabling the Unicode Plugin in Properties, Misc1. I don't think it is perfect yet, but it should be good enough for most users.

There is no such thing as a "must-have" feature for an image viewer apart from the ability to open most popular image files. The importance of other features is largely a matter of personal preference. Personally, I use IrfanView for viewing, reszing, and converting images — not much more.

For advanced processing of photographs I would recommend using a different product. I only recently learned what WIC means. What do you need it for?

[vsrawat]

Well, I am not adding anything on the previous part of this thread.

Just saw the thread title and came to read it. I use Window Imaging (xpsp3) and it accepts only TIF format files. So, I use iv to convert my images from various formats to save as TIF format that I then open into Windows Imaging.

I really don't know what kind of support can be there for Window Imaging from iv - may be, there could be some option somewhere in iv that would directly say open image with window imaging, and then iv would automatically convert that image (from whatever format) to TIF and launches Windows imaging with that file, - But frankly, this doesn't look much attractive for me. It is just saving a few keystroke/ clicks, which would be convenient but not much of a gain because it is not really integrating the two applications.

Frankly, if Windows imaging was capable of reading other formats, i would directly open Window Imaging with my images and wouldn't need to use iv to convert them to tif. Same would be true with other OCR.

One great feature addition to iv would be the ability to OCR from within IV.

So, I leave it up to you guys and gals. But I just wanted to cast my vote for some integration between iv and Windows Imaging or any other free OCR software. May be, iv can use that free OCR software's dll as a plugin to scan and text-ize the image from within iv. That would be what I would feel great help and real integration.

And, for such type of integration, MS is a bad idea because they are known NOT to tell their formats, codes, standards and keep on changing them arbitrarily, out of the blue. The mess of docx and xlsx is pinching to most users. So, I would say that if you are thinking of such integration, avoid MS and choose some other open source thing.

Thanks.
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V

[j7n]

WIC support or emulation.

I visited the Wikipedia link and learned that this WIC is similar to DirectShow, a reliance upon Windows to do file decoding. In the video world it has not improved performance (compare mplayer and ffdshow for speed) and only created a mess, where it's difficult to add support for new formats without breaking existing. IrfanView can already read and write almost all known formats, definitely more than M$ supplies codecs for.


image prefetching

Prefetching and caching behind has already been discussed. Neither has to rely upon Windows. Automatic prefetching without possibility to configure sucks (see – Vista), the system simply assumes that the data will be needed in the future and processes it now.

ACDSee v2.4 and v3.0 are currently good non-bloated viewers if you need caching. Technically paid software though.


Unicode support. Contrary to popular opinion not everyone lives in US, thus needing this feature badly.

Unicode hasn't anything to do with living in North America or Western Europe. Since the days on DOS, perhaps earlier but I can't speak about that, everybody could and did configure the system with their local codepage. All normal languages fitting inside 8-bit could be used without explicit change in architecture of the operating system. And you could also use these special characters in filenames. But we were taught that it is not a good idea at all because you could send your file to U.S. or Russia, and they won't be able to access it. And this rule still applies, because besides IrfanView there are other software and network protocols without Unicode.

Do you frequently see Internet addresses like this: http://Ūņïčóđé.net ? No, because it is important for a domain owner that all users (and of course technical software) can access and understand it.