§ ¶Incompatibility between VirtualDub 1.6 and Archos Multimedia MPG4 Translator

Disclaimer: Neither I nor VirtualDub is affiliated with Archos, and I cannot provide technical support for Archos products. Please contact Archos technical support for general problems with Archos devices or the MPG4 Translator.

Those of you who may have tried using the Archos MPG4 Translator with recent versions of VirtualDub (1.6+) may have encountered this error:

Cannot open file "jobs.avs":
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

This is due to an incompatibility with the Archos MPG4 Translator software due to a change in command-line parsing in VirtualDub 1.6. For a quick fix, use VirtualDub 1.5.10 with the Translator software instead. You can obtain 1.5.10 from the File List for the VirtualDub project on SourceForge. If you are willing to hex edit a copy of the Archos software, though, there is a workaround.

§ ¶VirtualDub 1.6.9 released

I've released VirtualDub 1.6.9 has a quick hotfix for a few issues that were found since 1.6.8; most are minor except the audio compression error bug. That particular error turned out to be caused by a regression since 1.6.7, which in turn happened when I tried to fix a different bug that was causing a small amount of audio to be lost at the end when using audio compression. So, if you're wondering why I'm reluctant to introduce new features at this point, this would be why. I haven't decided whether or not to do another experimental/stable cycle in the 1.6.x series; I hadn't planned to originally but there are enough huge changes in the 1.7 branch that might take too long otherwise.

I'm debating right now whether to run out and get the new Atelier Iris RPG that recently came out for PS2. My friend and I play a game called "get the other person to buy stuff"; by my count he's winning so far because he got me to recently buy the entire Crest of the Stars trilogy, Star Ocean: To the End of Time, and now that he's showing me Patlabor and Atelier Iris I'm tempted to get those too. We've had a few misses for RPGs lately too, though. Ys 6: The Ark of Nephistim turned out to be quite a slog, and Tales of Symphonia was a lot less fun as a multiplayer game as we'd hoped since the camera often only centers on player 1 and leaves 2-4 offscreen. Atelier Iris looks very promising though since it's a 2.5D sprite-based game that has a lot of funny dialogue and seems to incorporate every crafting system known to man.

§ ¶I hate reading Raymond Chen's blog

Raymond Chen is a long-time Microsoft employee who was on the Windows 95 team and now has a blog called The Old New Thing. It's a rather fascinating blog, one filled with lots of good programming tips and Windows history. Some of the anecdotes about Windows 95's development are quite funny.

However, it's a very depressing blog to read sometimes.

You see, the problem is that occasionally he'll post an entry about some aspect of the Win32 API and explain its common pitfalls and how it is supposed to be used. So it was with some dread today that I read his article about DeferWindowPos() and its funny behavior with regard to the HDWP handle it accepts and the new HDWP handle it returns. Sure enough, a Find-in-Files search of the VirtualDub 1.6.8 codebase revealed three places where I was calling DeferWindowPos() incorrectly. Sigh.

I love reading his blog because it's full of great information, but I hate reading it because every time I do I have to fix more bugs.

§ ¶1.6.8 released; 1.6 is now the stable branch

VirtualDub 1.6.8 is now out. With the release of this new version, the 1.6 branch has now become the "stable" branch, for which changes will be restricted mostly to bug fixes. One major bug was fixed with this release (filter list corruption), and the remainder of the application should function like 1.6.7. Please keep the bug reports coming so I can roll up any fixes into a 1.6.9 build.

Currently, in the 1.7 branch, I'm working on rewriting the filter systems. There are actually four audio/video filter systems in 1.6, the old audio/video filter systems, and the new A/V filter systems. Of these, the old audio filter system didn't permit external plugins, and the new video filter system never went live in 1.6. I've already removed most of the old audio filter system and shunted its functions through the new audio system, and am currently working on getting existing video filters wrapped and running in the new video filter system. This is important for allowing video filters to run asynchronously, as currently the video filter chain is monolithic and can't really run multithreaded or cross-process (which would be required for 32<->64 support).