<2021-04-10>
------------
Changed the MP2 audio encoder from MP2 to libtwolame.
Delivers better quality, needs an FFmpeg build with the
libtwolame library enabled. Win XP users need to
download and install the latest Win XP package from
this link:
https://files.videohelp.com/u/172211/manolito_s%20DVDStyler%20Plugins.zip


<2021-03-31>
------------
It turned out that my implementation of Hard Telecine
which was introduced in June 2020 was thoroughly broken.
Should be fixed now...


<2021-03-27>
------------
Tweaked the hard-coded HD bitrates slightly for better
quality. Also added the possibility to use custom HD
bitrates. Useful if the HD encoding result should be
burned on a BD blank and the bitrate must be calculated
with a bitrate calculator.


<2021-03-18>
------------
Another change for the HD High Bitrate extension. Playback
of authored High Bitrate clips was fixed by concatenating
VOB files as necessary to avoid going above the VOB limit 
of 9 VOB files per title. The size of the authored result
is not limited any longer, so now fixed HD bitrates are used
again.


<2021-03-09>
------------
Changed the High Bitrate extension for HD frame sizes. Since
DVDAuthor.exe limits the size of any conversion to about 9 GB
the plugin now sets the HD bitrate to the maximum value which 
will still work with DVDAuthor.exe.


<2020-06-17>
------------
Fixed a couple of important bugs.


<2020-06-13>
------------
Added two small fixes:
1. The plugin no longer tries to write to the DVDStyler\bin folder.
     This should avoid permission problems under Win10,
2. Added a workaround for the "Too many packets buffered for output
     stream 0:1. Conversion failed!" error. Now the plugin increases 
     the muxing queue size to the highest supported value by default. 
     I have been using this for quite some time without ever noticing
     any adverse effect, so I made it the default.


<2020-06-11>
------------
This update prevents DVDStyler from creating NTSC DVDs which do not 
comply to the DVD standard. It does so by forcing a HARD telecined 
encode for NTSC film content under these conditions:
- The frame rate is 23.976 fps
- My Soft Telecine Plugin is not installed (checks for the presence 
  of DGPulldown.exe).
- Soft Telecine is installed, but Mplex is not forced for muxing 
  (setting under DVDStyler Core settings).
- "Reencode by default for NTSC Film" is also not checked under Core 
   settings.
Of course SOFT Pulldown is preferable over HARD Pulldown, but there were 
some reports that the Soft Telecine plugin does not work under Win10. 
Since FFMpeg is unable to add pulldown flags, the only way is to use 
the "Telecine" video filter from FFmpeg, and this video filter only 
does HARD telecining.


<2020-03-15>
------------
This time I added support for DVDStyler's experimental HD converions. 
The plugin overrides the usual max bitrate limit of 9000 kbps and instead 
allows bitrates of up to 25000 kbps for Full HD target sizes.

For more details see here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/discussion/318795/thread/10066d9817/#4e0f


<2019-11-30>
------------
Background:
I never liked the way how DVDStyler treats interlaced source files. It 
does not even analyze source files if they are progressive or interlaced, and 
the default encoding mode is always progressive. For interlaced sources 
it really destroys the quality when they are encoded with progressive 
encoder settings.

Of course users can specify to encode the source with interlaced encoder 
settings in the properties window. But this has another problem: 
Interlaced sources cannot be resized vertically with the standard 
resize methods. There are special "interlaced resize" methods, but 
DVDStyler does not use them (The "scale" filter has an interlaced mode, 
but the basic "-s" parameter which is used by DVDStyler has not). And 
since most conversions do need some vertical resizing to comply 
with the DVD specs this method also results in bad quality encodes.

So I use a different method. First the source is analyzed by "MediaInfo" 
if it is interlaced or not. If it is interlaced and the "Auto_Deint" 
parameter is set to 1 or 2 then the source will be automatically 
deinterlaced using either "bwdif" or "yadif". No need to specify interlaced 
encoding in the properties window. I do not really have an opinion if 
bwdif or yadif result in better quality, you need to check this out 
for yourselves.


<2019-05-01>
------------
FFmpeg still has the habit to overshoot the specified max bitrate quite a bit 
which often causes Mplex to abort the muxing operation with a buffer underrun 
error. This seems to happen more often for NTSC conversions than for PAL. To 
fix this I decided to reduce the max bitrate settings in the plugin slightly 
(8500 -> 8200 and 9500 -> 9200). For the 9200 setting, this only applies if 
the average bitrate has been set maually to a value bigger than 8000 (only 
makes sense for HD target frame sizes). And here you still can get Mplex causing 
errors quite often, probably better to use FFmpeg for muxing in such cases.


<2018-11-10>
------------
For the new FFmpeg version which comes with 3.1 Beta3 I had to remove the 
"-sc_factor 4" parameter because it has been removed from FFmpeg. I also added 
some changes to support the experimental HD modes at the highest supported 
bitrate of 9Mb/s.

Only the file "ffmpeg-vbr.bat" is affected. The new version is backwards 
compatible.


<2017-11-23>
------------
Published a new bug fix release...

When the DVDStyler TEMP folder contained an exclamation mark in its name, the
plugin would crash in 2-pass VBR mode. Thanks to Data Diner for finding it.

For the bug fix only the file "ffmpeg-vbr.bat" needs to be replaced.


<2017-01-29>
------------
Just made a small addition to the VBR plugin...
It adds the possibility to force interlaced modes for all titles in a project 
simultaneously without the need to edit each title separately. Thanks to Arnout 
Ponsioen for pointing it out.

Background:
DVDStyler does not analyze source files if they are interlaced or progressive. 
For interlaced sources the user needs to edit the video properties and specify 
interlaced encoding (or deinterlacing) for each of the titles in a project. Now 
if you have a large project with many titles which are all interlaced it would 
be nice to force interlaced encoding or deinterlacing all at once for the whole 
project.

This is exactly what the plugin can do now. At the bottom of the "ff_vbr.ini" 
file there is an option to force the FFmpeg behavior for interlaced sources. 
You can either force interlaced encoding or deinterlacing (default for 
deinterlacing is bwdif, you can specify Yadif by editing "ffmpeg-vbr.bat"). 
For both modes I use the automatic field order detection, in a couple of tests 
using different sources this worked quite well.


<2016-12-21>
------------
Just fixed an extremely stupid bug for 2-pass VBR mode when a file or folder 
name has an exclamation mark in it. Thanks to DavidC for discovering it.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All previous changes were made before the plugin was halfway stable...

