Table A.1 describes the MPEG-4 Visual levels for the Version 1 and Version 2 profiles only including natural visual (or video) data, this means the so-called MPEG-4 video profiles. Note that Level 0 for the Simple profile has been defined in the 2^nd Extension to the 2^nd Edition of the MPEG-4 Visual standard.

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As you may know, the version number of 0.6.0 has been kept for nearly one year’s time though MediaCoder has been improved consistently during this period of time. I admit that I am quite conservative on the increase of version number of MediaCoder. Anyway after one year, I finally decided to increase the version number soon. Once a most stable 0.6.0 is released, let’s leave 0.6.0 in its best condition and steps towards 0.7.0.

Here I list some of my thoughts about the major new features of the next version:

• Adding batch image conversion/processing feature (base on ImageMagick)
• Implementing multi-segment simultaneous transcoding (this will optimize speed for multi-core processors even if the encoder doesn’t support multi-threading and no doubt 4-core will have a significant speed-up)
• Implementing multi-computer transcoding / transcoding farm (will adopt controller/agent mode, agent will run on Linux natively).
• x64 version
• Fully XUL-based user interface (the classic user interface will be kept of course)
• New graphics

Of course these new features won’t come suddenly in a release. They will be implemented gradually. If you have suggestions, please just tell me.

In 0.6.0.3980, frames being encoded can be viewed. The frame is rendered with SDL at a specified interval so it won’t slow down the encoding speed noticeably and can be switched on/off instantly.

Please note that in some combinations (when video source is “default”, in this case, frames are not passing through MediaCoder), this feature won’t work.

In this build, several serious bugs have been fixed. For details please check the changelog.

As many users complained about, sometimes after a long time of transcoding was done, an error occurred because of a muxer error and this wasted their time.

So in 0.6.0.3940, an automatic testing phase was added before the actual transcoding starts. The testing phase will convert 1 second (can be altered at Settings->Overall->Task->Testing phase duration) of original content to see if the result file can be successfully created. Only on success, the whole file will be processed.

By default, the testing phase will be activated only when external muxer is to be used.