Release 26.0.0

Author: WyattBlue

changelogs/2024.md

@@ -1,17 +1,30 @@
 # 26.0.0
 
 ## Major
+ - You can now preview videos before rendering is complete. (see footnote 1).
+ - `unset` is now never a valid codec. Use `auto` instead.
+ - `unset` is now not a valid bitrate value. Use `auto` instead.
  - Removed the `--extras` and `-qscale:v` cli options.
  - The `ae-ffmpeg` pypi package is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Future versions of auto-editor will not ship ffmpeg cli binaries.
- - The `--my-ffmpeg` and `--ffmpeg-location` cli options are deprecated and can be removed in a future release.
+ - The `--my-ffmpeg` `--ffmpeg-location` `--show-ffmpeg-commands` and `--show-ffmpeg-debug` cli options are now deprecated and can be removed in a future `26.x` release.
 
 ## Features
- - Remove all uses of ffmpeg-cli for video rendering; improves performance by ~20%
-   * Using `--my-ffmpeg` no longer means that libx264 (and friends) would necessarily be used. Instead, use a GPLv3 build of PyAV.
+ - Auto-Editor is consistency twice as fast as `25.x` if `-c:a pcm_s16le` is set.
+ - Auto-Editor is now 20% faster to 50% slower with default options. (see footnotes 2 and 3).
+ - Remove all uses of ffmpeg-cli in auto-editor, with the exception of a few holdouts (EBU norm, audio mixing, yt-dlp).
+   * using GPL vs LGPL builds of PyAV now determine if the `libx264` or `libopen264` encoder is used.
 
 ## Fixes
  - Never write a "null frame" if the timeline is known to be linear. Fixes #468
 
+## Footnotes
+ - [1] You can preview media files if they are in the Matroska format (`.mkv`). Although `.mp4` hybrid could theoretically work, ffmpeg does not appear to have sufficient support yet. YMMV with other formats.
+ - [2] Smaller files perform better. Larger files perform worse compared to `25.x` when using a solid state drive/fast storage.
+ - [3] It should be possible to eventually recover this lost performance. Either with multiprocessing, or multi-threading with GIL-free builds of Python.
+
+## Known Regressions
+ - Data Streams, Attachment Streams, and Embedded Image (video) streams are now always dropped due to some limitations with the current version of PyAV. This should be fixed in a future version of `26.x`
+
 **Full Changelog**: https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor/compare/25.3.1...26.0.0