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I've been trying to feed a .BAT script with Long File Names using Send To folder or file association. For some reason Windows 98 sends just the short names, always. Is there a way to force an LFN to be passed through command line parameters.

I've encountered a problem with the UltraVNC 1.0.2. The server part does not seem to be able to work on some Intel based GPU hardware. I was unable to make it work on: - Intel 82845G Graphics Controler (driver version: 4.13.01.3205) - Intel 82865G Graphics Controler (driver version: 4.14.10.3732) So far, I was able to observe the problem on just two different computers running Windows 98. Since I do not have a good access on those two I was unable to test for all possibilities. Still, it looks like some kind of a general video driver incompatibility, or something.

I've been experimenting with the newer GOM Player 2.1.24.5013. There were no changes to the way it handles the MKV subtitles, apparently. On the other hand, I've confirmed, the same .SRT subtitles are handled correctly, when provided in a separate file. So, the workaround is to extract the .SRT files from .MKV.

In my case the non-profit use will not do, I'm afraid. I'm beginning the in field testing of the UltraVNC 1.0.2. If the reliability will follow the feature set UltraVNC will be a perfect tool. I've noticed, the TightVNC does not work with the standard VGA driver. It could be a problem in some video driver related situations. On the other hand RealVNC and UltraVNC are working fine in such circumstances.

I was able to compile a version with UltraVNC server. It looks like quite an useful tool for remote rapairs, but the english language version does not handle polish national characters in file names. So, for the moment, it's next to useless to me. Have anyone been able to compile a version with different than english language setting?

Well, I tried to install it on Windows 98, already. It says kindly: "This program requires Windows NT version 5.0.2195 or later."

I have encountered a problem with building the image after changing the Basic - Windows 98 Live CD Base settings. When Set Default Language or Set Default resolution settings were changed the script ends with a message: ExtractFile - Failed to expand file: [shell95.bat] to: [%BaseDir%\Temp\Win98LiveCD\APP_TMP\Win95Shell\] It happens also, after returning the settings to the previous values. The only solution is download the script, again. (The problem happens on Windows 98 PL with KernelEX.) Also, I'm quite interested in adding a VNC server application to the build. ------------------------------- Looks like the 01-WIN98_BASE.script file gets decreased to just 64Kb, after altering the script settings. Since it should be about 8MB in size, the difference is quite significant.

Updated Free VNC software list: TightVNC 1.3.10 - supports file transfers - supports clipboard operations - the client freezes on slow connections, when the whole desktop has to be updated - does not work with the generic VGA driver TightVNC 2.0.2 - supports file transfers - supports clipboard operations - server does not work with Windows 98 - client requires KernelEX to function with Windows 98 - the file transfer function is not compatible with TightVNC 1.3.10 - no proper support for the national characters - java client does not support file transfers - java client does not support capital national characters Real VNC (free edition) - does not support file transfers - does not support clipboard operations - works fine on slow connections (very reliable) Tiger VNC 1.0.1 - does not support file transfers - supports clipboard operations (I had no opportunity to test it in the field) Ultra VNC 1.0.2 - supports file transfers - supports clipboard operations - sending a file can lock Windows 98 - does not work on Windows 98 with Intel 845/865 graphics chipsets - Windows 98 hangs during reboot, if there is an active connection with VNC server. -------------------------------------- from the original post: The newest TightVNC 2 does not work in Windows 98. So, I've decided to look through the available free alternatives, again. Is there any other VNC software worth considering? I can not count on the TightVNC development team to remove the bugs, apparently.

Well, I do have a problem with USB devices drive letters on Asus Eee PC 900. But, It's a bit different story, as there are two drive letters for each USB drive. One letter is from BIOS USB support and the other comes from Windows. Everything seems to be working fine (I mean just one drive letter), when Windows works in APM mode. After enabling ACPI the Windows forces another drive letter to be assigned. Since the ACPI is quite useful on a mobile device, I have learned to live with the issue.

Well, I've been playing around with a few Windows 98 compatible players a while ago. As the result I've managed to obtain a sufficient h264 coded video playback efficiency (on a single core P4 without GPU h264 acceleration), with just one flaw. None of the players I'm using seems to be able to handle subtitles sufficiently. GOM Player (2.1.21.4846) - does not handle some of the subtitles formats available inside of mkv files. - during the time a secondary subtitle is visible the main subtitles are ignored - some of the mkv subtitles are displayed delayed and/or for too short time period. BS Player free (2.43) - problems with backrard rewind function. The first key press rewinds only to the last key frame. It is necesary to hit the key a few times to get the desired result. - problem with positioning of the subtitles. It is necesary to display subtitles on an overlay surface for the positionig to work at all. But the video playback is choppy in the moment a subtitle is displayed. - during the time a secondary subtitle is visible the main subtitles are ignored Media Player Classic - I have failed to get the subtitles function working, so far.

I was able to get flawless 1280x720 h264 coded video playback on P4 2.4Ghz, without addidional GPU hardware acceleration. However, a few tricks were required to get such a result. In my case the best combination were GOM Player + ffdshow + Haali Media Splitter. Still, the GOM Player does have some problems with mkv subtitle support. The BS Player handles the subtitles much better, but the playback is not flawless.

Well. I'm using the GOM Player in Windows 98. Unfortunatelly, I do not use DVD, so I have no experiences related to this source. But, the GOM Player does have a setting restricting video effects to the video resolution. The effects are used only when the resolution is low, that way. Preferences - Video - Video Effect - Condition setting is never set to "Always enable" with default setup. So if you want to get the video effect benefits in a high quality video it is necesary to set "Always enable" there.

I've changed the firmware to 10.06, but I did not do any network speed testing, so far. Surprisingly, I was able to hold over 100kb/s download rate for a quite long time, yesterday. So far, the download speed was always going down with time. I'm suspecting the new firmware is responsible for improved network card performance. Still, there are other factors to be considered as battery/AC and downloading application type. In any case WGET did a nice job, yesterday.

In my case the Haali's Media Splitter (03-06-2007) works, with exception of the MPC with Haali Video renderer setting. The Haali Media Splitter 11/01/2009 does work only with the MPC (the Haali Video renderer setting works as well). Other players are unable to use it. Also some of the Haali componets started to complain about some system function missing. It could mean the end of the Windows 98 support from the Haali. By the way. The hack with the RAM disk cache file buffering gave me a better opportunity to compare the efficiency of the players. At first the BS Player free seemed to be the best one. But, when I've switched the otput from VRM 9 renderless to the system default setting, the GOM player and MPC both started to work with the same speed as the BS Player. So, it appears the system default video output setting seems to be the fastest in my case.

While playing with different players I've noticed a file is played much better the second time. Apparently, the RAM disk cache speeds things up significantly. It seems to be quite logical, since the CPU works 100% the whole time. So, to speed up just any player it is enough to start the playback with a little script: COPY /B "%1" NUL Player.exe "%1" Even the slowest GOM player received a significant boost in speed, that way. Since the computer does have 768MB of RAM, it should be enough to buffer a few hundreds megabytes of data in the disk cache. For the time beeing I made a script for every player in the "Send to" menu. It seems to be working better than I have expected. So, I'm somewhat satisfied with the result. But, I will get back to the topic, when I'll find a file my computer will not be able to handle in a proper way.

I've played a bit with the Media Player Classic. It seems there is no OSD here. I was unable to use softsubs from mkv file, as well (the MPC crashes in such a case). The Haali Video renderer function crashes the player, in my case. My GPU is too old, probably. If the MPC with Haali renderer is able to use only the full hardware decoding, it would mean a DXVA 2 graphics card is necesary. The DXVA 1 was ment for just partial stream decoding hardware acceleration, as far as I know. ----------------------------------------- I've downloaded the newest version of the Haali splitter. The setup by default disables the built in MPC Haali splitter. It fixed the problem with MPC crashing when the Haali Video renderer is selected. Since the Haali renderer works with as old graphic card as mine is, it could be possible to get the hardware acceleration with just DXVA 1 graphic card, I suppose. ------------------------------------------ And yet another side effect of the newest Haali splitter installation. The GOM player can not use the newest version. I had to enable the built in GOM MP4 filter. The BS player is in the same situation. But, I can not enable the built in codec, here.

In my case the GPU was identified as "RADEON 9000 AGP Pro (0x4966) Rev 1". There will be hardly any hardware acceleration possible, probably. Also, when I have encountered a 1280x960 video clip, it appeared the BS Player is more efficient than GOM Player (with ffdshow installed and internal filters disabled). Still I'm not fond of the BS Player, as the bacward rewind function does not work wery well, and the newest wersion refuses to work in Windows 98. In other words the BSPlayer will remain quite buggy for the Windows 98 users. It is the right time to check the Media Player Classic, apparently.

Well. I do have Ati All in Wonder 9000 (ATI RADEON 9000 AGP Pro). It does not support the DXVA as far as I know. On the other hand the Media Player Classic does seem to have an independant GPU support, unrelated to the manufacturer driver software. Still, I did not pay much attention to the MPC so far. So, I can be wrong here.

It looks like, the first problem to solve is to get a proper hardware. The Ati support for DXVA starts with the Radeon HD and Mobility Radeon HD devices. The software driver layer is called UVD (Unified Video Decoder). The NVidia support vor DXVA starts with GForce 6 series. The software driver layer is called Nvidia PureVideo. I do not know which graphic cards supporting the DXVA can be used with Windows 98. I do not know if the UVD or PureVideo can be installed in Windows 98 as well. I lost a lot of my interest in this field, because I was able to gain some performance through switching the GOM player from the built in to ffdshow H264 codec. Apparently, the built in the GOM player H264 codec implementation is significantly slower than the one from the ffdshow. Still, the CPU usage is 100% when playing 1080x720 video on single core 2.4Ghz P4. So, I'll be back to this problem, when I'll gather enough of frustration caused by choppy playback, again.

The GOM player is my favourite player. But, it seems some of it's internal video filter functions are not particulary efficient. When it comes to high video resolutions the playback is getting choppy. The BS Player Free is much more effective in such a situation, but it has it's issues and the newest version does not work on Windows 98. The GOM player does support DXVA. In theory DXVA should replace the GOM Player internal video filter and transfer some of the video related operations from CPU to GPU. However, that's where my knowledge ends.

I made some field tests with different protocol settings and the resutlts were different than expected. The speeds of the NetBeui i TCP/IP were almost exactly the same. More tests at home were giving the old results, but at some point the speed of the TCP/IP and NetBeui started to be the same. The investigation revealed the key factor was the NetBios over TCP/IP setting. With this option enabled the TCP/IP stack slows the NetBeui protocol down. It also happens when the TCP/IP is not linked to the Microsoft Networks client.

Right. I did some research. It is possible to convert formats using an online subtitle editor at http://subtitle-horse.org/ . As a result I'm getting an .SRT file but: - the converter does not work correctly with national characters in UTF-8 format. It is necesary to convert to Windows codepage first. - the line breaks in multi line statements are not converted correctly in the .SRT - there are other export formats available, but I have no idea how to use them with the GOM player. And yet another nuisance. The newest GOM player does seem to do stupid things on screen, when displaying SRT files in the full screen mode. Every time a text ending with ".pl" is displayed the player does strange screen effect. The test example SRT subtitle file for this phenomenon: 1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:26,500 www.clannad.wbijam.pl The problem seems to be related to Windows 98, somehow. I've failed to reproduce it on Windows 2000. ------------------------------- I've found a workaround. The problem happens when High-Quality Subtitle (VMR) output was selected in initial config screen. With the "Normal Subtitle" setting everything works as expected. ------------------------------- I've compared the settings. To be more specific the "Display on overlay surface" option is responsible for the problem. ------------------------------- The Subtitle horse save to file fuction destroys national characters. It is necesary to use the export window and clipboard, in order to get the valid SRT file data. Looks like the line breaks are working better that way, as well. But perhaps it could be browser or system related issue.

The web page video embeding with use of an external XML subtilte files is getting more polular. Just downloading the video file is not enough, now. It is necesary to download a separate XML file with subtitles, as well. Still, it appears I do not know any video player for Windows 98 able to display subtitles in this format. A sample: <tt xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1" xmlns:tts="http://www.w3.org/2006/04/ttaf1#style"> <head></head> <body> <div> <p begin="00:00:25.0" end="00:00:26.5">A single line.</p> <p begin="00:00:29.4" end="00:00:34.6">- First line.<br />- Second line.</p> </div> </body> </tt> According to my research it looks like the Timed Text CS3 format. But, there are some small differences, as there is "dur" in place of "end" statement. So, the possible solutions would be either: - to find a proper player with ability to display subtitles in the current form - to find a converter to some more popular subtitle format - to write a converter by yourself I have little experience with various subtitle formats, software players and converters. So, I've decided to ask for some advice, first.

BSPlayer 2.x The newest version 2.50 does not seem to work on Windows 98. The installer works, but the application just stops silently, just after running. So, it looks like the 2.43 is the last version working on Windows 98. The provided link: http://www.bsplayer.com/en/bs.player/home/ does not work, any longer. The link can be replaced with: http://www.bsplayer.com/bsplayer-english/p...s/bsplayer.html I do not know where the version 2.43 could be downloaded from.

Well. After thinking again about the problem, I've realized I do not know how much time the task will take without the network involved. So, I've decided to copy all the data to the local hard drive and do the measurements again. The results were interesting, indeed: - Windows 98 - 4m 40s - Windows 2000 - 3m 50s Apparently, the application works faster with the Windows 2000 professional. It also means the windows 2000 is much slower with the networking, then expected. The differences in time between the local and remote data access: - Windows 98 with NetBeui - 20s - Windows 98 with TCP/IP - 1m 20s - Windows 2000 - 1m 40s