v6 Stable! This brings all of the improvements cooking in the v6 Beta release.
This version upgrades to .NET 5.0, which is a complete platform overhaul. This means many things, good and bad:
- We're on the latest version of .NET, which means better performance.
- We had to throw out or find replacements for many libraries. I was not able to find an adequate color picker, so you need to type in a 6-digit hex code instead. You should be able to pick a color through a different tool like Paint.NET.
- Enabled pre-compilation with ReadyToRun, which should improve the launch time.
- The Microsoft Store package refused to build with .NET 5, so it is being retired. Portable and Installer are now the way to go!
- The portable version now includes a self-contained runtime, so now it's truly portable and can run even on systems without any .NET runtime installed.
The minimum version of Windows supported is now Windows 10. Windows 7/8 are now "run at your own risk."
- Added video compare feature. This allows you to quickly switch between the original and encoded videos to evaluate your encoding quality. Right click on a completed item and select "Compare against original". This works on any encode that starts at the beginning of the video, so you can lower the end range to compare smaller test encodes.
- Added ability to edit audio and subtitle track names from the main window. Also updated to automatically preserve audio and subtitle track names from the source video.
- Core engine
- Added Chroma smooth and Colorspace filters.
- Added additional options for deblock filter.
- Added 10 and 12 bit video encoders.
- Added ability to automatically pause encoding when battery or disk space is low. (Global Options -> Process)
- Removed the requirement to set a default output folder. The user's Videos folder is now selected by default.
- VidCoder is now single-instanced, due to better support of simultaneous encodes. Launching again will activate the current instance rather than create a new one. This prevents getting into a bad state when minimizing to the system tray.
- Look and feel
- The app has a fresh new icon, thanks to ArtexJay.
- Changed window title bars to use custom UI. This gives Dark mode a more cohesive look.
- Updated checkbox and radio template buttons to look better in Dark mode.
- Added marker to main window to tell if the current output path is being automatically set by the picker or has been manually overridden. When in manual mode, the marker can be clicked to revert to automatic naming. When in automatic mode, clicking it will open the Picker destination settings.
- Simultaneous encodes
- Increased simultaneous job maximum to 8.
- Implemented limits for hardware use. 3 for NVEnc, 3 for VCE, 1 for MF, dynamic based on core count for QSV, and 1 per DVD/Blu-ray drive source. These apply on top of the globally configured maximum and make sure the encodes do not error out or slow down from overloading the hardware.
- Picker improvements
- Added the ability to automatically include .srt, .ssa or .ass files with the same name as the source video.
- Removed output file location settings from Global config and moved all of them to the Picker. Output location is specified in only one place now.
- Added word break settings for cleaning up source titles.
- Added shortcut buttons to go to audio and subtitle picker options.
- Changed "Foreign Audio Search" to "Foreign audio scan" and added an option in the Picker to separately include it alongside other selection rules for normal subtitles.
- Changed audio and subtitle selection mode radio buttons to a more compact drop down.
- Added option to ignore files below a certain minimum size when batch queueing.
- Added option to pass through video metadata like director, release date and actors.
- Moved Rotate filter to before the crop/scale filter. This means that output sizes/cropping are applied after rotation.
- Added ability to reflect deinterlace/detelecine/grayscale in picture preview.
- Added cropping, output size, audio tracks and subtitle tracks as optional queue columns.
- Added option to retry failed jobs. Global Options -> Advanced -> Number of encode retries.
- Made CPU throttling and process priority options changes apply to currently encoding jobs.
- When increasing Max simultaneous encodes, new jobs will be started right away.
- Added new "Recycle" option for "Delete source files when clearing completed items". With this mode, there will be no confirmation dialog, but the source videos will automatically be sent to the Recycle Bin.
- Added an option in Global Options -> Advanced to control the order that's used for drag/drop queued files.
- When adding an item that's already in the queue, it will prompt to replace the queued job, rather than overwrite with an additional job at the end.
- Changed in-progress file names from .mp4.part to .part.mp4 to allow attempts to play partial encodes.
- Greatly improved batch scan speed by re-using the worker process.
- Binaries are now digitally signed, which should eliminate warning dialogs when installing recently released versions.
- Added Arabic translation.
- Many bug fixes.