I have spent quite a lot time on MediaCoder after finishing my one-month tour around Europe in October. Besides many fix-ups and tweak-ups, my work in this period involves several major tasks.

First, MPlayer/MEncoder finally got updated with latest SVN code after nearly a whole year. This alone took me a whole week as many underlying libraries were also to be updated and rebuilt which caused some problems in compilation. To my relief everything was solved finally. Among those libraries, libopus (for Opus audio support) was added and libbluray (for Bluray disc support) was updated. The binaries are now built with hardcoded SSE utilization as almost every modern processor now has that already. This will improving decoding performance a bit inspite of all the improvements of codecs during the year.

Second, Intel MSDK encoder was updated. Intel released Intel Media SDK months ago and now the encoder was built against the latest SDK. In addition, the encoder itself was also optimized a bit. The frames are passed in and processed in NV12 color space which is the native color space in Intel MSDK.

Along with the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, Windows XP platform target was re-added. So both MediaCoder 32-bit and 64-bit versions are now built with VS2012.

For the complete list of changes, please refer to the changelog.

In this release, many important encoders and multiplexers got upgraded, including x264, MP4Box, MKV toolnix etc.  Another noticeable update is the new dashboard window. By default it shows up when you minimize the application window when transcoding is proceeding. As I introduced in the previous post, it adds some fun when you like to watch your transcoding proceeding and is fully user customizable. It’s based on a dashboard rendering engine I developed last year, originally designed for running on mobile devices, so it’s very efficient and have very low overhead. That means there is no need to worry about slowing down your transcoding. If you do hate it, simply delete the dashboard folder in the installation folder. If someone is can make their own dashboard and share it, I would be appreciated.

Changelog | Download 

From this release, MediaCoder 64-bit version is built with Visual Studio 2012. This will drop the support for Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista x64. The 32-bit version is still built with Visual Studio 2008 in order to retain the support for the widest Windows operating systems.

In this release, the task bar progress display, as a new facility in Windows 7,  is finally added. When the application window is minimized,  a small video window will be shown on the desktop corner, with progress and transcoding speed info displayed in the title bar. If you don’t want to preview the transcoding video, simply close this window.

Latest release download link