v3.4

This is most likely the last release of STF, it seals off all the recent small changes.
I will update it only in case of any further drastic changes.
Color-management is defaulted to OFF, ffmpeg lacks a lot in this department yet and barely usable.

Release 3.35 beta

This is a beta release to test the new features and fixes.
It contains breaking changes, clean install required.

New features:

• Subfolders for sequences + new setting to toggle it. Descriptive suffix will be assigned to the subfolder name instead of the files if this is enabled
• Color metadata support but no actual color management included in this release. Part of #1
• Meta-options. The copy option for the wset.out.video.rate and wset.out.video.rate to copy the video/audio streams into the output.
• Image scaling support in all presets
• Framerate change in all presets
• Simple audio muxing support in all video presets, a convenient way to quickly add sound to sequences and videos

UI:

• Significant UI overhaul, more structured with colors
• The cmd/terminal window's title with encoding progress status added. Part of #4
• More convenient video duration formatting h:mm:ss.ms
• Displaying source video info (duration, fps, dimension, codec, color data)

Improvements:

• The dependance form the shortcuts' Start In folder option eliminated
• Much more reliable still image detection method. Closes #6
• Catch and report of unsupported/unavailable codecs for the current FFmpeg version/build
• Keyframe intervals now work properly and (for now) switched to frames instead of seconds
• Descriptive suffixes are now assembled of the actually applied options only, but in more "native" form
• Framerates can now also be set as fractions
• Negative framerate value can be assigned to override the input fps (useful to preserve all frames but change playback speed)
• More verbose settings' names
• Sequence frame numbering is now preserved for sequence-to-sequence conversion case

Presets:

• Presets' main parameters isolated into a separate section for easier user customization
• OpenCL acceleration for the Libx h264 presets enabled (keeping the same high quality)
• Enabled lookahead for all video presets, which increases RAM/VRAM requirements but results in more efficient compression
• New presets for WebM (libx VP9), HEVC (libx h265) and HEVC (nv/cuda h265). Closes #5
• Some of the less actual presets removed, they are now much easier to reproduce if required
• More precise descriptions for available options and links to the ffmpeg docs added as comments
• Encoder's Tune option for Cuda presets added
• Extended options for apng preset added

In most cases you will need to change the first few parameters to create a new preset.

This release is not fully production ready. Please report issues.
Its main goal is to test the features before the upcoming stable Release 3.5

Release 3.15

• New feature: The script to auto-create SendTo menu shortcuts to the batches (integrating them into the Windows Explorer's right-click menu).
  If up to this moment you were lazy enough to not create the shortcuts to the scripts to use them from the Windows' Send To menu, do not bother, there's a new script to do it for you. Just run (double-click) the Create_SendTo_Shortcuts.bat and wait a bit. In the end it will open the folder with the created shortcuts and then you might decide to remove some of them to unclutter the menu, cause there's 42 of them now. Make sure you're running this batch from the permanent location of the SendTo scripts.
• Improvements: Some minor code fixes and documentation updates.

All changes since the release 3.0 are still internal + 1 new bat file, you can simply overwrite the old files with the new ones.

Release 3.1

This release includes:

• Improvement: Validating if the frame counter is all of digits, not symbols.
• New feature: Detection of the frame counter after the delimiter specified by the frdelim setting, by default the delimiter symbol is ..
  This feature lets you encode the sequences named like this: Renderout.0001.puzzleMatte.exr. This detection runs if the search for the counter in the end of the filename failed. If it is set to empty string (the setting string is SET "frdelim=") then this detection is skipped. SendTo looks for the first inclusion of the delimiter and validates if the following symbols are digits. It will consider only the number of symbols specified by the frcounter setting, default is 4.
• New feature: New setting divline for the UI divider string. You can shorten or customize it to suit your needs.
• Bugfix: Fixed the Gif framerate bug, that was introduced since the release 3.0.

All changes since the release 3.0 are internal, so you can simply replace the files with the new ones.

Version 3.01

• Bugfix: Zero frame problem. Now SendTo properly detects if frame 0 is part of a sequence.
• Improvement: Nice restructuring of the Readme.

All changes since the previous release are internal, so you can simply replace the files with the new ones.

Release 3.0

Image sequence support

This is a big update to SendTo FFmpeg that adds the support of image sequence transcoding. The exceptions are the External Audio preset and EXR squarifier preset (demanded for Karma renderer).

To transcode a sequence

Select just one frame of the sequence and engage. The frame you've selected becomes the starting point of the video (trimming all the previous frames). There's just one limitation for now, it cant be the zero frame (or 0000). If you select a few frames that belong to different sequences, they will be transcoded independently.

Frame counter format

SendTo looks for the frame number at the end of the filename only. By default it's 4 last digits (zero padded), but you can change it in the setting frcounter. (Do not forget, you can make the local settings with different parameters for different folders).

Caution

Be cautious when transcoding images that are part of a detectable sequence, it will end up with a bunch of videos on your hands. When required, set the imgset (Consider image sequences) option in the settings to 0. (Or copy the sendtoffmpeg_settings.cmd with this option off into your current folder, and everything you transcode from this location won't be considered a sequence).

New settings for the image sequence support

A few new options in the settings related to the image sequences support: the default framerate fps, frame counter digit number frcounter, consider image sequences imgseq.
And the new setting quietover to disable quiet overwriting of the output files. You can read the description of each in the sendtoffmpeg_settings.cmd.

Fully restructured

SendTo FFmpeg has been entirely restructured and now is one step closer to a future modular system, which is easier to maintain, update or modify. Please, do not hesitate to bug report.

Release 2.2

A small update to the presets, that removes CUDA decoding. It has a tiny impact on the transcoding time, but lifts a lot of the input stream limitations. Software decoding gives you much wider input video compatibility, virtually any video source. Plus some errors fixed, and a few tiny updates.

Release 2.1

A lot of work has been done on this project since its start in 2018 and multiple features have been added during these 3 years.
The time has come to fix it as a release. I am deciding the future if this project, cause some really required features (like image sequence transcoding) are missing. I am not sure I want to implement this mess in windows batch, and thinking of a new python based utility, more sleek and more powerful. Still this project serves me very well in my everyday work, hope so does it for you.