The VB6 source code will be released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), in my understanding this means that anyone can use phreplace and even include the library in a greater works (e.g. PSPad), however if they modify the code it must be released under a similar open source library, in order that everyone will benefit from the changes.

The source code is available at Assembla, feel free to send any code changes to me to be included in the project.

Architecture

I rewrote phreplace in early 2009 when I was studying design patterns and as such the VB6 source code is heavily object-oriented and pattern focused. VB6 is not strictly an oo language but it does support inheritance through the ‘Implements’ keyword.

phreplace uses the iterator, observer and factory methods. I found some of the sample chapters of Visual Basic design patterns: VB 6.0 and VB.NET By James William Cooper on Google Books a very useful resource.

This early class architecture diagram (PDF) may help decipher some of the code design.

Future Direction

phreplace was designed to be application agnostic, it currently works only with PSPad but I hoped that by implementing only a few interfaces (IHostAdapter, IDocument and IDocumentCollection) it could work with any other editor that supported the basic operations required. My next intended editor to support was SciTE.

The first major change that I would like to see is support for Vista / Windows 7. At present the phreplace.vbs script intialises the application by checking to see if the phreplace.dll library is registered, if it isn’t it tries to register it with regsvr32. This works for Windows XP but standard users aren’t able to register libraries in Vista / Windows 7. So far I have come up with 3 solutions.

1. Override DllRegisterServer using vbAdvance. I can’t get this library to work. See Registering phreplace DLL in Windows Vista.
2. Create a separate utility similar to regsvr32 and include this with phreplace. I think this is messy. Again see Registering phreplace DLL in Windows Vista.
3. Use the Registration-Free COM solution of adding a manifest file for PSPad which references the phreplace.dll library so that we don’t have to register it in the registry at all. This solution works for XP, see the reg-free-com branch of the source code, but doesn’t seem to work for Vista. My theory is that perhaps Vista handles vbscript differently, so it doesn’t inherit the PSPad manifest. If someone could get this working I think this is the most elegant solution.

I look forward to seeing user contributions to this project.

Moving data off the PVR

If you want to use your recordings on devices other than your Toppy, you’re going to need to get the recordings off it. Fortunately this is the simplest step. For me there were really two options:

1. Use the provided USB link from the Toppy and the official ALTAIR software to download the recordings. For one or two recording this will be fine, although for me it took around 4 hours for a normal sized movie.
2. Attach the hard drive to your computer use TopfHD Read-Write to copy the recordings over to your PC hard drive.
   WARNING! To do this you will need to open your Topfield up to remove the hard drive, in doing so you will void your warrenty. I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless your Toppy is out of warrenty anyway.
   You need to use the TopfHD application to transfer files because Windows won’t recognise the file format of the Toppy hard drive. Be very careful not let Windows modify the disk in any way.
   Transferring about 8 recorded shows and 4 movies took under 30 mins, this takes longer to set up but is well worth it if you’re trying to move a bit of data.

Watching / Converting the Recordings

Once you’ve got the recordings on your PC they will be in Topfield’s .rec format, which Windows Media nor Quicktime can recognise. My traditional way of converting these files for buring to a DVD went;

1. Use ProjectX to convert to m2v file
2. Use TMPGEnc DVD Author to convert to DVD format
3. Use Nero to burn to DVD.

If you just want to watch them on your computer I’ve got some great news which took me a while to realise: the .rec files can be played directly by the ever useful VLC Media Player.

If you want to convert them to another format, VLC can help you there too. Use the Media > Convert / Save option to convert it into many different formats. Supposedly it can convert to H264 / mp4 format  compatible with iPods, however I had real problems with this, the video would be distorted or the audio would be way out of sync. So, after playing around for a while, I thought I give it a go converting directly form Handbrake which I do most of my iPod video conversions with… and this works great!

In summary,

To convert to DVD: Probably still use ProjectX > TMPGEnc DVD Author > DVD.

To convert to iPod: Use Handbrake.

To watch or convert to other media formats: Use VLC Media Player.

Hope this is useful.

• Handling an exception that occurs in the vbscript Regex object when using a badly formed regular expression (e.g. reader.(\w)+\(reader.GetOrdinal\(“(\w)+”)); – note I forgot to escape the last parenthesis).
• Added Write to Log option (which defaults to off) to write some debugging log events to a ‘phreplace.log’ file in the same folder as the ‘phreplace.dll’ library. This should help identify the issue for a user where the latest version of phreplace just doesn’t open (no error – no nothing).
• Not a change but rather a note: Tried to understand the vbscript Regex object’s handling of ‘.’. Apparently it matches a new line (\n) but not a carriage return (\r) which is why doing a replace all with ^(.+)$  was acting  strange, try this instead ^([^\r\n]+)$.

The docs include information on getting support, troubleshooting and version history.

When I was younger and more ambitious I thought phdesign would quickly become a global web design company and by now I’d be reclining in a large leather chair, behind a strong hardwood desk in a high rise building with floor to ceiling windows, organising the next board meeting, just as soon as I could dedicate some time to doing more projects. 5 years have passed since I started phdesign and my portfolio has only seen a few websites built, mainly for family and friends, and an add-on to a freeware text editor.

My expectations have changed a lot and I hope to reflect that in the new website design. I am well suited to a steady income, working a normal week and being able to enjoy my spare time, not on the computer. I want phdesign to be my sandbox for working on projects for fun, not for money, and I want it to provide an opportunity to share what I learn.

I hope this site will provide value to developers like myself while giving me an outlet for my design and development as the mood takes me.