So... preparations for 1.42 took a bit longer, but for good reasons - new features, including accidental HDR support™!
Added 2026-01-12 19:28:50 +0000 UTCYeah, I said it'd be ready "in a few days" which was almost a month ago.
Buuut, I did actually make some notable progress in that time (also christmas was a thing).
Here's some important things that I noticed just when I was about to wrap things up, with most of them actually resulting in additional features and UX improvements.
I added HDR video interpolation support "by accident".
What happened: I noticed some specific issues with Flowframes not tagging the color info of a video properly, which can lead to interpolated videos looking desaturated.
What I figured out: I used some incorrect names for ffmpeg color arguments, causing bt.2020 to be ignored (this is the one used for HDR video).
What's new now: HDR video interpolation works! While I have to do a little more testing regarding metadata (e.g. static brightness data) but I can confirm that HDR works - Brightness goes higher, the 10-bit color range is preserved, and video players recognize it as HDR.
I figured out why Flowframes refused to start while Battlefield 6 was running (...what?).
What happened: I noticed I could not use - not even start - FF while BF6 was running.
What I figured out: EA's anticheat software blocks all Vulkan-based software (even video players) while a game is running. In FF's case, this caused some weird memory address error on startup when the program tried to check for VK-compatible GPUs.
What's new now: Flowframes catches the error and shows an informative message instead of silently crashing.
Accessibility
I've started adding some text scaling features as the current default size is pretty small. It does not apply to everything yet, but you can, for example, hold Ctrl while hovering over the log box and then use the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the font size. Middle mouse click will reset it.
Error messages now have a "Copy" button to directly copy an error to the clipboard without the need to open a log file.
CLI Usage
I've continued to work on improvements to the still-kinda-barebones command line interface, added new args, fixed certain behaviors (you can now do "--help" without FF doing a full startup, etc.) and I'm continuously working on improving logging so that both the log files and of course the CLI output is less cluttered.
Many, many behind-the-scenes changes and cleanup
A lot of the code was pretty old and messy. A lot is still messy but there's slightly less of it now, less redundant stuff, which should improve performance and loading times a bit, and of course make further development easier and faster for me.
Thanks for the patience everyone, and happy new year.
I'm still working on some small improvements (e.g. audio and subtitle compatibility now being handled per-stream instead for the entire file) and UI fixes (some error messages are currently cut off).
I hope it won't be long until 1.42 is ready - I'm optimistic :)
Comments
Thank you for the report. Slower progress is mostly not a problem, but no communication is mostly one 😉.
Marco Birkholz
2026-01-21 11:59:43 +0000 UTCThank you for the great work and have a great start to the new year 🍀 I'm wondering if there's a possibility that ROCm will be supported in future versions?
Lucas Beckmann
2026-01-18 18:52:32 +0000 UTC