A new version of the Lazarus movie-making program VirtualU is available at the download site below. Numerous features have been added and many problems were fixed including:
1. The video playback method using MPlayer has been significantly redesigned. Now a left click while in Quick Play mode plays all videos in Windows XP and the clicked video in all other Windows versions.
2. The Z-Order of all cartoon images used from the Accessories palette now function like any other video, picture and text. Some problems involved with the Z-Order levels have been corrected.
3. All imported videos and pictures can now be deleted by name en mass easily and quickly.
4. Size limitations for AVI movies have been removed. AVI movies of almost any size can now be made.
5. Big bug fixed: I discovered that the "Choose by frame" method on the "Extract all or some frames from a video" page does not work correctly if the video has a soundtrack. If this method is chosen then a message now warns the user about this and suggests using one of the other two methods if the video has a sound track.
6. The feature that adds each project as a scene to a movie under construction has been improved. The program now precisely builds the audio file separately as the movie is built and then joins them when construction is ended.
7. In addition to dragging, a new feature on the Custom page (The main work station) positions videos and pictures numerically. This feature is useful when an object needs to be exactly positioned or moved only a few pixels.
8. The Tutorial and Help files have been updated.
9. A new feature on the Playback/Recording screen provides much more control in how audio files are recorded and how movie and audio files are played. Playback methods include TMplayerControl, Windows Media Player and VirtualU's frame player.
10. Some issues involving brightness levels of the movies made by VirtualU have been resolved.
11. VirtualU now detects what version of Windows from Windows 95 up to 8.1 is being used and makes adjustments accordingly. I could not find a way for the program to detect Windows 10 but this isn't a problem.
12. A new feature was added that now offers two ways to join MPGs together. Method 1 is for run of the mill joining tasks and Method 2 is for joining 'lip sync' videos together with an audio precision of 5/10,000 sec. Now the user can just drop movies into a movie under construction with assurance that everything in that clip is in sync.
13. A new feature was added that allows the user to quickly get the exact duration of a video. If you've worked with videos alot then you know that the recorded duration (meta file) of a video is often slightly wrong more than 50% of cases so this feature will be quite useful. I went nuts in trying to come up with something that would provide an accurate, fast duration since the video duration is so important in adjusting the durations of MPGs being joined in perfect sync. I now rely on something that accurately counts frames in videos so that the program can display its duration.
14. A pause button and a continuous play button have be added as new Quick Play tools.
Too many things too numerous to mention were improved, fixed and/or added to. Everything is working much better with fewer programs and much angst and effort went into precision and reliability.
I have discovered that big differences exist between Windows XP and other Windows versions in particular categories. Windows 10 is much less forgiving than XP and much work was needed to make the program compatible to both versions as well as hopefully in addition to those versions in between 'em.
Unsurprisingly, VirtualU works much faster on a machine with ample memory. Various processes in Windows 10 work faster or slower than in Windows XP but for the most part Windows 10 is better and faster.
I also discovered that processes involving brightness levels works differently between the two versions. Windows 10 requires far fewer adjustmenst in the different movie formats than Windows XP, which some folks still use.
I was very disappointed to discover that only one instance of MPlayer can be used at any given time when using Windows 10 despite all my considerable efforts to overcome this limitation. Windows XP allows multiple movies to be played at the same time when using MPlayer.
VirtualU is a work in progress and it continues to be fine tuned, improved and made more useful. Occasionally overlooked problems and bugs like the one described in item 5 are discovered and fixed though almost all of them are minor and the number of them becomes fewer and less serious as time goes by.
This program is very large, complex and I don't get much feedback so I have to weed out all of the problems now by just using it and testing it. Except for a few minor bugs that still may be lurking, it's working great.
The work takes time and I can't do everything at once, as any of you who have authored a considerable program know. This is the best version of all and many challenges involving video duration, synchronization and audio were met.
This program is starting to shine and should reflect well on Lazarus. There's still much housecleaning to do like removing unused variables and inert code, adding more try statements, finding bugs and maybe adding some more features. Some of the work was difficult and I'm glad that the program is mostly finished.
It's a whole new animal with lots of interesting information and plenty of options and workaround solutions.
A new TouTube show named show5 that was made with VirtualU is available at: Search YouTube for : Fingal McGinnis. This is the most precise, best show of all and Lazarus is mentioned in the end credits. The text quality was a slight dissapointment, especially since the original MPG show movie has great text. Something went wrong in the upload conversion to YouTube's system, I guess. I also tried uploading an AVI, MP4 and WMV.
Thanks again, Lazarus.
VirtualU.exe is in the folder temp15
temp15.zip download link:https://od.lk/f/NDJfMTM3NDQ0OV8
Note: I have not yet obtained a digital certificate for this program so if U download and run it for the first time then you may get a message saying that it's been blocked because it's from an unknown publisher. If you opt to run VirtualU anyway then subsequent runs won't show this message. This only seems to happen to files downloaded w/Windows 10.
If you download temp15.zip, you are advised to use a program other than your operating system's default unzipper to unzip it. Use a program like 7-Zip so that you won't get any unnecessary and erroneous warning messages about unpublished programs.
VirtualU isn't 'certified' by a so-called certification service for an exorbitant fee to the satisfaction of Microsoft but it's ironic that it IS published; VirtualU is published, certified and registered at the U.S. Copyright Office.
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