Virtual Dub 1.51 Updated

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Posted on Monday 10th of March, 2003 at 02:50 by SirQUK
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When you said you wanted free software, you should have specified you wanted bug-free software".

I wouldn't have released 1.5.1 nearly this quickly if it weren't for the glaring bugs in the 1.5.0 release. The biggest one, the random crash in the menu bar, is system-specific. I actually put 1.5.0 through a short beta test period since I knew the heavy refactoring I had done broke a lot of code; surprisingly, even though the testers did a great job and found a number of bad glitches that I fixed before release, none of them noticed the menu bug. I can't even reproduce it on the general version, but it did appear on the P4 version when I actually used the mouse to control the program. Stupid stack-sensitive bugs. The glitches in the capture module were due to some in-progress conversion of filename handling to Unicode -- a couple of subsystems in 1.5.0 are capable of accepting Unicode filenames under Windows NT/2000/XP, and this will grow with time. The simple truth is that QA is labor intensive, nondeterministic, and boring. Which is basically why most projects, commercial or not, don't do enough of it before shipping 1.0. Asymptotic version numbering schemes are a popular remedy.

On the good side, I received ~100 crash traces for 1.5.0. Which means that, in spite of the crash context additions I made to the source code, I escaped the cardinal embarrassment of shipping a crash handler that crashes.

Build 15654 (Version 1.5.1): [February 22, 2003]

Features added

Improved audio filter dialog.
Added "split" and "mix" audio filters.
Capture mode: Added menu item to launch Windows Volume Control in Recording mode.
Save Segmented AVI now attempts to cut before keyframes when the video mode is set to "direct copy."

Bug fixes

"Change so durations match" frame rate option was using microsecond periods as frame rates.
Fixed random crash when selecting menu option with no video file loaded.
Fixed broken free space gauge in capture mode.
Fixed trashed filenames when attempting to set capture file.
Save Segmented AVI was using one digit instead of two for the segment number.
Video capture without an audio device now works.
Audio compression dialog no longer shows incompatible compression formats when it first appears.
Added workaround for "shutdown when finished" job control option to work under Windows 98.
Assignments to string variables now work in scripts.