Blog

9 Feb

Written by on in Releases.

Greetings Everyone! I am proud to release the third beta of OpenShot 2.0 (full details below). This marks the 3rd full release of OpenShot 2.0 in the past 30 days. I am working closely with testers and users to address the most critical issues as they are identified.


Installers and Downloads

If you are interested in trying out OpenShot 2.0, you are in luck! For the first time ever, we are releasing the beta installers to everyone, so feel free to grab a copy and check it out!

 

Smoother Animation

Animations are now silky smooth because of improved anti-aliasing support in the libopenshot compositing engine. Zooming, panning, and rotation all benefit from this change.

Audio Quality Improvements

Audio support in this new version is vastly superior to previous versions. Popping, crackling, and other related audio issues have been fixed.

Autosave

A new autosave engine has been built for OpenShot 2.0, and it’s fast, simple to configure, and will automatically save your project at a specific interval (if it needs saving). Check the Preferences to be sure it’s enabled (it will default to enabled for new users).

Automatic Backup and Recovery

Along with our new autosave engine, a new automatic backup and recovery feature has also been integrated into the autosave flow. If your project is not yet saved… have no fear, the autosave engine will make a backup of your unsaved project (as often as autosave is configured for), and if OpenShot crashes, it will recover your most recent backup on launch.


 Project File Improvements

Many improvements have been made to project file handling, including relative paths for built-in transitions and improvements to temp files being copied to project folders (i.e. animated titles). Projects should be completely portable now, between different versions of OpenShot and on different Operating Systems. This was a key design goal of OpenShot 2.0, and it works really well now.

Improved Exception Handling

Integration between libopenshot (our video editing library) and openshot-qt (our PyQt5 user interface) has been improved. Exceptions generated by libopenshot are now passed to the user interface, and no longer crash the application. Users are now presented with a friendly error message with some details of what happened. Of course, there is still the occasional “hard crash” which kills everything, but many, many crashes will now be avoided, and users more informed on what has happened.

Preferences Improvements

There are more preferences available now (audio preview settings - sample rate, channel layout, debug mode, etc…), including a new feature to prompt users when the application will “require a restart” for an option to take effect.


Improved Stability on Windows

A couple of pretty nasty bugs were fixed for Windows, although in theory they should have crashed on other platforms as well. But for whatever reason, certain types of crashes relating to threading only seem to happen on Windows, and many of those are now fixed.

New Version Detection

OpenShot will now check the most recent released version on launch (from the openshot.org website) and descretely prompt the user by showing an icon in the top right of the main window. This has been a requested feature for a really long time, and it’s finally here. It will also quietly give up if no Internet connection is available, and it runs in a separate thread, so it doesn’t slow down anything.

Metrics and Anonymous Error Reporting

A new anonymous metric and error reporting module has been added to OpenShot. It can be enabled / disabled in the Preferences, and it will occasionally send out anonymous metrics and error reports, which will help me identify where crashes are happening. It’s very basic data, such as “WEBM encoding error - Windows 8, version 2.0.6, libopenshot-version: 0.1.0”, and all IP addresses are anonymized, but will be critical to help improve OpenShot over time.

Improved Precision when Dragging

Dragging multiple clips around the timeline has been improved. There were many small issues that would sometimes occur, such as extra spacing being added between clips, or transitions being slightly out of place. These issues have been fixed, and moving multiple clips now works very well.

Debug Mode

In the preferences, one of the new options is “Debug Mode”, which outputs a ton of extra info into the logs. This might only work on Linux at the moment, because it requires the capturing of standard output, which is blocked in the Windows and Mac versions (due to cx_Freeze). I hope to enable this feature for all OSes soon, or at least to provide a “Debug” version for Windows and Mac, that would also pop open a terminal/command prompt with the standard output visible.

Updated Translations

Updates to 78 supported languages have been made. A huge thanks to the translators who have been hard at work helping with OpenShot translations. There are over 1000 phrases which require translation, and seeing OpenShot run so seamlessly in different languages is just awesome! I love it!

Lots of Bug fixes

In addition to all the above improvements and fixes, here are many other smaller bugs and issues that have been addressed in this version.

  • Prompt before overwriting a video on export
  • Fixed regression while previewing videos (causing playhead to hop around)
  • Default export format set to MP4 (regardless of language)
  • Fixed regression with Cutting / Split video dialog
  • Fixed Undo / Redo bug with new project
  • Backspace key now deletes clips (useful with certain keyboards and laptop keyboards)
  • Fixed bug on Animated Title dialog not updating progress while rendering
  • Added multi-line and unicode support to Animated Titles
  • Improved launcher to use distutils entry_points
  • Renaming launcher to openshot-qt
  • Improved Mac build scripts (version # parsing)
  • Fixed many issues with keyboard shortcuts
  • Known Issues
  • WebM export crash on Windows
  • DVD export crash on some versions of Linux
  • Some translation issues with certain languages. Please review your language translations here.
  • Some users have reported issues launching OpenShot on Mac
  • Some stability issues with Windows - still haven’t nailed down the cause… but it’s probably related to threading and a couple more race conditions that only seem to happen on Windows.

 

 

Get Involved

Please report bugs and suggestions here: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt/issues. Please contribute language translations here (if you are a non-English speaking user): https://translations.launchpad.net/openshot/2.0/+translations.


Stay tuned...