March of the millions

[taner]

Jo.
I‘m going to organize a march of the millions towards the FFAStrans headquarter.
Chanting 1.4, 1.4, 1.4
Any hint which direction we have to take?
North?
West?
South?
East?

[emcodem]

West because it's where Benjamin (@momocampo) lives. There are rumours that he is the one responsible for all delays (generally)

[taner]

Hehehehe

[momocampo]

What cowardice Emcodem !!
Ok so i say East cause this is the direction where lives Emcodem and it is because of him that there is delay because he never stops adding new features And it's not rumours but facts

[FranceBB]

towards the FFAStrans headquarter.

Wait, we have an headquarter?! I wanna see it!
I thought it was just Grandmaster's basement! hahahahaha

Ok, back to serious mode.

I understand why people may wanna see 1.4.0 being released, but believe me, we're really not there yet.
The first thing that should be noted is that each release "isn't just a number", but it has a particular meaning.
If we take a look at the naming convention x.y.z (like 1.4.0) stands for "major", "feature", "bugfix".
In other words, if 1.3.0 was a feature release of the "1" series, then 1.3.1 was a bugfix release of the feature release 3.
It should be noted that we only really bump the "y" number when we're confident enough that we have enough features and that everything is stable.
This means that the development process doesn't follow a linear pattern; for instance, did you know that the development of 1.4.0 actually began after the development of 1.3.0 but BEFORE the development of 1.3.1?
This means that while the "master" repository is always updated with the latest and greatest features (it is, indeed, master), there are branches dedicated to bug fixes which make up the individual subversions.

That being said, as pretty much everyone is aware, 1.3.1 was released in the first part of 2023, but look at the date of the commits/pull requests we worked on for 1.4.0 ehehehehehehe

Screenshot from 2023-07-01 14-57-07.png (20.89 KiB) Viewed 5627 times

Screenshot from 2023-07-01 14-58-13.png (8.9 KiB) Viewed 5627 times

Screenshot from 2023-07-01 14-59-06.png (52.59 KiB) Viewed 5627 times

Screenshot from 2023-07-01 14-59-47.png (49.23 KiB) Viewed 5627 times

As you can see, commits/pull requests to 1.4.0 have been undergoing since 2022 and the development is indeed a slow meticulous process.
The whole team, Grandmaster, emcodem, Benjamin, Thomas and I is working on this and we're trying our best, but we're not there yet.
We have a few builds of 1.4.0 which have been compiled from master and I'll show you some very early screenshots for fun in the next few days, but keep in mind that those are what I call "development snapshot", so they don't represent by any stretch of meaning what the final release will be like and things might drastically change in the meantime.
Currently, 1.4.0 involved a massive redesign of the filter_builder.au3 (courtesy of a massive work done by Grandmaster Steinar) among other things and we're currently on the way of testing it out, especially in how it behaves with the current Avisynth frame properties etc.
Other changes are like ProRes XQ support in the ProRes encoder along standard writing library metadata so that you're no longer limited to Lavc (as some official Apple decoders were picky about it, but obviously we kept Lavc too for backwards compatibility), RF64 support for PCM muxed in .wav larger than 4 GB so that they're now properly muxed, improved support for images decoding (sometimes the A/V decoder would otherwise cause a loop leading to memory leak when BlanckClip() was wrongly set to length=0), high bit depth support for the A/V decoder for video and high audio sampling support for audio, IMF packages decoding support by reading the CPL, DolbyE & DolbyED2 decoding support, new options to control range and GOP in the generic MPEG encoder, new things in the REST API and plenty plenty plenty more stuff in general.

Every time we add something new, though, we gotta make sure we don't break anything and although the task of testing new functionalities and regressions might appear easily doable, believe me, it's a mammoth task.
Luckily we have test books and routine tests we can use for regressions (emcodem did a great job automatizing those for a series of meaningful tests), however we still have to spend a lot of time checking that everything is fine and even when we do that, the combinations in which users can do things is almost infinite, so we might miss something (which is why there are always bug fix releases after a while, 'cause it's you guys, the community, who actually uses it in many different ways and provides valuable feedback, far more valuable than any automatic test we might be doing on our own).


The TL;DR at this point is: yes, we're working on 1.4.0, but don't hold your breath on it 'cause it's a mammoth task.

[momocampo]

thought it was just Grandmaster's basement!

You're wrong dear Franck, the Grandmaster"s headquarter is more of an attic than a basement, I have already seen it
For everything else, you are absolutely right.

[FranceBB]

Grandmaster"s headquarter is more of an attic than a basement, I have already seen it

Lucky!
One day I'll also make my trip to see the northern lights and I'll stop by to say "hi" to Steinar...
although realistically I'm broke, so that day won't really come anytime soon

[admin]

Hi Taner, I'm really happy that you are anticipating the arrival of 1.4. It is a pretty huge upgrade in many ways. Huge upgrades take longer time, at least when there are several important part of the core that has been modified. However, I would like to shed some more light about another reason for the delay. Last year I got a severe back problem which in effect prevents me from spending too much time in front of my computer. And with me being the main developper, FFAStrans will naturally suffer from this. If it was not for this health related issue we would probably be much closer now to a release. At the same time, you can rest assured that we are now limiting addition of new big features and mainly concentrating about getting what we have already done so far right and thus closing the release. In the mean time, just report any bug you encounter in the current version. It's also likely that we might release 1.3.1.1 before 1.4.

-steinar

[taner]

Hi Steinar,

I‘m sorry to hear that you had health problems.
And i really appreciate the endless efforts of you guys.
I really do.
And one get really quick and professional help in the forum.

Concerning 1.3.1.1.
Can I send you a workflow of mine?
It takes FFAStrans several minutes to load it after double clicking.
It has a lot of nodes and variables.
Apart from that the visual display of the grid and nodes left and/or right get sometimes distored.
Maybe that could be something which can be optimized in one of the upcoming releases?

Best
Taner

[admin]

Yeah, just send the workflow and we will take a look at it

-steinar