Back after some time away from this. I know, HTML Applications (HTAs) are an old technology. The smart man jumps on Electron, but I’m much more capable with VBScript than JavaScript and I’m just too lazy to get up to speed with JS. Even though (even though!) this isn’t that complicated. Well…I might get into JS again just for this, but that’s a personal battle not worthy of public discussion.
Long story short so you won’t have to read through
THIS is that I no longer trust HDDs as a storage choice. I lost A BUNCH of titles when I had a drive fail. So I’m looking at Optical Storage. 50GB Blu-ray to be exact. The whole goal for me is to be able to insert a disc that I’ve archived titles on and fire this thing up to show me what is on it and be able to launch what I click on. I got unlazy and switched from Chrome to the actual VLC program for playback. I was originally going to have this via Chrome but more setup was needed than necessary for it.
It was you, the viewers at home, that made me think of a different plan. If I got it working how I wanted and showed people, what if they wanted to try it, too? How many out there can easily get IIS running on their PC, or install Chrome if they didn’t already have it, or would even want to for either? If I created an EXE program it would probably require some to install the aging VB Runtime environment (…I use old tools). So, I went the route of making a faux web interface that any Windows user could use (sorry Mac) and could easily get working if they wanted to give it a go. How’s that for nice? (kidding). Well, not so nice because if I used Electron driven by JavaScript it would have been cross-platform, hence…sorry Mac.
Behold! My brand-spanking new HTML Application: JAV Archive on Demand (JAD). Uh…”on demand”? I did use the world
faux. What does it do so far? It builds a visual presentation (so far a bit of a mess) of what is stored on an inserted disc. For my needs I’m using the aforementioned 50GB Blu-ray discs. That’s about 46GB of usable storage, so, with the SD versions of titles I have that should yield roughly 30-40 titles per disc on average, instead of maybe 9 or 10 of those HD titles that are all the rage. But that’s just me, I can usually only view in my GearVR so the SD size in the theaters look pretty darn nice to me. JAD so far should work with all media files VLC can play. I use all MKV files because I remux everything to that container. This is so far not very elegant at all, BTW.
I bought a 160 disc holder for $15 at computer store. Eventually it will be filled and down under my desk, out of the way. How to find what I want, you ask? That’s the second part I haven’t gotten to yet. I’m not one to need a whole lot of information for JAV. I’m looking to be able to search by Publisher, DVD Code prefix (JUFD, ARM, PPPD, etc.), Genre, Performer. So far that’s all I would need, and even then right at the get-go I’ll probably only have DVD Code prefix. The rest I can ease into because it will be some work, even with the scrapers out there. BUT…the big difference for me that makes up for it is that I will have a large visual library telling me which disc has which title (going by the cover). No there yet, though.
What you're seeing if you grab the video below is me opening the app, the app loads thumbnails of the videos on my disc from a folder on my HDD. Then as I click a cover it launches VLC with a set width of 854(p) whether the actual video is that big or not. Just for a little size. I'm sure you can set it to fullscreen if you wish. I like mine windowed for some reason.
JAD_test01.mkv
https://mega.nz/#!eZEHHY7B!PN4l0yeH9_c8XK6TU52LmfeGj5nYqz8Bvsq_0ckBkp4