Diffractor 1.27.3

• Movie mixer — put photos and videos in order and make one MP4 of them: trim videos, set how long each photo shows, add a transition and end fades, preview, and save the project to come back to. Windows Live Movie Maker projects (.wlmp) can be imported, and sources that have moved are found again in your collection. Your photos and videos are never changed. Projects can also be checked, imported and rendered from the command line.
• Options on one page — every setting in one place, in the sections you look for: the collection, viewing and playback, the sidebar, editing and saving, and general settings. Nothing changes until you save, and Diffractor asks before it discards a change.
• Subtitles — subtitle tracks in a video, and subtitle files beside it (SRT, WebVTT, ASS/SSA, SAMI, MPL2, VobSub .idx/.sub and Blu-ray .sup), show as it plays. Show them always, only when the speech is in another language, or only when a film forces them, and choose their language.
• Films and TV shows — say what each collection folder holds. Films and TV shows are named, numbered and dated from their file names, and Diffractor can read titles, plots, seasons, episodes and dates from the .nfo files Kodi, Jellyfin and Emby keep beside videos.
• Share — send the selected files to another app through the Windows share panel, as one zip file, converted to JPEG or reduced in size if you choose. Originals are unchanged.
• JPEG XL — save edits as JPEG XL and convert to it, lossy or lossless.
• Commodore 64 SID tunes play like any other audio file. The SID monitor shows each voice, the filter and the chip's registers as the tune plays, picks the file's other tunes, and mutes or solos a voice.
• A look inside any file — a file Diffractor has no viewer for is shown in the panel as text, in syntax colours where the language is recognised, or as a hex dump.
• Smoother video — where the graphics card allows, video is decoded on the same device that draws it.
• Microsoft Store version — a diffractor command opens folders and files from a terminal or script, and Windows AutoPlay offers Diffractor when a camera card or USB drive is inserted.

Fixed

• A collection folder with an apostrophe, such as C:\Foto's, lost its last letter after a restart, and of several other folders only the first was kept (#256). Recent searches that 1.27.2 saved damaged are cleared up.
• Dragging a clip into Vegas Pro or FilmCraft pasted it twice (#255).
• A portrait video recorded with rotation became a wide, cropped tile once a label or other metadata was written to it (#252).
• Videos with non-square pixels play, preview and scrub at their intended shape (#78).
• The rotate preview turned the picture the opposite way to the rotation (#260), and a rotation now respects the orientation the picture is shown in.
• After a delete the cursor moves on to the next item instead of the view jumping back to the start (#259).
• The filter box and the thumbnail size slider sit in the status bar, so they no longer scroll away (#257).
• Matroska tags written in a language other than the file's default are read (#238).
• Duplicates on a network share are listed, not only marked (#8).
• Deleting from a drive without a Recycle Bin, such as a network share, asks before deleting permanently.
• Windows' XP title and tags read as written instead of "?", IPTC text that is not UTF-8 reads as Windows-1252, and a lossless rotation keeps the camera's maker note.
• Dates in a RAW file's sidecar take precedence over the dates embedded in the RAW.
• A crash copying a metadata block to the clipboard, and many smaller faults found by a full reliability review.

Under the hood

• Media files and their metadata are read and written by libfiles, shared with ImageWalker. Adobe's XMP Toolkit, Expat and libexif are no longer used. A metadata edit that fits is patched in place, and one that moves the file is written in a single pass.
• Video and audio use upstream FFmpeg rather than a Diffractor fork, still under the LGPL.
• Updated: SQLite 3.54.1, libarchive 3.8.11, Hunspell 1.7.6, libheif 1.23.7, libjpeg-turbo 3.2.1, libpng 1.6.59, LibRaw 0.22.3 and the Adobe DNG SDK 1.7.1 build 2768.
• The installer, the zip and the Store package include the licence texts (LGPL-3.0 and GPL-3.0).
• All 13 translations cover the new features.

Before you upgrade

• After the first start, audio and video files are read again in the background, so their details fill in as the scan reaches each one. Settings, tags and the rest of the index carry over.