Methodox Foundation

Methodox Foundation (MethodoxFoundation.exe) plays video and audio and shows pictures. It is built to start quickly, in about a quarter of a second, so it is a good program to make the default for your media and photographs: a double-click opens the file at once.

It comes with Methodox Office, beside the other applications, and the Start Centre opens video and audio in it. It also has an installer of its own, for using it without the rest of the suite (see Installing).

Video and audio

A video or a sound opens with its timeline and transport controls, and plays. Its picture can be adjusted as it plays, in the Effects panel.

Pictures

A picture opens as a picture, without a timeline. It fits the window, never enlarged past its own size. The wheel zooms around the pointer, and the hand shows that a zoomed picture can be dragged. A double-click zooms to 100%, its real pixels, where you click, and another fits it again; +, −, 0 (fit) and 1 (100%) do the same from the keyboard, and the arrow keys move a zoomed picture. The zoom in the bar below opens a field to type a zoom into, with steps from 25% to 1600%. A picture can be rotated and mirrored, and while it fits, the arrow keys, Space and Page Up/Page Down step to the next or previous picture in the same folder.

The grid button beside rotate chooses how a picture is drawn:

Scaling: Auto (the default) smooths a reduced picture, copies pixels exactly at 100%, and from 300% draws each pixel as a square to inspect; Nearest, Bilinear, Trilinear and Bicubic fix one way.
Pixel grid (G) draws lines between pixels once a picture is zoomed in far enough to see them, from 400%.
Background (B), for a picture with transparent parts: a Checkerboard that moves with the picture, or the window's Dark, or Light.

Foundation remembers these choices.

The Effects panel adjusts a picture's brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, gamma and sharpness as you watch. Reset puts them back. The file itself is not changed.

An animated GIF, APNG or WebP plays like a short video.

Foundation reads the common formats, PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and TIFF, and also a phone's HEIC and AVIF photographs, camera raw files, Photoshop and GIMP documents, OpenRaster, OpenEXR and HDR images, JPEG 2000, DDS, SVG, ICO and TGA.

Very large pictures

A picture too big to hold in memory is read as it loads rather than refused. A PNG of 131,072 × 65,536 pixels, for example, shows at once as a reduced picture that fills in from the top, with a chip saying how far it is reduced and how much has been read. Zooming in shows the real pixels of the part on screen, a fraction of a second after you stop.

This works for PNG (an interlaced one shows a rough whole picture at once, then fills in), TIFF and BigTIFF (a pyramid's reduced copies are used for the overview), JPEG including progressive, Photoshop's PSD and PSB, and BMP. A picture beyond what Foundation can hold in a form it cannot read in pieces, such as a JPEG 2000, a TIFF in a compression Foundation does not read, or a Photoshop document saved without its merged picture, is reported as too large to show and why, never as damaged.

Settings

Foundation keeps its settings in %APPDATA%\Methodox Foundation and saves screenshots in Pictures\Methodox Foundation. On its first start it copies the settings of VideoFoundation's player, if there are any, and leaves the originals where they were.