Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
I agree, great program, best results out there in most categories (e.g. when deinterlacing video).
However, portability is a complete disaster (there are many components that need to be installed).
Upgrading this program is a real pain in the ass !
On 2016-04-19, I tried upgrading from version 1.3.2 to 1.3.4 (seems minor) - it was a total mess.
The program is very complicated by it's nature,
partly because it depends on so many additional components,
not just the ones included in the App sub-folder,
but also on installed parts of Your operating system [Visual C++ redistributable, Java].
In addition, the Stax Rip developers are changing their settings all the time,
making it harder to transfer the settings You customized (& this can take hours) to the next version.
As a result, upgrading Stax Rip will cause the following :
- You will loose at least a half of Your customized settings [toolbar & menu cutsomization, templates],
& I am not in the mood to spend hours working on settings again,
- You will be prompted to install (!) newer versions of system components like
Visual C++ redistributable, Java, AviSynth.
Although in the new version 1.3.4 "what's new" lays out a huge & seemingly impressive list,
the new features seem to be mainly geared towards geeks [the encoding options dialog for x265 now has an option to display the full command line]
& the bug fixes seem to address issues that never bothered me [d2vsource added to VapourSynth, moving subtitles up and down wasn't working correctly].
So I skipped this upgrade & labelled it as an "insignificant upgrade".
The version 1.3.2 works well for me, & I will tray to avoid upgrades
unless they do something about - better portability & easier transfer of settings to the new version.
On 2017-10-25 I tried my luck again with the new version 1.7.0.0 (portable, 64-bit), with these results :
- the new version cannot start with the old settings (program crashes),
- the new version cannot start even without old settings (You get some obscure error message ... some files from D drive missing ! - no indication of what system component displeases the program).
Hence, my conclusion was :
do not upgrade !
This program is begging for a very ambitious programmer who likes a challenge, and wants to make this thing properly portable.
I tried it yesterday and the first thing it did was ask me to install AviSynth... Just to convert MKV to MP4. Pity because it has everything and the kitchen sink. Oh well, at least it made its TPFC debut.
Tried it many years ago and the UI was all over the place. Still the same today. Main reason it's worth using is it's one of the few GUIs that supports AviSynth, but for general usage other programs are easier to use (for me even ffmpeg which is CLI).
I should note that the requirements are a little high: Win7+, x64 only, dotNET 4.7, and for some encoding operations, you need a roughly 2015-or-later Intel processor (or one of a few different video cards) for some encoding tools.
The program has a one of the clearest portability notes I've ever seen up front:
StaxRip is for the most part portable, some features require certain apps to be installed, in such case StaxRip provides guidance so the user must not take great care.
Whenever StaxRip starts the first time from a new location it will ask for a settings folder location to use for this particular start-up location. You can open the current settings folder from the main menu at Tools > Folders > Settings
It’s not recommended to start StaxRip from a location without full write access so ‘C:\Program Files’ shouldn’t be used. StaxRip utilizes dozens of tools and some of this tools might require write access to their start-up directory.
This is great as I've always felt like video encoding was something portability was born to do: take your software to the fastest computer you can find and run it there without admin access.
