Honken 1.0.006 
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Honken is a media player, with pretty much the same functionality as Windows Media Player or iTunes, but without most of the chrome and advanced features in these applications, making Honken an easier and faster light-weight tool for viewing and listening to digital content. Honken is not designed to "make it easy for you to discover, download, organize, and play your digital media—from music to video, pictures, and recorded TV". Honken is designed to do just what a media player is supposed to – playing media files. Honken is truly freeware, no registration or purchase necessary. Disk and memory footprint is about 100 kB, compared to the impressive 24 MB of Windows Media Player 11.
This is what the program looks like (localized version). All controls should be self-explanatory.
Playlists and formats
Honken uses no hidden system files, a.k.a. "playlists". The fact is that Honken does not use play list files at all. The reason behind this is that the operating system already has wonderful feature for organizing your files, namely folders. Using the Play directory on the File menu, you can play your albums, favourites or whatever in the selected folder. The files are played in alphabetical order. User a numbering prefix to play the files in the same order as on the album. The files are displayed in a toolbarish window to the right of the application window if you press F5 to open it.
What formats you can play in Honken depends on the installed DirectShow splitters/codecs. Generally, if you can play a format in Windows Media Player, you can also play it in Honken. Use Types on the Tools menu to select the extensions that should open i Honken. The format list is hard-coded. Use Tools->Folder Options in Explorer to assign more file types to Honken. You have to have DirectX installed to play files in Honken. Click here for more information on to download and install DirectX.
Some formats, such as QuickTime and RealAudio, have codecs that have no native support för DirectShow. To play these formats in Honken you need to install a DirectShow splitter. Splitters for these formats are provided free of charge at Free Codecs. Check for "QuickTime Alternative" and "Real Alternative" under Tools to the left.
Two options in the Options dialog box may need some explanation.The option One Instance Limit means that another instance of Honken should/should not open when you double-click a Honken-associated file in Windows Explorer. The option Play Subfolders tells the application to include subfolders when you are using File->Play Folder. If the checkbox is unselected, Honken will only play the files in the selected folder.
Installation
There is no installation program. This is a design decision.
The entire application consists of one file. Download the zip file and install Honken by extracting the zip file to a location of your choice, such as
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Esaro/Honken
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Esaro.Honken.Media
Download
Download (honken.zip, version 1.0.006, 52.1 kB zip, Win32)
History
| 1.0.001 | 2005-03-30 | Released |
| 1.0.002 | 2005-09-09 | Screen saver disabled when playing clip. Player returns to first clip after finishing directory. Window size retained between clips and sessions. |
| 1.0.003 | 2005-10-17 | Added play list, changed color of background window, some smaller fixes. |
| 1.0.004 | 2005-10-31 | Fixed resizing and splitter issues. Added resizer bitmap to status bar. |
| 1.0.005 | 2006-01-03 | Clip just stops when finished playing (if no more clips in playlist) instead of being reloaded. |
Source code available on demand. Write a nice mail to astham{@}esaro{.}se.
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