v1.4.0 - the window wins over the config file

An unticked box now means it

The window could only ever ADD arguments to the converter, never take one away.
So a setting in NVENCForge_Config.ini quietly won against what was on screen:

• With autoCrop=true in the config, an unticked "Cut off black bars" still
  cut.
• With autoShutdown=true, the converter shut the PC down as soon as its one
  file was done, taking the rest of the batch with it. That is the same damage
  the window itself did until v1.0.1 - triggered from the config file this time.

Neither could actually happen before now, because autoCrop never made it into
an existing config file: NVENCForge only ever wrote new settings into files it
created from scratch. NVENCForge 1.22.0 fills them in, which is exactly what
brings both within reach.

The window now sends -nocrop for an unticked box and -noshutdown on every
converter call - but only when the installed NVENCForge knows those switches, so
an older one does not log an unknown option on every run.

Split, join and the DaVinci path are untouched: they take no extra switches, and
they need no shutdown guard - they finish before the converter could shut
anything down.

Also

Your Settings page can no longer be incomplete. With NVENCForge 1.22.0 or newer,
settings that a newer converter added are filled into your config file
automatically, at their proper place, keeping your previous file as .bak. Until
now, a config file older than a feature simply never showed it.

Ships NVENCForge 1.22.1.

v1.3.0 - Black-bar controls

Cut the black bars off letterboxed video — after looking at exactly where the cut would go.

Two new controls on the Convert page: a tick box Cut off black bars (letterbox), and a button Check black bars next to Start. The watched folder gets the box as well.

Look first

Check black bars converts nothing. It writes one picture per file next to the source — three frames from the film, uncut, with a red line around what would be kept. Check that no picture content sits outside the line, then press Start with the box ticked.

That is the only honest way to check a cut: the converted file can no longer show you what was taken off it, so previewing the result would answer the wrong question.

A check never shuts the PC down, even with that box ticked — somebody has to look at the pictures afterwards.

What cutting does to your files

Hover over the box and it tells you, based on what your own NVENCForge_Config.ini says. The short version:

• Auto CQ off (fixed CQ): files come out about 6 % smaller and the encode runs 19 % faster.
• Auto CQ on (the default): files come out larger — and that is the feature working. Auto CQ measures quality across the whole picture, and black bars flatter that measurement, so letterboxed films were quietly getting less quality than your target asks for. Cutting the bars makes the measurement honest.

Needs NVENCForge 1.21.0

The converter does the cutting. With an older one the box and the button stay out of reach and the bubble says why — an older NVENCForge shrugs an unknown option off as a log warning, so the run would look perfectly normal and simply keep the bars.

The About page fetches the new converter for you.

Also in this release

Profiles remember the setting, and a profile saved before this version reads as "off" rather than switching cutting on for someone who never asked for it.

v1.2.0

The window picks itself back up

The Windows web view this window is drawn with sometimes stops while starting. Nothing of yours is harmed when it happens, but until now it meant a small "the WebView2 process crashed" message and starting the program again by hand.

From this version on, the program runs as a tiny watcher plus the window itself. Task Manager therefore shows two NVENCForgeGUI entries, and that is meant to be: the watcher holds no web view at all, so the fault cannot touch it. If the window drops out, the watcher puts it straight back — twice at most — and closes the message for you. On the last try it leaves the message standing, so a lasting problem still says what it is.

What this does not do: it does not repair the web view. The fault can still happen. It just no longer costs you a double-click.

Measured, not assumed

• Start to window: 0.41 s with the watcher, 0.40 s without (10 runs each) — no cost worth mentioning.
• 50 starts of this version and 50 starts of 1.1.1 were run back to back on the same machine. Neither showed a single drop-out, so on that machine the fault is simply not occurring at the moment — those runs say nothing about the watcher either way.
• That the watcher does its job was shown separately: a window that is killed comes straight back under the same watcher, the real message is closed in 0.11 s, a different message box is left untouched, closing the window normally ends both processes, and a second start falls through the single-instance lock without any restart loop.

Also in this release

• The About page has a new short section, "Why it starts twice", so the two Task Manager entries are explained inside the program itself.
• The README lists the behaviour under what you get.

Nothing else changed: same converter, same settings, same files on disk.

v1.1.1 - a clearer message when the web view stops

A clearer message when the Windows web view stops

Some starts end with a small window saying "The WebView2 process crashed and
the application needs to be restarted", and the program closes. That wording
comes from the window toolkit, and it is misleading: NVENCForgeGUI does not
crash there, and nothing on your disk is harmed. What stops is the web view
that Windows itself provides (WebView2, the Edge component this window draws
its interface with).

This release replaces that one sentence with something honest and useful:

The Windows web view (WebView2) stopped. NVENCForgeGUI itself did not crash and
no file was harmed — please just start it again. If this keeps happening, repair
the web view: Settings → Apps → Installed apps → Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime
→ Modify → Repair.

What this does not do is fix the underlying fault, and it would be dishonest
to claim otherwise. It was measured over roughly 215 starts, and it happens
somewhere between one in five and one in twenty starts regardless of:

• the program version — 1.0.2 does it just as often, so this is not new,
• the web view's data folder, even a completely fresh one,
• GPU acceleration, on or off,
• how quickly the program is started again after closing it,
• the WebView2 runtime version, before and after repairing it.

Windows' own system file check came back clean as well. The fault sits in the
web view, outside this program. If it happens to you: start the program again,
that is all. Nothing is lost, no conversion is affected, no setting is touched.

Everything else is unchanged: same converter, same output, same settings.

v1.1.0 - the window can update itself

New: the window can fetch its own updates

Until now, a new version meant going to GitHub, downloading the file and
replacing it yourself. The About page now does it for you.

It only looks when you ask it to. There is no check on startup and no
background call — the window never goes online unless you press the button.

1. Check for updates asks GitHub whether there is a newer release. If there
   is not, it says so and nothing else happens.
2. Update to vX.Y.Z and restart appears only when there really is something
   newer. One click downloads it (with the progress shown on the button), puts
   it in place, starts the new version and closes the old window.

There is always a way back. The version you were running is not deleted: it
is kept in the tools folder as NVENCForgeGUI-<version>.exe.bak. Rename it to
NVENCForgeGUI.exe, move it up one folder, and you are running the old version
again. It is never removed on its own, so it stays yours to keep or delete.

Not in the middle of work. While a conversion is running or a folder is being
watched, updating is refused — a restart at that moment would cut the converter
off from its window and leave it running unseen.

If anything goes wrong, nothing is lost. The new file is downloaded next to
the program first and checked against the size GitHub announced; only a complete
file is ever put in place. Should the swap fail halfway, the old program goes
straight back where it was.

Nothing else changed: same converter, same output, same settings.

v1.0.2 - the shutdown option no longer cuts a batch short

Important fix: "Shut down the PC when finished"

If you used that option with more than one video in the queue, the machine
switched itself off after the first finished file and the rest of the batch
never ran. This build fixes it.

What was wrong: the window hands the converter one file at a time, and the
option was passed into every one of those calls. Each converter then did what
it was told at the end of its batch — which was a single file.

How it works now: the window decides. The PC is only switched off when

• every area is finished — converting, splitting, joining and the watched folder,
• no folder is being watched (a standing order never really ends),
• and nothing is converting outside this window either, e.g. NVENCForge.exe
  started by hand — the process list is checked before anything happens,
• and the batch was not stopped by hand.

Windows performs the shutdown and gives you a minute. On top of its own warning,
the window now shows a countdown with a cancel button (shutdown /a still
works too). The box can be ticked or cleared at any time, including in the
middle of a batch — the decision is only made at the end. Stopping an area
clears it; skipping a single file does not.

Nothing else changed: same converter, same output, same settings.

v1.0.1 - Windows shows the version, and a README worth reading

A maintenance release: nothing in the window changed, but two things around it did.

Windows shows the version again

Right-clicking NVENCForgeGUI.exe and asking for its details used to show
nothing at all — no file version, no product version, no company. The values
were in the file the whole time, but under a language id Windows does not
read, so it gave up on the whole block. That is fixed: the details tab now
shows file version and product version 1.0.1, along with the company,
description and copyright.

Nothing about the program itself changed. If 1.0.0 works for you, there is no
urgency here.

A proper front page

The README now opens with the screenshot, a table of contents and a
problem-and-answer table, and it finally mentions the parts that were built
but never written down: profiles, the savings line, the taskbar progress and
the About page. New sections cover the six pages, the requirements, and an
honest note about why Windows SmartScreen complains about an unsigned EXE.

---

Download: NVENCForgeGUI.exe below. Nothing is installed; put it where you
like. If NVENCForge.exe is missing, one click in the window fetches it.

NVENCForgeGUI 1.0.0

A window for NVENCForge — for everyone who would rather click than type.

Drop your videos in, press Start, watch it happen. Nothing is installed and nothing is written to the registry: put NVENCForgeGUI.exe in a folder of its own and start it. If NVENCForge.exe is missing, one click fetches it, and it then sets itself up (configuration file and FFmpeg) without you doing anything else.

You need: Windows 10 or 11. An NVIDIA card (GTX 10 series or newer) for the fast path — without one, the converter still works on the processor.

What it does

• Convert by drag and drop — files or whole folders, subfolders included — with live progress per file: bar, speed, ETA, bitrate and the output size so far.
• Watch a folder on its own page and convert whatever lands in it, beside a batch you started by hand. A file is only picked up once it has stopped growing for 30 seconds, so a download in progress is left alone.
• Split and join losslessly, and prepare footage for DaVinci Resolve. When a file has several audio tracks or subtitles, you tick what you want instead of typing numbers.
• Every setting explained. The Settings page is built from NVENCForge_Config.ini itself: hover over anything and it tells you what it does, what is allowed, and what your file currently says.
• Profiles — keep a set of options under a name and pick it again with one click, on the Convert page and for the watched folder.
• The savings line along the bottom edge: space saved and time spent converting, both counted from the very first run.
• Progress on the taskbar button, so the window can be out of the way while it works. It flashes when a batch is done. No sound.
• Day or night, and it remembers its size, its place and which one you chose.
• Up to three converters at once, one at a time by default. Measured here with four 90-second clips: two took 52 seconds instead of 72, a third brought nothing more.

Since 0.9.4

• The licence is stated at last: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free to use, study, change and pass on for any noncommercial purpose. The 0.9.x downloads carried no licence at all, which legally meant nobody was allowed to use them.
• Every job has its own page, its own list, its own progress and its own log.
• The watched folder runs beside a batch instead of writing over it.
• New: day/night switch, About page, profiles, the savings line, progress on the taskbar.
• The three files the window keeps for itself now live in the tools folder, so next to the program file there is only the program file and that one folder. Files from an older copy move along by themselves on first start.
• One video at a time is the new default.
• Every push is checked by GitHub Actions.

How it works

The converter is not touched. The window starts the unchanged NVENCForge.exe as a separate process, hands it the options on the command line and reads its machine-readable event channel. Quality decisions, bitrate caps and the GPU probe all stay exactly where they were.

The rule throughout: no button may lie. What is not built is greyed out rather than pretending to work, and nothing on screen claims anything the converter did not report.

v0.9.4

The missing half of the DaVinci workflow. -davinci does two jobs, and only one of them had a button: taking a file apart was there, putting it back together was command line only. The Join page now offers both routes:

• 1:1 - everything copied unchanged, the way back from Split.
• Resolve-ready - audio DaVinci Resolve cannot read (AC3, E-AC3, DTS, TrueHD, Opus, Vorbis, FLAC, anything above 5.1 or above 48 kHz) is re-encoded to AAC, and subtitles are cleaned along the way. The picture is copied either way.

Files the list cannot use no longer vanish silently. Dropping a video together with its audio - exactly what you would try when looking for the join - used to make the audio disappear without a word, and the window then quietly split just the video. Those files now say so and point at the Join area. Dropping a whole folder stays quiet: other material next to the videos is normal there.

With this, everything NVENCForge.exe can do is reachable from the window.

v0.9.3

The subtitle cleaner is editable in the window now. The list of lines it throws away sat in SRTCleaner_config.txt next to the converter and needed a text editor. It is a list, so it is one on the settings page: add, remove, tick exact, save. Your previous list is kept as a .bak, the explanatory header in the file survives untouched, and so does any phrase you parked behind a #.

The section also says where this applies at all: only when files are taken apart for DaVinci. Split and Join never touch a subtitle, and an ordinary conversion does not clean either.

Three explanations elsewhere were saying more than they knew:

• Results land in an output folder, not loose beside the source.
• Originals go wherever retireMode says - the recycle bin is just as normal as the originals folder, so the help now reads your INI and names the one actually in force.
• The CPU timing is now tied to the kind of processor it was measured on, instead of being promised to every machine.

Nothing about converting changed; the converter itself is untouched, as always.