The Yearly Slowdown – 2018 UHD Remaster

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Fredrik Mellbin

It’s that time of the year again. Expect huge slowdowns in development.

Snail!

R43 – Cleaning up the remaining mess from R41

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Fredrik Mellbin

R41 changed quite a few things internally and that created regressions. New zimg branch, added alpha support and a pile of changes behind the scenes in the python module caused problems. The release fixes several zimg bugs, a vspipe hang on error, vsscript functions not being threadsafe and a few more things.

Possibly (un)breaking changes:

get_output() in python only returns a tuple when alpha is set, this more or less restores the previous behavior

R42(+.1) – Less Regressions

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Fredrik Mellbin

This release fixes a VSScript regression when setting variables that would make players like mpv fail in R41. Go upgrade!

Another crash bug managed to sneak into the optimized transpose so one more regression fixed now. (the +.1 update)

R41 – Less Leaking

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Fredrik Mellbin

This is basically a bugfix release that tries to take care of as many known issues as possible. Especially memory leaks have been hunted down this time and as a result a lot of the cython code was changed to be less likely to create circular references.

The second half of the work was making alpha handling less bad. It’s now possible to pass a second alpha clip to set_output() in scripts and vspipe will output it. Unfortunately y4m can’t be combined with alpha and no other output method currently preserves the alpha but at least some workflows with alpha should be a simpler now.

Breaking changes:

IMWRI now requires Q16 or Q32 ImageMagick 7 with HDRI enabled
The imwri namespace is now always imwri since a single version can handle all formats
And basically everything else in IMWRI

IMWRI – Making it suck less

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Fredrik Mellbin

I’ve mentioned that I hate ImageMagick before. I still hate it but finally took the time to update AND test it for ImageMagick 7. As a result it’s now a mostly usable image source or at least should be. There are only a few remaining quirks which will probably exist for all time. Like being able to figure out if a source file is floating point for any remotely relevant format apart from TIFF. But enough about that, all 8-31 bit images will be assumed to be integer and all 32 bit images will be assumed to be float. Unless it’s in TIFF in which case it will all just magickally work.

Binaries and discussion are in this thread.

Seal holding its breath to avoid the smell of ImageMagick

Insane Avisynth Compatibility

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Fredrik Mellbin

The person with the pretentious name created an interesting Avisynth compatibility solution. It allows you to easily pass clips to and from 32 bit Avisynth from 64 bit VapourSynth under Windows. So now there’s no excuse to not switch to VapourSynth, it’s more compatible than 64 bit Avisynth!

R40 – Avisynth+ Compatibility and Fixes

Posted on November 10, 2017 by Fredrik Mellbin

R40 has been released. It mostly just fixes small issues like a stupid gamma bug introduced in Levels in the previous version. There’s also a change to how the memory pool is handled on windows which should make it scale better when using high resolutions (like 8k material high) and many threads. Instead of previously being fixed at 100MB it’s set to 10% of the max cache size.

Possibly breaking changes:

AVISource now doesn’t output alpha by default (however alpha was never well supported or tested to begin with)
Avisynth compatbility no longer has the special workarounds needed for MVTools to work

That’s all for now. Go encode something…

R39 – Fixing Bugs and Undoing Bad Ideas

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Fredrik Mellbin

R39 is finally done after far too long. It has the optimizations and bug fixes and nothing really interesting beyond that. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to start experimenting with bigger changes soon…

Release highlights

Optimized Sobel, Prewitt and Levels
Added float support to BoxBlur
Added swapN and dupN operators to Expr
AVX-512 support (as in proper memory alignment when AVX-512 is preset, no actual optimizations)
Fixed a pile of value range clamping issues for 9-15 output in internal filters

Breaking changes

Sobel and Prewitt functions had their min and max arguments removed since they’re just a bad idea inherited from MaskTools.
Reverted the horrible per plane argument system in Levels to the way it previously worked. Fortunately nobody seemed to even notice this change.
Now uses Nasm instead of Yasm in the build system.
CropRel is now simply know as Crop since that’s the crop function most people usually want anyway. CropRel is still kept as an alias for compatibility.

New Test Build Posted (R39)

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Fredrik Mellbin

Development has continued and I’ve started posting test builds for R39. You can find it in the doom9 thread as usual. It should be RC quality but there are still a few small additional improvements I want to make before it’s released.

R38 – BoxBlur is Best Blur

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Fredrik Mellbin

This release is mostly kind of a bug fix with minor enhancements as well. Nothing exciting but the restrictions of several filters were re-examined and relaxed a bit to match what the actual code can handle. As a result Transpose doesn’t care about subsampling anymore, horizontal and vertical convolutions have a larger element limit and AverageFrames can average over even more frames. Not very exciting at all for most people.

The other part is the addition of a box blur filter. The main attraction is that it can be used to approximate large radius Gaussian blurs very quickly. Or simply a large area average.

This release dragged on for far too long.