HTPC Launcher Copyright 2001 - John Duksta http://www.collective.sh About HTPC Launcher ------------------------------------------------------ HTPC Launcher is a file launcher for use on a Home Theatre PC. I developed it because I had pretty much everything I wanted setup for remote control of my PC (using Girder www.girder.nl) except for a "Now Playing" style file list like my TiVo has. I couldn't find anything appropriate, so I went ahead and wrote it myself. The initial release version is formatted for 800x600 screens only. I plan to add some resizing code in the future, but this is the way it's going to be for now. Configuring HTPC Launcher ------------------------------------------------ The Settings in the settings dialog are pretty self explanitory, but I'll go over them here for completeness. Search Paths - Add directories to be searched for files. Directory searches are *not* recursive. File Extensions - Add extensions of file types to be searched for. Use only the extension (e.g. mpg). Do *not* include wildcard characters (?,*) or the dot. App Settings - Skin Directory - Path containing the skin files you want to use. Player - Full Path and filename of the player you want to use. Player Options - any options you might want to pass to the player. Using HTPC Launcher ------------------------------------------------------ HTPC Launcher was designed to be used with Girder. Thus, everything has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. Keyboard commands are case insensitive. They are as follows: P - Play Selected File S - Settings X - Exit N - Select Next File in list L - Select Previous File in List You will note that the file list doesn't show the full path and filename. It is actually a Title list. It strips the extension and anything after an underscore character "_" out of the filename before adding it to the listbox. This is to give a nice display. The reason behind stripping out anything after the underscore is because my ATI All in Wonder MMC TV software appends an underscore and three digits of serialization numbers if there is a filename conflict when it records a recurring program. I didn't want to see them, so I stripped them out. Skinning HTPC Launcher --------------------------------------------------- HTPC Launcher is skinnable. I have included a default skin with the dist. Stick with the same filenames and image sizes and you'll be in good shape. Just put them in another directory under the skins directory and select the new skin directory from the Options dialog. Giving Credit where Credit is due ---------------------------------------- Being generally lazy, I used a bunch of sample code from a few VB sample code websites. Here are the copyright notices for the portions of other peoples code that I used. File Searching Module Copyright 2000 - John Percival - http://www.vb-world.com Directory Browsing Module Copyright ©1996-2001 VBnet, Randy Birch, All Rights Reserved. Ini File class Copyright ©2000 - Stan Schultes