Vice 2.7.1

Recording starts on GPUs that refuse the configured codec

Vice picked its codec from ffmpeg's encoder list. All that tells you is that ffmpeg was built with NVENC support, which it always is, and nothing about whether your card will accept it. Vice then passed -k h264 to gpu-screen-recorder whether it would work or not, and recording failed outright with Could not open video codec: Function not implemented on machines where gpu-screen-recorder's own UI records fine.

Vice now reads gpu-screen-recorder --info and will not ask for a codec your GPU does not list. If the encoder still refuses, it retries on the GPU with a codec that works before it falls back to CPU encoding, so you stay on hardware encoding instead of losing frames. There is a banner when that happens telling you which codec it picked and why.

Worth knowing if you are on a wide monitor: H.264 encoding caps out at 4096 pixels wide on NVIDIA. HEVC and AV1 go to 8192. That combination, an ultrawide plus H.264, is a case where the codec is listed as supported and still will not open.

On any machine where the capability probe cannot answer, the command Vice builds is byte for byte what 2.7.0 built.

A clip directory that has gone away says so

If your clips live on a second drive or a network mount and the path stops existing, Vice detected it and then threw the message away. The check ran before the web UI started and the exception never reached the log, so vice.log stopped mid-startup with nothing after it and the error dialog had nothing useful to show.

The check now runs after the window is up, so you get a banner naming the directory and the config file to change, the daemon keeps running, and it starts recording on its own once the path comes back. Anything else that goes wrong during startup is written to the log before it stops.

Other

• The test suite runs on Python 3.10 again, the oldest version Vice supports.
• Tests now run automatically on pull requests.

Full Changelog: v2.7.0...v2.7.1