China DOS Union

When multimedia is mentioned, many people think of Windows, and it was indeed the appearance of Windows that drove the large-scale popularization of multimedia PCs. However, multimedia is not Windows’ exclusive domain; other operating systems also have very powerful multimedia capabilities, such as DOS, which people think has relatively “weak” multimedia functions.
There is a lot of multimedia software under DOS. Besides the very familiar SEA and so on, in recent years, with the development of multimedia technology, DOS multimedia software, especially foreign DOS multimedia software, has also increased noticeably. For example, there are nearly 20 kinds of players for the MP3 music format alone, not to mention the others. These new DOS multimedia programs have very good playback results and support a wide range of formats. Details can be seen in the “Multimedia under DOS” section of this site’s “DOS Usage” column.
Among so many programs, I think QuickView Pro is a very outstanding one. It can not only play music in formats such as MP3 and WAV, but also view images in many formats, such as JPG, GIF, BMP, TGA, PCX, and so on. It can even play multiple media formats, such as MPG, MOV, AVI, FLC/FLI, DivX, etc., as well as VCD. It also supports playlists and loop playback, and can display long file names (for example, they can be displayed in the DOS window of Win9x. If you want to display long file names under pure DOS, you can use a long file name driver under DOS, such as DOSLFN; its latest version can be downloaded in the forum). Its playback quality is also very good; the sound quality can completely compare with WinAmp, and it is still being updated continuously. It supports both command line and graphical interface modes, so everyone can choose the method they like according to their own preferences. Below I will talk about its specific usage.
First, let’s talk about its graphical interface mode. After starting its main interface with the QV command, you can see a file manager, which contains a list of all files and folders in the current folder. Press Enter on a folder to enter that folder. If you want to switch drives, you can press Alt+D; at this point it will show a drive list, and entering the corresponding drive letter will take you there. After entering the appropriate path, you can select one or more files in the interface to play. Among these files, those displayed in white indicate files that QV can play, while the yellow ones cannot. For example, pressing Enter directly on a file can play one file; if you first use the spacebar to select multiple files and then press Enter, you can play multiple files. If you want random playback, press Alt+S. During playback, you can also perform various controls, such as pressing the spacebar to pause playback, and pressing any other key to continue; pressing the left and right cursor keys can fast-forward/rewind; pressing Enter or TAB plays the next file, pressing Backspace plays the previous file, ESC cancels playback, +/- adjusts the volume, and so on. In the main interface or during playback, you can press Alt+X at any time to exit QuickView. If you want to set or view system information or file information, press F2 and F3 respectively, of which F3 will display detailed information for all supported media files. For graphics files, you can also set their display resolution, that is, enter + or - in the main interface to choose between “auto select”/“300*240”/“600*480”/“800*600”/“1024*768”/“1280/1024”; the selected result is displayed at the top of the screen. You can also set many QuickView options, such as full-screen playback, number of display colors, 50-line interface mode, and so on; press Alt+O to enter its options menu. If you want to use these settings permanently, you can save them.
Then I will introduce how to use its command line mode. Its basic command line operation is: QV . You can use the /? option to view all its command line parameters. Its operation is very simple. For example, using the QV *.MP3 command can play all MP3 songs in the current folder, or QV /@SONGS.M3U will play all files specified by the playlist file SONGS.M3U. It can play files of various formats mixed together, such as QV *.*, meaning that if media files in multiple formats exist at the same time (such as MP3, WAV, as well as JPG, AVI, and other files), they will all be played in order. Using its /RANDOM option can enable random playback. When playing from the command line, the keys from the graphical mode can also all be used, such as Enter or TAB to play the next file, ESC to cancel playback, Alt+X to exit QV, and so on. When you want to watch VCD or CD-i, you only need to enter the QV /VCD command. See, isn’t it very convenient and practical?
One very prominent advantage of QuickView is that it is small in size and fast. For example, its version 2.43 is only 180K, less than 1/50 the size of ACDSEE under Windows, and it only needs the single file QV.EXE to run. Its latest version is version 2.51, which was just released in February this year, and it is still under continuous development. You can go to its website http://www.multimediaware.com/qv and have a look. To make it easier for everyone to use, I also specially registered-cracked and Chinese-localized its versions 2.42 and 2.46, both of which can be downloaded in “Media Software”. In addition, in order to take care of lower-configuration computers (such as 386, 486, etc.), its author has also kept a download for QuickView’s real-mode version 1.03b. The biggest feature of its real-mode version is that it is even smaller and faster. Although it is only a little over 50K, its functions are already very powerful. Most formats supported by its protected-mode version, such as WAV, BMP, GIF, AVI, FL?, and so on, are all supported by it. Moreover, it not only supports producing sound through a sound card, but also supports producing sound through the speaker, so that lower-configuration computers without sound cards can also produce sound.
In short, QuickView is a very powerful, convenient, and practical multimedia software tool under DOS. Everyone may as well use it; this can also encourage its author to continue developing this excellent DOS software.

So long, my eyes hurt from reading it. When I have money I’ll buy an LCD

Replying to show support

Great, very easy to use, but it doesn’t support Chinese display, which is a bit of a pity. After entering Chinese mode (such as UCDOS), listening to songs is still OK, but as soon as I view pictures it crashes.

QV supports full Chinese display! At least on several of my computers, viewing Chinese with QV has no problem.

Can qv adjust the volume? I always feel the sound is too low

Of course QV can adjust the volume. During playback, use the + and - keys to increase/decrease the volume respectively.

I want to write a simple multimedia player myself in c.
Moderator, can you provide a rough idea? Also, how should the hardware port issues for the display, speakers, and so on be handled?
Requesting an answer, thanks

There is quite a bit of related source code online; you can go look for it.

Does qv not support onboard sound cards? Why is there no sound?
It says there is no sound card. How can this be solved?

It supports AC97 sound cards, but you need to load the AC97 sound card driver first.

How to load it? Under dos?
The sound card driver is installed under windows. Does it need to be loaded again under dos?
How do I load it? Can you explain in more detail? Thanks!

Load it in config with the device command; refer to the boot disk configuration file

Hehe, I’m very newbie. Could you be more specific?

It depends on your driver type. Some with an exe suffix can be executed directly.
This forum has posts specifically about installing ac97 sound cards. Take a detailed look....

QV is excellent. I have an old notebook (Toshiba 530CDT, Pentium 166MMX). Playing mpg files in win98 gives poor results. Using QV2.51 under dos gives much better results.