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sView 2009 user tips

sView 2009 is a Media Player + Image Viewer. Designed for stereoscopic playback it supports a lot of specific features. This short manual intended to explain them.

Mouse navigation

sView 2009 is adapted to use with mouse. Besides main menu and tool-bar icons there are some more useful tricks.

  • Drag & Drop. You can drug file icon from your file explorer and move it to the opened sView window - file will be opened immediately (make sure you move image to Image Viewer and video file to Movie Player)!
  • Zooming. You can zoom the image using scroll on your mouse (or scrolling area on your touch-pad). Note that zooming will be aim-based (according mouse cursor position).
  • Moving. Push left mouse button, move image where you want, unpress button.
  • Fullscreen / Windowed. Press scroll button (or middle button) on your mouse. You can also switch mode using keyboard keys 'Enter' or 'F'.

Separation adjustment keys

These calibrations are set in per-file basis. Changes will be used for file export (black field will be added, cut options will be available in future versions)!

  • Numpad / - Adjust horizontal separation (move left view in right direction, move right view in left direction);
  • Numpad * - Adjust horizontal separation (move left view in left direction, move right view in right direction);
  • Ctrl + Numpad / - Adjust vertical separation (move left view in up direction, move right view in down direction);
  • Ctrl + Numpad * - Adjust vertical separation (move left view in down direction, move right view in up direction);

View short-keys

Settings below are saved for active playlist in per-file basis.

  • Backspace - Reset view settings;
  • W - Swap Left/Right (will be applied for export!);
  • F or Enter - Switch Fullscreen/Windowed (note that sView never touch monitor resolution and desktop settings will be used);
  • P - Switch spheric panorama / flat image view;
  • + or Numpad + - Zoom in;
  • - or Numpad - - Zoom out;
  • Left - Walk left (only Image Viewer);
  • Right - Walk right (only Image Viewer);
  • Up - Walk up (only Image Viewer);
  • Down - Walk down (only Image Viewer);
  • [ - rotate both views 90° counterclockwise;
  • ] - rotate both views 90° clockwise;
  • Ctrl + [ - rotate both views counterclockwise (smooth);
  • Ctrl + ] - rotate both views clockwise (smooth);
  • Ctrl + ; - rotate left view clockwise, right view counterclockwise;
  • Ctrl + ' - rotate left view counterclockwise, right view clockwise;

Next settings are used for all files.

  • Shift + G - Increase Gamma correction coefficient;
  • Ctrl + G - Decrease Gamma correction coefficient;

Source stereo format short-keys

Source stereo format is applied to all files in the playlist (current and next viewed). Note that in case of Movie Player source format changes will NOT be applied to current displayed frame - you need wait about 16 frames (if playback in pause - you will not see the changes until you start the playback). Source format will not take any effect for multi-view files (contains separate left and right streams like MPO).

  • A - Use source-format Autodetection;
  • M - Mono;
  • S - Side By Side;
  • O - Over/Under;
  • I - Row Interlaced;

This article could be read to understand what these formats means.

File navigation keys

sView is adapted for structured file storage. When you open any file with sView all other files in same folder will be loaded into playlist. This allow user to fast navigation using hot keys or buttons on the icons panel.

  • Esc - Close the program;
  • Ctrl + O - Open file dialog;
  • Ctrl + S - Save snapshot dialog;
  • Home - Open first file in playlist (current folder);
  • Page Up - Open previous file in playlist (current folder);
  • Page Down - Open next file in playlist (current folder);
  • End - Open last file in playlist (current folder);
  • Space - Start/Stop slideshow (Image Viewer), Play/Pause (Movie Player);

Software Pageflip

sView provides software emulated pageflip for shutter glasses (in addition to hardware OpenGL Quad Buffered stereo and NVIDIA Direct3D stereo-driver Quad Buffer). You should understand that this feature couldn't provide 100% stability for shutter glasses to work due to NO any hardware callback provided. Also you will need activate/disactivate glasses controller yourself (if manufacture provide that 'button' at all). In most cases this is preferred to use interlaced output (CRT monitor + eDimensional glasses) or even checkmate output (some 3D-ready DLP TVs and projectors). Without synchronization views can be randomly reversed during stereo viewing .Some recommendations to work with software pageflip:

  • Close any other application before starting sView (especially worked in 3D).
  • It was noted that most problems happens during intensive I/O (from/to hard drive for example).
  • To work good software emulation needs as less interfering factors as possible. If your hardware is slow you may try to reduce monitor resolution and/or frequency. Heavy images and videos will load your system stronger.
  • Software emulation uses vertical sync feature provided by OpenGL driver. That means if your driver vendor provide bad implementation (or doesn't provide it at all) image maybe broken! Noticed that NVIDIA drivers are not good over Windows Vista+ and may render corrupted image (partially).
  • On multi-monitor system drivers can lock vertical sync to wrong monitor (connected not for shutter glasses) especially if monitors use different vertical frequency. Software emulation will not work at all in this case. Try to disconnect some monitors or to update the drivers.

Advanced

sView use some 3rd party components. Most of them are dynamically linked and licensed over LGPL. What does it mean for user? This means you free to compile your own library (use more up-to-date version or modified by you!) and use it with sView. Later I publish some instruction per-library but you already can do that using official instruction and sources for projects FFmpeg, DevIL, FTGL, OpenAL soft.

OpenAL. sView published with OpenAL soft. This great library provide common way for audio playback throw many systems. However you may prefer to use your own library or library provided by Audio card vendor (maybe hardware accelerated in case Creative cards, for example). To do that - you need just remove (or rename/backup) "OpenAL.dll" library in installation path.

OpenAL itself may provide a list of output devices. You can list and select it from Moive Player menu. Note that changes will be applied only after program restarts!

Multichannel playback. OpenAL soft provides support for surround playback. However it may be disabled by default (especially on Windows Vista+). You may need to configure OpenAL soft yourself. In Windows installer option "OpenAL soft - force 5.1 channel output" can be used in most cases for surround layout. Sure you need to play multichannel audio in player to these all setting take effect.

FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a great libraries pack for audio/video decoding and encoding. Project also has its own command line executables to perform such tasks (them not provided with sView). There are no serious problems to compile FFmpeg in Linux environment. Moreover official DEB-packages doesn't include these libraries allowing user to use their own or from official repository. But in case of Windows things become more complicated. FFmpeg couldn't be compiled using popular Visual Studio and their compilers due to C99 incompatibility. MinGW tools should be used instead. MSYS could be used as building environment however my own builds are done in Linux environment and cross-compiling (because I have no luck to generate stable executables using MSYS).

FTGL. This library is used for text rendering using OpenGL. To compile your version you should patch official sources with this which allows to use sView-managed VBO instead of obsoleted and slow glBegin/glEnd in official version.

Localization

sView 2009 translated into Russian and English languages. If you want to translate it to your own - you free to do that!

All language files are in "$sView_Installation_Path/lang/" folder. You should make copy of any existing language "english" -> "french" for example and perform translation for all strings (right values) in files of the folder (each file corresponds to the program module). Files should be in UTF-8 encoding. To test your translation you need to change the language in sView. Currently sView doesn't provide language option in menu (only on setup) and you should change it in settings manually (sView/language/FOLDER_NAME). You may distribute translation yourself or for own use but if you want to put it into official version - contact me.

Where are settings placed?

As most programs sView has a lot of settings for it work. Most of them configurable in the program itself, but some advanced - are not. Anyway you can look for them if you is experienced user (don't cry if you broke something ;)). On the Windows them all placed in system register at path "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\sView\". Each subpath represent modules in sView and "sView" - for global settings (like language).

On Linux libconfig+ is used and all settings stored in "~/.config/sview/".

On Mac OS X settings are stored in XML format and placed in "~/Library/Preferences/sview/" directory.

Obsolete hardware support

sView 2009 needs hardware accelerated OpenGL2+ driver. Updated NVIDIA drivers provide this for GeForce FX 5xxx cards and newer (desktop). sView 2009 supports GeForce FX 5xxx however you should know some limitations:

  • This GPU doesn't support non power of two textures, thats affect FrameBuffer too and results in decreased quality of the image in many sView outputs.
  • This GPU shader support is really SLOW. It still may be used with sView however any option (for example gamma correction) may significantly reduce performance of application.