Improve Usability

[Frotty]

Hi, the tool is nice and now extracts everything I need, but the usability leaves much to be desired.

Most annoying things:

• When specifying an output folder that doesn't exist, perform a check at the start and offer to create the folder instead of throwing an error on every extraction-attempt and having to wait till the file is completely processed.
• Change the default output to something like ./extracted . Having the source folder spammed with thousands of <1kb files by accident can be annoying
• Have a default value for minimum file size (e.g. >1kb for non-text). I think you rarely are looking for very small files and valid images/sounds are rarely that small. Having no minimum just tends to extract tons of useless files. Of course you can set it to 0 via option. I just think the default values should provide a more out-of-the-box experience.
• Ask the user for formats and output dir when no arguments were provided.

Mostly IMHO, but 1. would be very useful.

[panzi]

1. Good idea (checking if the folder exists). But you don't have to wait for the process to end. Just press Ctrl+C to terminate it just like any other process.
2. I don't know. I usually go to the target directory in the shell and then call mediaextract /path/to/archive.
3. This should only happen if you use one of the formats that have those issues (mpg123, mpegts and mod). These formats are not in the default set of extracted formats anyway.
4. I don't want any interactive behavior. I want it to be usable in scripts like basic tools just as tar, gzip etc.

[Frotty]

2 . This doesn't work in windows unless you add the mediaextract bin to the path environment variable.

-> which is why i paste the archives into the mediaextract folder

[panzi]

Well, you can specify the full path of mediaextract.exe. But yes, that's cumbersome. Back when I used Windows I used cygwin and xterm, because the Windows command promt is just horrible. Anyway, Windows users might want to write a Visual Basic GUI wrapper or something. I don't use Windows. I cross compile the Windows binary on Linux.

[panzi]

Lacking for a better option (or a GUI) you can write a helper .bat script that contains all the options you want and then it should be possible to drop an archive on that, I guess (not using Windows so its all from many years old memory):

@echo off
call C:\Users\Frotty\mediaextract.exe -o C:\Users\Frotty\outdir %1
echo press enter to exit
pause

Not sure if there needs to be some quoting for when the path of the archive contains spaces.