A film in Desktop Minder is meant to do two things: be watched, and be edited. Watching works. A film plays the moment you open it, picks up where you stopped last time, and will step one exact frame at a time, backwards or forwards. Editing is designed down to the names on the menus, and the first of its eight stages—the exact frames everything else stands on—is built. The rest is waiting its turn.

Where It Stands

Watching

A Film

Double-click a film and it plays, right there in the middle of the screen, because opening a film is the request to watch it. Its tab says Watch. Under the picture is the usual transport bar—a rail to move through the film, the time, the buttons to skip and play, subtitles, volume and full screen—and the arrow keys skip five seconds either way. MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV and WMV files open this way; anything else goes to whatever Windows would have used.

The playing is done by LibVLC, the engine inside VLC, but inside Desktop Minder: double-clicking a film no longer means waiting for another program to draw itself before you see a frame. Starting a film quiets anything else that was playing, the Jukebox included. A film's tile is its first frame, set in a strip of film with sprocket holes. And select a film without opening it, and the Viewer panel on the right shows it, ready to play when you are.

One Exact Frame at a Time

If ffmpeg is installed, two more buttons appear: Back one frame and Forward one frame. Pause, press one, and you get the next or previous frame—not roughly; exactly—and Play carries on from there.

That is harder than it sounds. VLC, which does the playing, is right about frames on a phone's own footage and unreliable in general, and the MP4s the editor will make are exactly the case it gets wrong. So the frames come from ffmpeg instead, chosen by the film's own clock rather than by seconds rounded off to a decimal. On test films of every kind—MPEG-TS, MKV, MP4, and one whose frame rate wanders—it was right thirty-one times out of thirty-one, and it was right on my phone's own footage too. The first jump to a new place can take a second or two; after that, steps are instant, because the next stretch is fetched before you get there. Phone footage is turned the right way up, and DVD pixels are made square. The one exception is a film showing subtitles: when it pauses it keeps VLC's own picture, so that the words stay on the screen.

While an exact frame is on show, the clock reads like 2:13,23: the twenty-third frame to begin during the second marked 2:13. Frames are counted, not worked out from the frame rate, because a phone's footage is variable-rate; one second may hold 29 frames and the next 31. Right-click the frame for Copy Image, then To Clipboard or To File.... Either way you get the film's full-size frame, the right way up, not the copy on the screen, and a file is offered a name like Storm surf [1080p] 2m13s,23.

Picking Up Where You Left Off

Close a film halfway and open it next week, and it starts five seconds before where you stopped, to pick up the sentence that was being said. That's true even if the program crashed in the meantime. Less than a minute in counts as a look, not a watch, and isn't remembered. And a film counts as finished once you're into its last five minutes, because nobody stays for the credits—but never more than its last tenth, or a twenty-minute episode would be finished at the quarter-hour.

The memory is kept in the film's own tags, so it goes wherever the film goes. While the film plays, a running note in the folder's settings file is brought up to date every ten seconds, and that is what survives a crash; when the film is closed, the note goes into the tags. (AVI and WMV files can't hold such tags, so for them the note in the folder is the record.) Folder listings can show Last watched and Resume at columns, which sort as they should. Mark as Watched and Mark as Unwatched set them by hand, for any number of films at once. And Hide Watched Videos, on a folder's View menu, leaves only what you haven't finished.

Names and Formats

Normalize Filename... reads a film's title, year and resolution out of the kind of name films tend to arrive with—Bros 2022 1080p 10bit WEBRip 6CH x265 HEVC-PSA—and shows you what it found beside a frame of the film. You correct it, add the genre or the director if you like, and press Rename: the tags are written and the file is renamed, to Green Mile, The (1999) [1080p].mkv if you like your articles at the end. Convert... makes a copy in another format. It's a dialog rather than a plain command, because there's no such thing as a plain conversion of a film: the reason is nearly always the subtitles.

A film has tags, as a track does—Edit Tags, Copy Tags and Paste Tags are on its menu—and the Properties panel shows them: title, director, series and episode, year, genre, length, and when it was last watched. A music video kept in an album's folder is treated as one of the album's tracks: it's numbered and named from the matching recording, and Convert to FLAC (audio only) keeps just its sound.

Editing

The Video Is the Document

An app-centric editor—Premiere, OpenShot—is a program you go into. You open a "project," work on it, and at the end you "export" a film: a second, separate thing you then have to go and find. The film is a by-product of the program.

Here it will be the other way around. You'll make a video from a folder's New menu, the way you make a text file. You arrange it. You put it down. Its film is brought up to date by itself, quietly, in the background, the way a sheet of paper is up to date when you put it down. There is no Export step, because there is nothing to export: the film is simply what the video looks like.

Behind the scenes, a video is a folder. In it are links to the footage you've brought in (or copies, if you asked for them), a small file of instructions saying which stretch of which footage goes where, on which layer, to the exact frame, and the finished film. A split changes the instructions, never the footage, so nothing you shot is ever cut up. The film is remade only when the instructions have changed, off to one side, and swapped in when it's ready.

What the First Version Will Do

A video will have two tabs, Watch and Edit. Edit shows the picture large, with the frame buttons and the transport, above a stack of layers from Top to Bottom, each a lane of pictures over a lane of sound. Footage dropped on a layer lands where you drop it, snapped into place—several files dropped together go end to end—and is divided into its scenes as it lands: hard cuts split it, dissolves don't, a fade through black splits in the middle of the black. Then you double-click near the playhead to Split. There's no scissors tool and no mode; I preferred the double-click. Delete leaves a gap and Close Up closes it; Join puts two pieces back together; you drag pieces along their lane, and drag their edges to trim them. Everything you do on the layers can be undone, back to when you opened the video, and there's a list of what has been done.

The words were chosen with care: a layer, never a track; Split, never Cut; New, never Add. And a lot was left out on purpose: titles, transitions and effects, still pictures on a layer, a video inside another video, picture-in-picture, volume for each piece. All of those come after the first version, which starts where an editor has to start—with the first, most basic thing it can do, which is split.

Eight Stages

The editor is being built in eight stages, riskiest first, each one leaving Desktop Minder working, tested and better than before:

1. Exact frames for every film. Done, 27 September 2026.
2. The video's model: the instructions, and the one rule that turns them into a film.
3. Folders that open as videos, and New > Video.
4. One history of changes, shared by the picture editor and the video editor.
5. Properties that can be edited, in the Properties panel.
6. The Edit tab itself.
7. Making the film by itself, in the background, when the video is put down.
8. Finding the scenes.

Each stage is planned in detail only when the one before it is done, so stage 2 is the next to be written down.

Putting Things Together

Today, nothing can be dropped onto an open film; try, and it says so. A frame comes out by way of Copy Image: paste it into a folder and it becomes a picture file there, or save it straight to a file. The film itself drags anywhere a file can.

The editor is where video starts taking things in. Footage and sound dropped on its layers—from the video's own assets, from a pane or a folder, or from File Explorer—land where you drop them, snapped into place; and a plain drop on the assets links a file rather than copying it, so a big piece of footage isn't stored twice. Still pictures and other videos come later; until then, one dropped on a layer is refused with a tip that says so. Text should go onto a video too, as a title over it; but titles are among the things deliberately left until after the first version, so for now that one is an intention rather than a design. Going the other way, a frame is a picture, so one day the picture editor will be able to work on a frame, or a whole scene, without needing a new idea.

Progress

• By 26 September 2026—Films play in the View and in the Viewer.
• 26 September—The editor is designed, section by section, and its building laid out in eight stages. A test pits VLC against ffmpeg for exact frames, and ffmpeg wins.
• 27 September—Stage 1 is done: exact frame stepping, in the View and in the Viewer.
• 28 September—The frame clock, and Copy Image.
• By 1 October, when the project's detailed history begins—Films can be renamed tidily and converted, too.
• 1 October—One thing sounds at a time. That evening, in a single sitting: films remember where you stopped, when you last watched them and whether you finished; Last watched and Resume at columns; Mark as Watched; Hide Watched Videos.
• 4 October—The running note moves into the folder's Desktop.dmini.