Using the Windows GUI version


The Windows version with the graphical user interface is the one most of you will use. It tries to bring some comfort into working with SFV files “at home” at a still high level of performance. Compared to prior releases of pdSFV you will notice some major changes in the interface, mostly getting rid of some unnecessary graphics. 

To start pdSFV, simply run pdsfv.exe . You can create an icon for that on your desktop if you want. If you figure out that you like pdSFV and would like to use it permanently as your SFV tool of choice, you can associate .sfv file extension with pdSFV. To do so, run pdsfv with the /reg command line parameter: 


pdsfv.exe /reg



You only need to do this once. pdSFV will tell you that it successfully registered itself with .sfv files. If you don’t know how to run a program with a command line parameter (doh!), you can use the associate.bat batchfile to do this job.

After doing so there are two ways to start pdSFV: either run it by starting pdsfv.exe (or clicking on your desktop icon, or whatever), or double-clicking on any SFV file e.g. in your Windows Explorer (you also can select the “perform SFV check” option in the popup menu you get when using the right mouse button). 


If you run it by double-clicking on a SFV file, you’ll first see a window popping up displaying the contents of the SFV file. As you can see SFV files are plain ASCII files with not too much content – the viewer is mainly intended to let you have a quick glance at the SFV file even if you don’t want a complete check performed. This is useful if you download a SFV file only from a FTP site e.g. to count how many files are listed in it so you figure out how much you have to download. The SFV file viewer gives you the choice between quitting (in case you only wanted to have a look at the SFV file) and performing a full-scale SFV check on all files listed in there – this is your option when you already have downloaded the release and want to check it right now – we’ll get into that a little bit later.



If you start pdsfv the regular way you’ll see a screen with version information etc. On the bottom of the screen you can choose your action: create a sfv file, check a whole release, or check individual files. Click onto the action you want to perform. Each of the action screens has a help section on the left which should guide you through the process. After some time you should get used to it.

Clicking on the minimize-icon in the upper right will minimize pdSFV to the traybar, this is the small area where your Windows clock sits. Click on the mini - pdSFV icon there to restore pdSFV’s screen. You can exit pdSFV by clicking on the “close” symbol on the upper right of the window, right next to the minimize symbol. You should know these two from standard Windows applications yet :) 


Basically, creating a SFV file takes the following steps: first choose a name for your SFV file. You either can enter one in the text field or click on the button to browse through your directories. Then specify the name of your banner file / group logo, if you have one. The logo will be added as comment to the SFV file. If you don’t have one, simply leave this field blank. Now there are two options, the first one is whether to include size & time stamps of the files to SFV file. It is enabled by default in spite of the fact this information is pretty useless and often gets lost when distributed via FTP sites. How this information can be used is described in the developer section of this documentation, if you don’t know whether you need it, just leave the option turned on. The second option is backward compatibility to WIN-SFV. It is turned off by default because we consider it unnecessary nowadays, only turn it on if you really need to, since it unnecessarily implies restrictions to the SFV file format. Then you can add the files you want to be listed in the SFV file to the list of files to be processed. This can be done by browsing through the directories and add either whole directories or single files by double-clicking on them. Please notice that you should only add files part of a RAR archive or MP3 files to your SFV files. Adding files like .NFO, .ZIP, .JPG there is pretty stupid because FTP sites do not perform SFV checks on these files, so just leave them out. Once you’re done, click on the “create now” button and watch the progress. That’s it :)



Checking a whole release is the easiest operation. All you have to do is to select a SFV file and click on the “check now” button. It will crc-check all files listed in the SFV file you picked and tell you about each file whether it is good, bad, or missing. Bad means you have a file on your hard disk but its CRC doesn’t match with the one listed in the SFV file. Missing means there is a file listed in the SFV which isn’t there on your hard disk. Probably you have forgotten to download it or the release was incomplete on the site you downloaded it from. There is a second status window in which only bad and missing files will be listed. This should make it even easier for you to overlook the situation and figure out which files you still have to (re-)download. 


Checking individual files takes slightly more time to set up but it is faster if you don’t want to check a whole release but only files you e.g. re-downloaded because an old version was bad. First select the SFV file you want to use. Then add the files you want to be checked to the list of files to be processed the same way as in SFV creation mode. Finally, click on the “check now” button and only the files you selected will be CRC-checked. The output will tell you which of them are good and which are (still) bad.