Please do not use pre-release builds in production! For production use, always use the latest stable release.

Another week, another beta release! This weeks update brings much needed optimizations to StreamFX, and some additional fixes as always. Let's delve into the details:

Performance Improvements

All filters and sources have received massive performance optimizations, which should help you reach your higher resolution or framerate goal - or maybe even both! Dual-Filtering Blur also now works as expected and outperforms Gaussian and Box blur in almost all cases. In testing with every single filter applied to a 2560x1440 source and all sources, rendering time dropped from 34.1815ms to 31.1205ms - almost 10% lower! This should allow anyone to enjoy using StreamFX, and have a drastic performance impact in integrated GPUs or weaker GPUs.

Fixes for FFmpeg NVENC

The "Adaptive I-Frames" and "Adaptive B-Frames" options should now actually work again, thanks to cs9kc for reporting this. The behavior before now was that these options weren't even applied properly, resulting in streams and recordings looking worse than they should. Expect to see a slight quality improvement if you have both enabled after installing the new Beta!

Mip-mapping Rework

The mip-mapping option in 3D Transform has been reworked and should now be much more efficient at the task, but has lost some of its features - of which many weren't even implemented. This should allow you to check the mip-mapping option on every 3D Transform filter without noticing a dent in render times - but realisticly you only need it for sources where there is a lot of pixel-to-pixel variation.

Fixed Linux

And as a final fix, Linux users should now be able to use the plugin again! The missing symbols should now be properly linked into the binary and there should be no issues loading the plugin. Functionality is a different thing and if you find any crashes or bugs, please report them via the new entry in the Tools menu! Just click on "Tools", then "StreamFX", then "Report a Bug or Crash".

Changelog

0.8.0b3

• Fixed Linux being unable to load the plugin due to a missing Qt symbol.
• Fixed vertex buffers not being initialized to 0, causing some effects to not render.
• Fixed mip-mapping causing Browser Sources to render corrupted.
• Fixed Dual-Filtering Blur causing excessive GPU usage due to miscalculated render target sizes, which also fixes Dual-Filtering looking weird.
• Fixed the "Adaptive I-Frames" option being inverted in the NVENC FFmpeg Encoders.
• Fixed that "Adaptive B-Frames" is not actually being applied in the NVENC FFmpeg Encoders.
• Improved the performance of various rendering steps by using a single fullscreen tri instead of a quad (See #199). The effects should be immediately noticable with mip-mapping and some of the Blur effects.
• Added optional performance profiling which by default is not compiled in. Developers can choose to build StreamFX with it if they wish to check for possible optimizations.
• Removed any currently broken shader examples.

0.8.0b2

• (Hotfix 2) Actually fixed Shaders losing the ability to render transparency.
• (Hotfix 1) Fixed Shaders losing the ability to render transparency.
• Updated the StreamFX logo.
• Updated translations from Crowdin again.
• Updated help strings for Dynamic Mask and Blur.
• Fixed the 'drunk.effect' example shader and added even worse options to it.
• Fixed Shaders rendering larger or smaller than the specified size.
• Fixed Shaders rendering once for each time they are drawn per tick instead of only once per tick.
• Fixed Direct3D11 evicting important textures before encoders had a chance to work with them in high GPU usage situations.
• Fixed "Look Ahead", "Adaptive I-Frames" and "Adaptive B-Frames" not being applied as expected.
• Improved the performance of the Nvidia Face Tracking filter massively by moving almost all of it into worker threads.
• Added a default path to the Shader file selection dialog.
• Added various ShaderToy shaders (shadertoy-#####.effect) and a new semiline.effect which was used for the StreamFX logo.
• Added an entry into the OBS Studio tools menu which links to important things such as where to get help and where to report bugs.
• Added an "About StreamFX" window to thank all supporters, translators and contributors. This window opens once automatically when a new version of the plugin is installed, and otherwise is accessible via Tools -> StreamFX -> About StreamFX.

0.8.0b1

• Updated translations from Crowdin, huge thanks to everyone submitting translations!
• Fixed FFmpeg Encoders not respecting user selected color formats and instead always using YUV 4:2:0. (#136)
• Fixed FFmpeg ProRes not correctly overriding color formats with the ones supported by the selected profile. (#136, 140)
• Fixed a lot of code issues by actually jumping ship to modern C++.
• Fixed some sources not tagging the settings object with the current version, making migrating settings problematic.
• Removed the lib prefix from the StreamFX.so files on Linux. Make sure you delete the old version of the plugin first if you're using Linux!

0.8.0a4

• Updated support for libOBS v25.0.3 and newer.
• Added support for Ubuntu 18.04 and 19.10, take a look at the platform parity wiki page to see what is missing.
• Fixed potential memory corruption caused by FFmpeg Encoders.
• Fixed a regression introduced in 0.7.2 which causes 3D Transforms to suddenly invert. (#116)
• Added Custom Shader Filters, Sources and Transitions - and also added extra examples for them.
• Added Nvidia Face Tracking filter which will be available at a later point in time.
• Updated translations from Crowdin, many thanks to all the volunteer translators!

0.8.0a3

• Updated support for libOBS v25.0.1 and newer.
• Fixed 3D Transform causing discoloration in transparent sources. (#104)
• Fixed audio jitters caused by audio mirroring in Source Mirror happening out of order. (#111)
• Fixed a common freeze new to libOBS v25 caused by Source Mirror.
• Fixed audio mirroring only working every second configuration update in Source Mirror.

0.8.0a2

• Added FFmpeg Encoders which expose various encoders available in FFmpeg to you with a neat, easy to use UI (if you can read tooltips). You will find them available under either Streaming or Recording, depending on the codec you want to encode. This integration is slightly different from the one in obs-ffmpeg-encoder, so the two plugins will clash and you should remove obs-ffmpeg-encoder ahead of time using its uninstaller entry.
• Improved Custom Shaders further, however these are still very experimental. Expect these to crash, corrupt or otherwise eat your setup in unexpected ways, and also expect these to change wildly.
• Improved Audio Mirroring in Source Mirror by relying on a global thread pool instead of a thread per source, drastically reducing the total CPU load in massive setups.
• Removed scaling from Source Mirror which was mostly broken anyway, so please use any of the available filters instead.
• Fixed a possible crash in multi-core systems caused by event callbacks.
• Fixed various crashes and corruptions caused by Source Mirror, Dynamic Mask and Blur.

0.8.0a1

• Important: The plugin was renamed to StreamFX, users that manually installed this plugin (or manually built it) must ensure that the old obs-stream-effects files are removed before installing the new version.
• Deprecated 32-Bit versions of the plugin. You don't have an excuse to be on 32-bit anymore, hardware has gotten dirt cheap thanks to AMD Ryzen. You can get a barebone modern PC for around 260 €, or upgrade your existing one for around 140 €.
• Added additional options for Tint control to Color Grade, allowing fine tuning of what is Shadow, Midtone and Highlight.
• Added GPU debug markers to most of the code which allow GPU debuggers like NVIDIA Nsight to show the exact time taken for each effect step.
• Added a new example shader: Plasma. This effect simulates old school plasma effects and showcases some of the features of Custom Shaders.
• Added a temporary workaround for a bug in OBS Studio to ensure that StreamFX does not crash or corrupt OBS Studio's memory. A fix to OBS Studio has already been submitted and is waiting on Review.
• Updated translations from Crowdin: de-DE, es-Es, fr-FR, it-IT, ja-JP, nl-NL, pl-PL, ru-RU, sv-SE, zh-CN. Much thanks to all the contributors on Crowdin!
• Improved Custom Shader Sources by adding support for automated file reloading, dynamic parameter updates, and various UI improvements.
• Improved stability drastically by gracefully handling all unexpected exceptions and refactoring a lot of code.
• Improved performance drastically by no longer always caching sources and ensuring that some code hotspots don't duplicate heap data on call.
• Moved all examples from data/ to data/examples/.
• Fixed a few crashes caused by the Graphics Subsystem Wrapper (GSW).
• Fixed a freeze with Source Mirror when retrieving the size of a mirrored Source.
• Fixed rescaling size in Source Mirror when "Use Original Size for Transform" is active.
• Fixed filters messing with source sizes when they shouldn't be.
• Fixed a freeze caused by Directional Gaussian Blur (#83, #85).
• Removed Custom Shader Filters temporarily, they will return later.
• Removed AppVeyor Continuous Integration in favor of GitHub Actions. You can now download bleeding edge builds from here by clicking on the commit, then clicking on Artifacts, and then selecting either windows-2016 (Windows 7) or windows-2019 (Windows 10 or up to date Windows 7).