Avisynthplus/Changelog

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AviSynth+

Contents

Changelog

5th February 2014

But I bring you now a shiny new test build, r1689, which - in contrast to the previous one - is actually usable. Probably even much better than that. So I strongly suggest everyone to give it a shot, aside that I can probably improve on the thread scheduler for some more performance, you'll have fun with it (in a good way). Just make sure you set the correct MT mode for your filters. Here is a snippet that you can start with, but please add some new filters to that list on your own too. Don't bother with built-in filters though, they're already handled internally, so you only need to add filters from external plugins.

The MT branch is now also the main branch of AviSynth+, which means all (even non-MT) improvements end up here, and it will be merged into "master" as soon as it has received enough testing. But now you might wonder what are the "other" user-visible changes compared to the stable release. Mainly:

  • innocenat has worked more on the resizers, which are now even faster and require less memory, especially (but not only) when working on planar video and you have SSE3.
  • This issue is fixed, which sometimes caused that a filter function from the wrong DLL would get used. Thanks for reporting the issue, real.finder.
  • If a plugin DLL cannot be loaded, a human-readable error from Windows is also displayed, giving the user a clue what is wrong.
  • Filters that reserve memory on construction can now share that same piece of memory between multiple instances, giving large memory savings in many cases. Most affected internal filters have been updated to make use of this capability, most by tp7. Some external filters will follow when the API is officially stable.
  • The new caching system is done, and it will result in noticeably lower memory usage than any previous "classical" AviSynth version. Give it a try, you'll be surprised how much memory it brings in complex scripts.
  • SSE2 has been a requirement for AviSynth+ by mistake, this is fixed now, and you now only need an SSE-machine.

Of course all the above is paired with a lot of rewrites, refactorings, and cleanups. And then there's MT.

2nd January 2014

This is the fourth bugfix release in the current stable series, bringing you:

  • Reduced memory consumption in resizers.
  • The fix for this crash.
  • A fix for correct detection of AVX capability.
  • A small "for"-loop change for compatibility with Gavino's original version.
  • A fix for bad alignment in the crop filter.
  • A compatiblity fix in BitBlt.
  • And a fix for a bug that resulted in autoloaded functions sometimes taking precedence over a non-autoloaded version.

Okay, so much for the bugfixes. Boring but at least useful. If you want something cool though, try out and help me test the new caching system in this experimental build. Make sure you rename the file to "avisynth.dll" if you try it out.

The experimental build is mostly the same as the just released r1576, except that it has the new caches, so if you're doing comparisons, please compare the experimental build to the r1576 release in this post. The new caches have been written from scratch with MT in mind, and although MT is not yet active in this build, the new caches will (or should) provide similar performance to the stable release, but with significantly reduced memory consumption. Let me know your experiences. The sooner I can deem the new caches "good enough", the sooner we'll see MT.

8th December 2013

A second bugfix release is available. Besides proudly wielding the version number "0.1 (r1555)", the most important changes are:

  • A fix for the autoload issue reported here.
  • A fix for TemporalSoften which potentially resulted in crash.
  • A fix for some filters not loading under specific circumstances. Discovered on WriteFileStart.
  • A fix for the "return" script statement not returning from the current function if used inside if/while/for etc.

This release is a nice opportunity for you to try out AviSynth+ if you didn't already. Unless some major issue pops up, the next release will bring larger changes.

There is a slight change in behavior in r1555, made necessary by the fix for the autoload issue. Previously, plugin autoloading started automatically if forced by the AutoloadPlugins() function, or if an unknown(=external) function was found. Beginning with this release there is also a third condition, autoloading will also happen if any LoadPlugin() is issued, and it will happen right before the LoadPlugin() is executed. This was necessary to preserve compatibility with scripts for classic AviSynth.

Note: The AutoloadPlugins() function simply forces autoloading at the point it is called. Not useful for scripts, it was meant to support editors like AvsPmod. [1]

26th November 2013

Hello folks, here is the bugfix we promised to you. Issues with the installer are hopefully fixed, and the plugin loader got two patches too for things that have been reported. This had to stay off the fix-list though, I didn't even get to look at it due time (but I have a pretty good guess what is going on). I will reach in a fix for that another day, shortly. Until then, enjoy line0's updated installer look and icons.

Oh I almost forgot, there's a zip-release too.

24th November 2013

A new release
Yes we have a new release and a cool one that brings full 64-bit functionality. But here's the semi-detailed changelog.

  • A small number of bugs that were regressions compared to classic AviSynth have been fixed. This includes a bitblt copy error, and a script evaluation error that made it necessary to explicitly give the „last“ clip as input to some rare filters. It was discovered on animate(), but it might not have been the only one. The 64-bit version also had non working versions of Amplify(DB), Normalize, and MixAudio, which should be fixed now.
  • tp7 and innocenat have finished porting all built-in filters to compiler intrinsics. This is a truly great accomplishment not only becasue it gives us a fully working 64-bit version, but the previous assembly code (which is now gone) was a large obstacle in reaching linux/osx compatibility too. We are still not cross-platform, but their work has brought us a large step closer. Not to mention it also allowed us to get rid of the SoftWire library, which brought down the binary size by 50% (though you might not see this if you compare it to UPX'd versions). I should probably also underline how much work this has been for them, they updated like 19.000 lines of code!
  • As yet another consequence of tp7's and innocenat's work, the speed of many internal filters has greatly increased, in some cases 150% or more.
  • There is now a shiny new installer. After qyot27's installer update for AviSynth+, line0 brought it another step further and has rewritten the old AviSynth installer from scratch. Compared to the old installer, you not only get a nicer graphical look, but also comprehensive migration options from classic AviSynth too, as well as unified x86/x64 support. Line0 is also working on high-res icons. This is still work in progress, but you can see preliminary results in the installer's icon.

Last but not least, we give special thanks to a random stranger* (see EDIT) who has pioneered in introducing Pig Latin translations to the software world. His work is unfortunately not yet included due to purely technical reasons, but I'm sure that many will appreciate his contribution when we finally do, especially native speakers of Pig Latin.

Homepage and IRC
Also kind of important news is that AviSynth+ now has a homepage, reachable under avs-plus.net. It is hosted by GitHub and is a bit minimalistic right now, but for sure a better landing page than GitHub's repository dump. There is also a new #avs-plus channel on Rizon for all IRC lovers, and in addition to this forum, you are welcome to influence development of AviSynth+ there too.

A few notes on the porting effort, ASM and future plans

By tp7

  1. A lot of ASM in the core was quite terrible. We actually had to remove HorizontalReduceBy2 YUY2 ISSE implementation because it was slower than the C code. There were some quite good MMX routines though (SSE2 was awful everywhere but resizers). Resizers were good.
  2. As mentioned in the first pull request, the general rule was "not slower than original on Nehalem+ CPUs". We did not test on any older CPUs. Expect performance to get a bit worse on Pentiums and I'm not sure about some memory-bound filters on Core 2. Please report if you experience a noticeable performance drop in the core filters on Core 2 level CPUs. We will not be spending a lot of time optimizing for pre-Nehalem CPUs though.
  3. All filters now have C versions so you can run them on super ancient CPUs. It will also help non-x86 platform support.
  4. All filters now have SSE2 versions. This for example means up to two times faster TemporalSoften. Some also got SSSE3 and SSE4.1 optimizations. You can find which one in the commit messages of the pull requests.
  5. There are some behavior changes: TemporalSoften mode 1 is removed, mode parameter is simply ignored. Blur MMX parameter and Tweak SSE parameter are also ignored.
  6. MMX optimization routines are dropped if there is a faster ISSE version. This affects only a few filters and some extremely old CPUs.
  7. Code from FTurn is now integrated into the core (with some additional optimizations and new RGB32 routines), making the plugin obsolete.
  8. We did not port MMX code of any audio filters. We won't do this any time soon, feel free to contribute.
  9. Resizers are implemented as VerticalResizer().Transpose().VerticalResizer().Transpose() instead of two separate routines for vertical and horizontal resizing. Some rounding differences are possible, although not noticeable. This improves performance in most test cases and simplifies implementation quite a bit.
    YUY2 resizer is also implemented as ConvertToYV16().Resize().ConvertToYUY2(). This does not affect performance in any way on the CPUs we were working on. Conversion is lossless and extremely fast.

15th October 2013

I have just updated the online repository and the binaries in the first post with a new version, compiled fresh today. There are some goodies here, so let's see:

  • First, Gavino's scripting extensions have been integrated. Be sure to say thanks to Gavino for his work again. I've only made minor modifications to his patches, like properly handling empty "if" blocks or missing optional "else" parts, and taking the "last" variable from before the new "if", "while", and "for" statements better into account. I've also added a "break" statement that will allow you to jump out of any loop without reaching the terminating condition. I've counted the votes for the "for"-style carefully, and your votes turned out equally even, so in the end I picked Gavino's original simplified style. You can still write any kind of sophisticated loop using "while".
  • I added back proper AvsPmod support, that got temporarily removed earlier 'coz of the plugin system's rewrite. Built-in functions will now work as before, but to get autoloaded functions to show up in AvsPmod will need a slight modification to AvsPmod. This is unfortunately necessary, because autoloading has to be delayed to support adding search folders in scripts. As soon as AvsPmod gets modified you'll have full functionality back again. The needed modifications won't interfere with traditional AviSynth.
  • The C interface is now probed before the 2.5 plugin interface, making ffms2 work again even if you're not using qyot27's latest build.
  • The "crop" function now defaults to aligned crop. You can still control alignment using its second parameter, but if you omit it the default is now for the new frame to be aligned. This is important for plugin authors so that they can have a stronger alignment guarantee, in the end leading to faster processing in multiple plugins.
  • And as always, there are cleanups and refactors, in an ongoing effort to make the sources higher quality. Not as many as in previous releases, but still. Of course more to come in the future.

64-bit support

There's actually one more feature item missing from the above list. The archive in the first post includes both 32-bit and 64-bit builds. All ASM from the core got replaced with C-code or intrinsics, the inline ASM in filters got sandwiched in ifdefs, and I fixed up any remaining issues that prevented the core from working correctly. But before rushing to download to run your uberscript in 64-bits, please note that no porting of the builtin filters has been done yet, making that build hardly usable. You'll find that many essential filters are missing, like resizers and color space conversions, just to name a few. So trust me, as a user you are most likely better off using the 32-bit build for now. But the 64-bit is there for the adventurous, for motivated testers and developers, and for all those who are wishing to help port the missing functionality to 64-bit. Besides, the new 64-bit build is compatible with existing 64-bit plugins found here, here and here, so you might actually be able to use the 64-bit version for something if you don't rely much on internal filters.

So, there is a working 64-bit build, though fairly gutted out. If you know some intrinsics, please consider helping out with the port, even if with only one or two routines. Even without knowledge of intrinsics or ASM, if you can rewrite some algorithms that were only available in ASM before into plain C, that would already be a lot of help. Feel free to start anywhere you like, and rest assured, I'm also continuing my work on AviSynth+.

1st October 2013

Yuhuuuu, new build, and new code on GitHub!

So, what has changed:

  • First of all, the crash-on-out-of-memory bug is hopefully fixed. Should be.
  • There is a brand new plugin-system in place, and if you work with scripts that use a lot of plugins, you should notice that they load faster.
  • You can have multiple plugin directories. Exact semantics in my next post.
  • LoadCPlugin (or Load_Stdcall_Plugin) is now a synonym for LoadPlugin. LoadPlugin will load C-plugins and LoadCPlugin will load normal plugins. They are one and the same. No difference.
  • Hence, C plugins are also autoloaded.
  • LoadVFAPIPlugin() is out of order for now. I'm not planning on removing it, I just need some info how to correct it.

Changes noteworthy for developers:

  • Invoke finally stops throwing exceptions as a "normal condition" -> better debuggability
  • VFAPI and VirtualDub filter loading are now separated into their own plugins, and are not in core any more.

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