It's been a while since last released version of Video Enhancer. We've accumulated a lot of feature requests from our users and also came up with our own ideas, so it took quite a lot of time to implement it all. Now version 1.9.4 is finally out and here's the list changes worth mentioning:

• YV12 mode for super resolution. All previous versions worked in RGB32 colorspace where each pixel is represented with three numbers: reg, green and blue. However many modern video codecs work with video in YUV colorspace where luminosity (lightness) and chrominance (color tone) are stored separately. YV12 is one of YUV modes. In YV12 chrominance data has twice lower resolution and for each 4 (2x2) pixels there are 4 distinct luminance values but just single color tone value (made of 2 bytes), so 6 bytes encode 4 pixels, i.e. 12 bits per pixel, hence the name. Applying super resolution to YV12 video means much less work to do. Also, RGB super resolution internally calculated approximate luminance for all pixels - it was used for motion search. In YV12 we already have this data, so that step is just eliminated. Now when VE sees that source video can be decoded to YV12 and super resolution is the first (or the only) filter in the sequence, it then applies YV12 variant of SR which works almost twice faster than RGB version. However VirtualDub filters work in RGB32, so if SR is applied after some VD filter, RGB variant of SR is used. In Options window you can disable this behavior and force using RGB in all situations.
• Scene change detection (less artifacts), mentioned in earlier blog post.
• Higher overall SR quality and speed, thanks to new in-frame upsizing method.
• More precise control on SR quality/speed trade-off (4 modes and a slider to choose between quality and speed).
• Unicode, multilanguage support, easy to add translations (just add a text file).
• Can work with lower than normal priority - doesn't slow down other applications even with 100% CPU load.
• Fixed conflict with nVidia drivers that caused problems in Vista and Windows 7 when Aero was turned on (only on nVidia cards).
• Now you can easily save and load projects (sequences of filters with all their settings). Just right click the filters box in Advanced mode.
• Some minor changes (like drag'n'dropping files to main window) and bugfixes (e.g. placing output files in same folder in batch mode).
• Better Win7 compatibility: doesn't try to write to Program Files, uses proper directories instead for storing its data (like list of filters).

tags: video_enhancer