History/Changelog

The full changelog can always be found at http://p.outlyer.net/vcs/files/CHANGELOG. See also Future versions and timeline.

This is a selection, where minor or internal changes are usually omitted.

• 1.0.100a (Published April 10th 2009) (1.1.0 “RC2”)
  • Preliminary support for OSes other than Linux (specially FreeBSD, on which it can be considered beta). So far output is less clean on those systems.
  • BUGFIX: Don't fail if tput fails to set console colour
  • BUGFIX: Check for requirements early, shouldn't die silently

• 1.0.99 (Published March 11th 2009) (1.1.0 “RC1”)
  • Experimental support for DVDs (-V)
  • Added JPEG 2000 output format (-j2)
  • Polaroid mode renamed to photos mode, and introduction of new polaroid and polaroidframe modes
  • Slight adjustments in the timestamp size based on capture size.
  • Better detection of video frame rate (no more 1.000 fps, in theory) and audio channels number by using ffmpeg.
  • Bugfix: Fixed overlap mode putting all images on the same location (only with newer versions of ImageMagick?)

• 1.0.12 (Published April 16th 2008)
  • Corrected 0ms timestamps (seconds were being used as ms too)
  • Re-added the (disabled for long) black border after highlights
  • Added a minimun length to use the end offset
  • Bugfix: Fixed the regression on highlights from the last version (extra padding was being added my IM automatically)
  • Bugfix: Fixed parsing of manual timestamps including milliseconds (when seconds didn't include the s character they were accidentally multiplied by 10!)

• 1.0.11 (Published April 8th 2008)
  • Don't print ms when using mplayer
  • Better alignment in extended mode
  • Bugfix: (brown bag bug) Corrected typo in variable name that made vcs fail when setting the default timecode derivation to number of captures instead of interval
  • Some support for older versions of bash
  • Added FOURCC for VC-1

• 1.0.10 (Published November 8th 2007)
  • Allow disabling shadows (-ds or --disable shadows).
  • Allow disabling timestamps (-dt or --disable timestamps).
  • Added HD resolution to aspect ratio guessing (-A or --autoaspect).
  • Bugfix: Fixed aspect ratio guessing for known widths paired with unknown heights.

• 1.0.9a (Published June 10th 2007) Bugfix release
  • Bugfix: Fixed regression introduced in 1.0.8a which broke extended mode (Thanks to Aleksandar Urošević).
  • Bugfix: Was using the incorrect number of extended mode columns.

• 1.0.8a (Published June 2nd 2007) Bugfix release
  • Bugfix: -c was ignored when using the interval mode (-i and default behaviour) (Thanks to Homer S).
  • Bugfix: Right side of heading wasn't using the user's font colour (Thanks to Dougn Redhammer).

• 1.0.7a (Published May 12th 2007)
  • Print the title before the highlights.
  • Feature: End offset: Now a number of seconds (defaults to 60) from the end is ignored by default. This gives a better result with full feature films but might be an annoyance with music videos and such. Change the default with -E / --end_offset or disable it with -E0. The default can be overridden with DEFAULT_END_OFFSET. Can be disabled by adding DEFAULT_END_OFFSET=0 to configuration files.
  • Decimal point precision for seeking and timecodes
    • Accept decimal point timecodes (e.g. 20s.23)
  • Workaround for the problem with ffmpeg's arguments order (some files fail depending on the order of arguments) (-Wo changes the order to try to avoid the problem).
  • Experimental support for non-latin alphabets in filename (-Ik / --mincho).
    • Added overrides for the filename font (font_filename) and for the default Minchō font (FONT_MINCHO).
  • Funky modes ( -kp / --funky polaroid, -kr / --funky rotate, -ko / --funky overlap, -kf / --funky photoframe, -ki / --funky film, -kx / --funky random)
  • Replaced hard by soft shadows
  • Added codec ids for On2's codecs (VP3 to VP6), TSCC (Camtasia), Theora and added (unused?) extra Indeo codec ids
  • Allow changing the contact sheet background (override bg_contact)
  • tput (for coloured console text) is now an optional requirement.
  • Use /dev/shm for temporal output if possible.
  • Allow redirecting the output of ffmpeg/mplayer for debugging purposes (overrides stdout and stderr).
  • Bugfix / Feature: Correctly round the number of extended captures to be a multiple of the number of colu,mns.
  • Bugfix: Fixed safe renaming, failed with filenames with leading dashes and assument current directory output.
  • Bugfix: Added forgotten options to the help: -c / --columns -O / --override
  • Bugfix: Made font size of the title and timestamps independent, added overrides font_title, pts_title, fg_title and bg_title.
  • Bugfix: Corrected parsing of intervals (test for illegal characters was incorrect)
  • Bugfix: Print coloured console text to the correct channel
  • Internal: Made the FOURCCs detection case sensitive
  • And many internal changes, the decimal point precision and the funky modes required a lot of changes (rewrites, renamings and code split in smaller units)

• 1.0.6b (Published Apr 21st 2007) Bugfix release
  • Bugfix: Use mktemp instead of tempfile (Thanks to o kapi) (Note previous versions probably failed on non-debian derived systems).

• 1.0.5b (Published Apr 20th 2007)
  • Feature: Extended mode (-e).
  • Feature: Highligh mode (-l).
  • Feature: Basic auto aspect ratio guess (-A).
  • Feature: Command-line overrides (-O).
  • Allow using real user name instead of user id (-U).
  • Colourful feedback on the console if possible.
  • Added a bunch of codec ids
  • And of course some fixes :)

• 1.0.4b (Published Apr 17th 2007)
  • Feature: Aspect ratio support (with -a). Note it breaks the usage of --shoehorn to resize the video, which is totally intended anyway.
  • Bugfix: Put temp files in temporary locations. Should help with some filesystems. Thanks to Alon Levy for the bugreport.
  • Refinement: Suport for per-dir and system-wide configuration files. All of them are loaded if they exist, in order (system-wide, user local, current dir), each one overrides the previous if necessary.
  • Bugfix: Apparently the number of vidcaps output is finally correct.

• 1.0.3b (Published Apr 14th 2007)
  • Brown bag bugfix: Don't print the full path in the heading.

• 1.0.2b (Published Apr 14th 2007)
  • Gone beta: Multiple code cleanups.
  • Bugfix: Fixed program signature (broken in previous update).
  • Applied license.

• 1.0.1a (Published Apr 13th 2007)
  • Refinement: Allow more readable timestamps. Some examples with equivalent forms:
    Refer to 1:30:15 as: 1h30m15s = 1h30m15 = 5415s = 5415
    Refer to 1:03:00 as: 1h03m = 1h3m = 1h180s = 63m = 3780
  • Feature: Manual mode (-m). Output only the captures set by the user with -S.
  • Feature: Allow per-user config, which allows e.g. setting a different username that the default or changing the colours. See the script source for a list of allowed variables. Example ~/.vcs.conf:

          # vcs configuration
          user=outlyer		# Sign as outlyer
          # Change the signature from "Preview by outlyer" to "A rip by outlyer"
          user_signature="A rip by"
          bg_heading=slategray	# Use slategray headings (same as default footer)
          pts_heading=12		# Smaller font for heading

    Note this example is updated to the changes in the last version.

• 1.0a (Published Apr 10th 2007)
  • Feature: Allow setting the output height of the individual vidcaps (-H), the width is auto calculated from it.
  • Bugfix: If there'll be just one vidcap take it from the middle and not the end of the video.
  • Feature: Allow manually setting the number of columns (-c)
  • Added codec ids of WMV v8 and WMA v2