I never mentioned the minimum requirements for VapourSynth. I completely forgot about it. It wasn’t until a poor ancient Athlon user reported crashes I remembered that I actually do have minimum requirements. So what are they? and why?

• A CPU with SSE2 support (may be disregarded if not running on an x86 CPU)
• XP SP3 or later (may be disregarded if not a windows user of course)

That’s it! Not so bloody. The rationale for only supporting XP and later mostly comes down to testing. There’s simply no one who uses older systems around to provide testing. Maybe my code will run,  maybe it won’t, but there’s no way to justify spending time testing it myself.

SSE2 on the other hand requires a bit more motivation. It’s very good to have when optimizing filters. Also, most CPUs support it today, it has reached the levels MMX support had 10 years ago or so. Every single x64 CPU must also support it. It’s everywhere.  And it’s good. For example the transpose function in VapourSynth runs a bit over 10 times faster with SSE2 optimizations.

I think that’s all I have to say about the minimum requirements. There’s always Avisynth for the few who don’t qualify.