any video players with excellent search features ?

[vhelp]

hi all.

as the titles says.. i'm looking for a good sw/hw player that has excellent search features but is simple to operate and is not some resource hogging application. also would like to know if hardware is searchflexible as above or is better to htcp (sw media/player) app.

how fast do videos load up and start playing or are there lag times ?
do they present complicated menu systems to navigate ?
easy search keypads/keyboards ?
multiple multi-playing preview video menu system, ie, 1 video, 3 videos, 6 videos, ... ?

i was considering making my own. just bare-bones searchable player. i already have a basic search for files. i could add a directshow player window and custom grid to hold searched files. and maybe add a random favorites everyday. but i would like to see what and how others are doing it all.

thanks for any input.

[jagabo]

xbmc? Windows Media Center?

[vhelp]

i'm trying to stay away from suites or apps that have to be installed (registry updates) as much as possible.

i have mpc-be and mpc-hc. and when playing .ts files (hdpvr captures) both take around 30 seconds to finally show. i suspect that some of these suites will have that same problem. however, in one of my own custom players, the .ts files playback instantly.

also, what i'm really interested in is the search features. a screen shot of them, actually.

[jagabo]

i have mpc-be and mpc-hc. and when playing .ts files (hdpvr captures) both take around 30 seconds to finally show.

MPCHC starts playing TS files immediately for me. Less than a second.

[SpectateSwamp]

If the video clips are short then they can start play very quickly. Most of my videos are 2 or 3 minutes long so they pop up and play fast.

The app plays from a USB stick as well. Sometimes the DVD play will have a little delay, but not the USB segments.

[hello_hello]

i have mpc-be and mpc-hc. and when playing .ts files (hdpvr captures) both take around 30 seconds to finally show. i suspect that some of these suites will have that same problem. however, in one of my own custom players, the .ts files playback instantly.

Try remuxing one of those ts file with ts muxer to see if it then opens straight away. Or remux it as an MKV with MKVMergeGUI.
I don't understand the technical reasons exactly, but when the x264 encoder is outputting an MKV file (as opposed to raw video) the resulting file can take a while to open. Once it's remuxed with MKVMergeGUI it opens instantly. It's something to do with the original MKV not having an index (or something like that) so when you open it, MPC-HC creates one and therefore takes a while to open the file. Your ts files may be the same. Other players (I think VLC is one) just opens the file, but it means they can't seek accurately (based on duration).

MPC-BE will probably display "buffering" in the status bar while opening one of those files (if I'm correct). MPC-HC used to, but the newer version, which uses LAV filters internally, no longer seems to display the "buffering" message so it just appears to be slow to open some files.

[jagabo]

Try using a different TS reader/splitter. And/or a different h.264 decoder. Some combinations have that problem, others don't.