Installation and first run
Installing
Run MultiAngleVideoPlayer-Setup.exe. The defaults are right for almost everyone: just click through.
- The app installs for your user account only — no administrator password needed. (If you specifically want it available to every account on the machine, the installer offers an elevated all-users install; this needs admin rights and is rarely necessary.)
- You get a Start Menu entry, and optionally a desktop icon (a checkbox during setup).
- If the machine is missing the Windows App Runtime the installer adds it automatically; if it’s already present, that step is skipped silently.
No other software is required for normal use. Two optional features have extra requirements, both covered later: Fast Seek needs ffmpeg (chapter 11), and Fast Seek’s encoding plus smooth multi-tile playback both lean on an NVIDIA GPU (chapters 11 and 12).
Where the app keeps its data
Everything the app remembers lives in one folder:
C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\MultiAngleVideoPlayer
| File / folder | What it holds |
|---|---|
settings.json |
The app settings (chapter 14) |
tracknames.json |
The track database (chapter 10) |
mouse-mappings.json |
Your mouse button assignments (chapter 13) |
layout-settings.json |
Remembered layouts, splitter positions and window placements |
Packages\ |
Saved packages, unless you point the app somewhere else |
crash.log |
Only appears if the app ever crashes — useful to report |
On a fresh machine the installer seeds the settings and layout files with useful starting data, and the track database arrives pre-filled. Mouse configuration deliberately starts as a clean slate: no button mappings assigned and no active mouse set — you configure your own in the Mouse Buttons window (chapter 13). Upgrading or uninstalling never touches these files — anything you’ve configured survives both.
One thing to check after installing on a new machine: the PackageSavePath setting may point at a folder that existed on the machine the installer was built on (for example D:\Video Packages). If that drive doesn’t exist on your machine, set your own folder — see chapter 14.
First run
Start the app from the Start Menu. The first time you run it on a machine that has no saved settings, a short First-time setup dialog appears: it asks where to save race packages and which folder to look for videos in. Both come pre-filled with sensible defaults — accept them, or click Browse… to choose your own (a folder that doesn’t exist yet is created for you). Click Save to keep your choices, or Use defaults. You’re only asked once, and both paths stay changeable in Settings (chapter 14). If the app was installed with seeded settings it already knows a package folder, so this dialog is skipped — in that case check PackageSavePath as described above, since a seeded value can name a folder from another machine.
After that you’ll see a single empty tile and the transport bar. The app opens in Lock Mode; to load your first videos, switch to Unlock Mode first (the two buttons at the far left of the transport bar), or just use Open Package if someone has given you a saved package.
With nothing loaded, the layout area shows a single greyed “not available” symbol rather than layout buttons — there’s nothing to arrange yet. It’s replaced by the real layout buttons the moment a video loads.
The app remembers its window size and position between runs, along with the layout you used last and whether the transport bar was floating (chapter 15).
Starting with videos from the command line
For shortcuts or scripted use, the app accepts up to four video file paths as command-line arguments and loads them straight into tiles:
MultiAngleVideoPlayer.exe "C:\race\angle1.mp4" "C:\race\angle2.mp4"