New AppImages for December 2023 to January 2024 now available with quite a number of small updates and 4 updated libraries. Special thanks again to Andrew, Andrea, and Terje for much work with the code and the manual. Hopefully, I did not forget to put all the changes into the release notes. ************ December/January Release Notes update ****************** *Andrew R’s contributions:* Library x265 has been updated from 3.5 to snapshot of 17122023, with the name of 3.517122023. Libaom has been updated from version 3.4.0 to 3.8.0. This new version requires cmake to be at least at version 3.7.2 (compiled correctly on 32-bit Debian 9.1 with this cmake version). However, Ubuntu 16 only has included cmake at version 3.5.1 so anyone doing their own builds will need to update cmake or add “--enable-libaom=no” to the configure step and not compile libaom. Updated libsndfile from 1.0.28 to 1.2.2. Libsndfile is a C library for reading and writing files containing sampled sound through one standard library interface. MAXCHANNELS is no longer limited to 6 and will allow for up to 32 in most cases. New useful addition of codec sar/dar and container sar/dar to ffmpeg asset info in the Resources Media detailed window when available. Fixes for Free BSD version 14 build to include moved from python 38 to python39, switch up to ffmpeg 6 from ffmpeg4, and correct build for OpenEXR. Patches for ./blds/netbsd.bld to change to ffmpeg v6. Bluray creation, specifically the bdcreate.C file, now includes additional creation options for 16x9 videos. A small display for non-standard progressive options has been fixed. Add 32000 and 44100 khz sampling frequencies to pcm-dvd encoder and to mjpegtools/mplex. Additional audio render formats for mp2 and dvd_pcm have been added. The location of HiLo/LoHi settings is now consistent between info, requester, and encoder to make it less confusing. Limit number of OpenCV modules built for the 6 obj plugins since that is currently all that is used. Local Vorbis render format parameters fixed to allow for modified values. Add ffmpeg raw dv profiles just for testing purposes. Update versioninfo.h for the new year of 2024. Add internal documentation about ratio of the new canvas size (W, H) to the old previous canvas size as well as a Note for the user to see in the Format window. Set sample aspect ratio for encoded ffmpeg stream (except in some cases so not to impact dvd/bluray). DV fix to handle 16x9 to avoid floating point rounding errors. DV improvement to add date and timecode when encode rawdv. Remove unused define from filedv header file. *Discovery, Testing, and Mods by Andrea, Terje, and AndrewR* Libstvav1 is now added as a buildable option at version 1.8.0 but requires cmake 3.16 (although 3.12 seems to works). On the build configure line, add “enable-libsvtav1”. SVT-AV1 is an encoder adopted by AOMedia as the basis for future development of AV1 and scales fairly well across many CPU cores. New render formats created by Andrea and Andrew are now available to use SVT – svt_av1.webm and svt_av1.mkv. When using the X11 graphics driver, Color3way, Histogram, and Videoscope and rgba-float color model now allow you to display greater than 0 – 1.0f values to accommodate HDR. So there is no clipping. See the Manual for details in those 3 sections. New render formats of av1_vaapi.webm by Andrea, as well as image creations for hdr.hdr and wbmp.wbmp are now available. These will require specific hardware and software to be usable on your computer. Add missing includes as discovered by Andrea of <array> and <fstream> for the newest distros such as the rolling-release Arch in AppImage build tools. Modified the bld.sh script to include comments for specific builds on the configure line.