Preferences - General

 

Misc

Enable Cooperative Multithreading (Pro Edition only) is quite a useful feature. It allows you to do different tasks at the same time. For example while a FFL file or a folder with plugins is being scanned in one pane, you can do something else in the other pane or load a filter into the FF Editor. There haven't been any complications yet, but if you should encounter problems it would be safer to deactivate this feature. Please notice that not all commands support cooperative multithreading to avoid potential problems.

PiCo uses the Select Folder dialog for selecting a destination folder for some commands. If the Suppress the Select Folder Dialog check box is activated, PiCo won't prompt you for a folder and automatically use the folder of the passive pane.

PiCo supports writing FFL 1.1 files. However, older pre 1.0 versions of PiCo only know the FFL 1.0 format. So if you want to distribute a FFL file, please activate the Write FFL 1.0 Files check box for compatibility reasons (Pro Edition only). FFL 1.1 files are smaller than FFL 1.0 files and PiCo can process them faster.

PiCo automatically optimizes the filter code of Filter Factory plugins. If you want to suppress this feature, activate the No FF Code Optimization check box.

Load all components on startup will load all necessary components when starting Plugin Commander. This will slow down the startup process, but avoids waiting later. If you often use Plugin Commander to do some conversion or plugin management, you should deactivate this option. But if you use the image and preview features very often, you should activate this check box.


Preview Cache (Pro Edition only)

This feature is enabled by default. Every time a preview is calculated for 8bf plugins, the preview image is saved as a JPG file into the cache sub folder of the PiCo folder. If the same plugin is previewed again, the cached image is displayed instead of recalculating the preview. This feature can speed up the display of plugin effects tremendously, especially in the Browser dialog.

The Clear Cache button erases all cached preview images and frees some hard drive space. The JPG Compression slider lets you adjust the compression of the cached images. A compression ratio of 15% is set as default. A larger value results in less used hard drive space, but worse image quality.


Associate File Types with PiCo

Pressing the Set Associations button will associate the selected file extensions with Plugin Commander. This means that every time you double click a file with one of these file extensions, PiCo will be started.

 

For the other tab sheets see

Preferences - FF/TF
Preferences - Interface
Preferences - Folders, Images, Apps
Preferences - Plugin Types

 


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