Mammoth Software

[mammoth]

This section is to discuss the new features in 2.2.300. This version contains 3 major changes:

1. Was to port PowerExplorer from XP to Vista. This required to upgrade to a new installer program that would understand Vista and Vista 64-bit. This also required changes to registry settings, log locations, and a few interfaces that are required for the shell. Logs are now located in $USER_HOME$\AppData\PowerExplorer.

2. Porting to 64-bit and MSVC 2005. To support AMD64 bit required upgrading to MSVC 2005 and the libraries it uses ATL80.dll, MSVCR80.dll, and MSVCP80.dll. This also required some modifications to the code to be compatible with this compiler version. 64-bit changes included registry changes to modify just the 64-bit registry for shell support.

3. The only real feature change was to add auto Description discovery (see Disk Properties). Now when you 'Identify' and disc and there is no description, PowerExplorer will attempt to scan the disc to provide some content information. There are currently 2 types of auto description support, Data Discs (UDF/ISO) and Audio CD.

In the case of Data Discs, Identify will scan the root directory for both files and directories and will store on seperate lines the name and creation date time. The description field is limited to 255 characters, so the data will be truncated.

For Audio CD, PowerExplorer will ask Windows Media Player(10 and above?), to provide identification of the Artist, Album Title, and Track Title. The description field is limited to 255 characters, so the data will be truncated. Please note that there is currently an issue with Windows Media Player identification, IF you do NOT have AutoRun turned on. If you noticed the same description for your Audio CDs, you probably have AutoRun turned off.

[mammoth]

PowerExplorer and MCE are incompatible, at least the Sony MCE 2k5 version we've tested. Windows only allows one application to access the PowerFile at a time, so they can't be run together. Plus PowerExplorer uses a service that once started doesn't stop until rebooted or killed. The reason behind this is that the data is cached and allows multiple Explorer. We're currently investigating an install issue with Vista version and hope to have a resolution soon.

[mammoth]

We checked the current installation, the 'required' reboot option on the installer wasn't included in the 32-bit version. Please make sure to reboot after installation.

[mammoth]

We realized by upgrading to MVC 2005 there was additional dependencies added. If you're experiencing problems, please download and install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)

[url]http://www.microsoft.none/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32bc1bee-a3f9-4c13-9c99-220b62a191ee&displaylang=en[/url]