There’s some kind of theme to this release but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I should say it’s all about fixing past mistakes since the majority of GenericFilters got rewritten and integrated into the core. The original code quality was simply too low and there were small bugs and differences littered all over it.

Or maybe it’s about streamlining the API to have fewer odd cases to deal with. The so-called “unknown length” clips have now been deprecated and trying to return one from a filter will trigger an error. All potential uses of it can simply be replaced with one very long clip. No reason to keep unnecessary complexity around.

There’s also been a big effort put into making the frame properties mean something and for them to be used. Now most filters will automatically use the flagged field order when present, the order specified in filter arguments will only be used if no valid order is set. There’s also more color information provided so colorspace converters can automatically pick the right input format. To make this work you’ll need to update to the latest fmtconv and FFMS2 builds. The z library will probably be updated soon too.

Important Compatibility Information

The API version has been increased to 3.2 to show that unknown length clips are no longer available. This means plugins compiled against the new header won’t work with older versions.

The plugin version of GenericFilters will be removed in the next release so start changing all scripts to use the equivalent functions in the std namespace instead.