Software Review of:
Media Browser 
2000 

The manual describes it as “the ultimate multimedia organizer that lets you store, manage and access important image, video and even document files.” Media Browser 2000 lets you create albums of files and enter information about each file. The albums are like shortcuts to groups of actual files. I have 75 folders of graphics files, organized into categories. Many of these folders have sub-folders, some sub-folders have sub-folders, and each folder and sub-folder has an average of 50 files. You do the math- I just know that if I didn’t have my graphics folders organized into subjects, I’d never find a graphic when I need it. Categorizing them wasn’t even enough. I often look for a particular graphic and can’t remember where I put it. I have a funny picture about an elephant; is it in one of my animals folders or my drawing folder? Without Media Browser I would have to open Windows Explorer, search the names of files in the folders where I suspect the file might be. Sometimes, I cannot recognize the file by its name. Sometimes I it is in a folder I did not suspect it to be, for instance, the elephant cartoon was in my cartoons folder. With Media Browser you can find files easily with the sort and search function based on information you enter. Or you can open albums where you suspect the file may be and look at thumbnails of the files. You can drag and drop files into an album or even between albums. When you save an album, it doesn’t create another copy of your file unless you want it to. This was important to me, since I already have so many files categorized and saved. I could now save the elephant file to the animals album, the drawing album and the cartoon album and there would still be only one physical copy of it on my hard drive. This means that I will more likely find it since a shortcut of it is in more than one album. You can also copy files to other locations. 

The interface is very intuitive; I would suggest browsing through the menus to see the capabilities of the program. It comes with a 4 ¾” square, 18 page manual, just enough to be informative without overwhelming.

You can attach sounds and even text files to your graphics files. You can also create slide shows of images to give to other people on a CD. Your slide show can have images with transition, titles, music or narration. You can attach a sound file to any graphics file, one you have or one you record. The wizard-type interface that creates the slide show asks for input and creates it. Again, make sure to save it to its own folder since it makes copies of all the graphics, audio and other supplemental files to the destination folder. As you go through the process, it tells you exactly how much disk space will be used. This is not small, because each folder must store not only the slide show, but also the associated graphic and sound files. Effects are added if you like, but you don’t have control of which effects. They are all so cool that it doesn’t much matter.

You can create an html web page of thumbnails to display on any web browser. You open an album, click on Image/Make web album and the program walks you through it just like the slide show. You give the page a name, choose which images you want on it, decide the size, layout, background, and what information you want displayed with each image, file name, size, date, etc. Then it asks where you want it stored. When you publish it to a web site, the thumbnails are displayed on the page. When a thumbnail is clicked, it displays with whatever viewer is on an individual’s computer. This is the only part I don’t like; I want more control over how the images are seen. Perhaps it can be done another way, I haven’t experimented with this yet. Again, much storage space is required since you must save the html file, the image files and the thumbnails.

The most exciting feature I found was one I didn’t need at all. You can create video postcards with audio, video, images and text. This was a mountain of fun. I’d visited relatives and taken short videos of them with a digital camera. These are saved onto disk as mpegs. I used some of the mpegs to let Media Browser create a video postcard for each member of the family. Each consisted of an illustrated border offered by the software, one of the mpegs and a text message. The Image menu contains a command to “Make Video Post Card.” It then offers about six background templates to choose from in each of seven categories: Art, Fun, Greetings, Holidays, Romance, Scenes, and Sports.

The video will appear in a part of the template, for instance, there’s a picture of TVs floating in a skyscape and the video will appear in the screen of the largest one. You must have the media Browser CD in your drive to access the templates.

You fill in the to and from and message sections on the back of the card next.

After that, you browse to select your video, with a choice of .avi, .mov, .mpg. and .mpeg. Last, you choose how to save your video postcard. It gives you the option of saving to disk or writing to a CD, if you have a CD-Recorder. The option to create a directory is important because the video is always called video.avi or video.mpg according to the video format and the postcard itself is always called VideoPostcard.exe. Therefore, if you don’t save a postcard to its own directory, it will overwrite any previous postcard.

What I did was write it to a CD. I created a separate folder on the CD for each video with the name of the person who would view it. Each folder contained a postcard and its 2 associated files (the video and the template). The recipients just had to pop the CD into their computer, go to their own folders, double click the exe files and the postcards played. Be warned, the files are big, each postcard, depending on the size of the video, can run about 3 MB. This is why there’s no option to save it to a floppy; it simply won’t fit. As far as I was concerned, the video postcard feature was worth the price of the software. But there is more.

One last perk is that it comes with a promotion for 10 MB of additional free space on a web site at http://www.PhotoIsland.com. This site allows you to join free, load photos to your own private album, personalize it and allow your friends and family to view it. You can use this site even if you don’t have MediaBrowser.

Now I’m going to make a confession. I have created a number of albums with Media Browser 2000 and have never saved any. Remember I mentioned how many folders of graphics I have? Well, over the last seven years, I have carefully saved and categorized these. I really had no need to create albums to categorize. If I were just starting out, then this would be a useful tool to help me save and categorize, because a graphics saved in one album could be accessed using the keywords that can be stored with the file. At this point for me, to go back to each file and save keywords would be overwhelming, but I still see it as useful for those just starting their graphics collections. So why do I create and cruelly abandon all those albums? I do it for expedience. Let’s say I want a picture of a fish. I can go to my fish folder and open each one and look for the particular species and pose I want, but that’s time consuming. With Media Browser I just create a new album, add to it all the files from my fish folder and it creates and shows me their thumbnails. From these, I choose the file I want and then I can open it to work with it. You can print thumbnail albums in different sizes with frames and borders supplied by the software and your own descriptions. This is helpful if you want a hard copy of certain files you use often.

System requirements are Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0; VGA monitor w/16 bit color or better; CD-ROM drive to install and load templates; 30 MB hard drive space; 486 PC based Pentium or better; at least 8 MB RAM (16 MB is recommended); mouse. The program supports BMP, TIF, JPG, GIF, PCD, PCX, TGA, FlashPix, AVI, WAV and MPEG formats. It recognizes TWAIN compliant devices which means, for instance, that you can scan right into the program. It also supports CD-Recorder or CD-Rewriteable drives; ArcSoft Zipshop and other video capture devices; Video for Windows compliant devices; and sound cards.

The only disappointment for me was that the program doesn’t offer instant opening of graphics files from Windows Explorer. If you assign it to open files of any graphic type, clicking on a file of that type will open the whole Media Browser program which takes too long for me. It’s a good program to browse through a whole folder of pictures, but if there’s just one you want to open, there are shareware programs that will do it much more quickly. One such program is called PolyView, which you can find on the Web.

That one disappointment aside, Media Browser 2000 from ArcSoft is user-friendly with diverse and practical functions, and has not crashed on me, which means to me that it knows how to manage resources.

Media Browser 2000 is priced at $29.99 at ArcSoft’s web site. ArcSoft is located at 

46601 Fremont Blvd.
Fremont, CA
Web address: <arcsoft.com/mainproducts.html>
Direct sales e-mail:  [directsales@arcsoft.com]
phone: 800/762-8657.