Create wind track files for HTFanControl
WindTrackCreator is an application meant to help create wind tracks for the HTFanControl program.
- Open up WindTrackCreator.
- Load the movie you want to work on in your MPC-HC/BE or Kodi media player.
- Enter in the connection information for your media player.
- Seek through the movie and press the OFF, ECO, LOW, MED, and HIGH buttons (or their corresponding numpad hotkeys) to insert fan commands at that time.
- You can click the Seek button to jump to an existing fan command time.
- Don't forget to save your work when you are done.
- After you are done creating the Wind Track, proceed top creating the Audio Fingerprints.
The SpinUp and SpinDown offset numbers at the bottom are just there to help you format your command times with reasonable timing gaps. Time code lines will highlight in red if 2 commands are closer than 500ms from each other, and lines will highlight in yellow if the SpinUp time (commands following an OFF) or SpinDown time (commands before an OFF) when subtracted from the time code would put the time code closer than 500ms to the previous command.
It is recommended to not place 2 time codes closer than 500ms apart or to place SpinUp or SpinDown commands closer than their set times plus 500ms. If this happens, HTFanControl will simply round the next time code to be exactly 500ms after the previous one, so nothing too terrible will happen, just your commands won't be sent to the fans exactly when you wanted them to be.
The Wind Track file format starts with a header in which each header line start with a #. The header lines are as follows:
# Movie Title (Year)
# Disc Format (Duration)
# Offset: Disc Format (Offset time amount)
# Coded by: Username
Where Disc Format is either "HD Blu-ray" or "4K Ultra HD Blu-ray"
The # Offset: line is an optional line which can be used to specify a disc format offset so the wind track can be used with a different version of the disc.
It is sometimes the case where the HD Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray contain different "studio logo" intro screens before the actual movie starts, and this requires that all the wind track commands be offset by some positive or negative amount.
For example, if you coded your wind track for the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, and the HD Blu-ray has an extra 10.5 seconds of logos at the beginning, you would add a line to the header that looks like this:
# Offset: HD Blu-ray (00:00:10.500)
The offset amount is always relative to the disc format that the track was originally created for. To add a negative offset simply put a minus sign "-" before the first set of 00.
The easiest way to find this exact offset is to open both copies of the movie in your media player, and seek the movie to the exact the same frame (you can usually use chapter skip to accomplish this) and then subtract the time code of the frame between each disc copy.
If you don't have access to both disc versions then simply leave this line out.
The header is then followed by a blank line and then the time codes and fan speed commands which are in this format:
HH:MM:SS.MIL,CMD
HH = Hours
MM = Minutes
SS = Seconds
MIL = Milliseconds
- OFF
- ECO
- LOW
- MED
- HIGH
# Jurassic Park (1993)
# 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (02:06:28)
# Coded by: SOWK
00:09:40.915,LOW
00:09:43.374,HIGH
...
Once you are done creating the commands for your wind track, you then need to create the audio fingerprints and package them up into into a wind track .zip package.
The format for the wind track .zip package is a .zip file with the name of your movie, i.e. Movie Name (Year) and inside the .zip will be 3 files:
- commands.txt (the wind track text file)
- full.fingerprints (audio fingerprints for the full movie that was used to create the wind track)
- intro.fingerprints (audio fingerprints for the first 5 minutes of the movie)
You do not need to worry about creating this package yourself as WindTrackCreator will do it for you.
Simply open your wind track file, and click on the "Create Fingerprints" button at the bottom.
First, you need to make sure that you have FFmpeg installed (click the link on the top right of the "Audio Fingerprint Creator" window to do this)
Next, make sure you have a video file opened, a temp folder selected, and a wind track package name entered, i.e. Movie Name (Year)
Finally, click the "Create" button and wait for the process to finish.
When the process finishes successfully you will get a message popup, and your Wind Track Package file will be located in the "windtracks" folder located next to WindTrackCreator.exe
Click Here for a great guide on how to write good WindTracks, by brazen1.
I encourage you to post and share the wind track files you make with others over on the community forum. Someone there will then upload your wind track to the online database on Google Drive here.
When your wind track is uploaded to the Google Drive database, it will also become available for other users to download directly from their HTFanControl web interface.
Visit the forum thread for this project and the main HTFanControl project here.