v2.9.0

Snipwright 2.9.0

A project format of Snipwright's own, advert detection that can now see Film4, and a good deal of work on keeping subtitles where they belong.

Film4 was the channel Chalkline simply could not read: during a film there is no logo, and the film cuts straight to the adverts with no black frames and no silence. What Film4 does have is the same red ident at the start and the end of every break, and Snipwright now learns that kind of card from your corrections and uses it. Alongside that, the Joiner can hand its work to the batch queue, and on Windows the first start after a reboot can be much quicker if you choose.

📁 A project format of Snipwright's own

A VideoReDo project records each cut as two times and nothing else. That has served well, but it cannot say which recording it belongs to beyond a file path, and times alone go wrong on a broadcast whose clock jumps partway through.

A Snipwright project (.swproj) places every cut on the exact frame you chose, notices when it is opened against a different copy of the recording, finds a recording that has been moved together with its project, and notes whether the cuts came from you or from the advert detector.

• New installations use it by default. An existing installation stays on .vprj until you change it, under Settings → Files & folders → Project format.
• VideoReDo cannot open a .swproj, so if you move projects between the two editors, stay on .vprj. Both formats open, save and queue exactly as before.
• The watcher writes whichever you choose, and the Batch Manager takes either. Double-clicking a .swproj in your file manager opens it in Snipwright, on Linux and Windows.

🎬 Film4, and channels that frame their breaks

Some channels show the same short, full-screen card at the very start and end of every advert break — Film4's red ident is the clearest example. When you save a corrected project, Chalkline now learns that card as well as the logo, but only if it appears at the edges of most of the breaks and never in the programme itself. A card that also turns up in programmes is refused, and on several channels it was.

Once learned, the card does two things:

• It puts each break's edges on the exact frame. On Film4 films shown letterboxed, the breaks were already found, but their edges came out five to eight seconds adrift — cutting a few seconds of the film at every break and leaving the sponsor card in at the other end. They now land within a fraction of a second of where you would cut. ITV1, ITV4, Rewind TV and Sky Mix turned out to have cards too, and their edges tighten as well.
• On a channel where nothing else marks the breaks, it finds them. A full-screen Film4 film gives the other techniques nothing at all; now every break is found from the ident alone.

It was checked against recordings whose card was learned from a different film, since that is how it will be used, and it changed nothing on channels without a card. One limit: the card marks advert breaks, not the start and end of a recording, so on a full-screen film the lead-in and the end may still need trimming by hand.

🔗 The Joiner and the batch queue

Joining recordings that do not match means re-encoding the whole thing, which can take a long time — exactly when you would rather it ran in the background.

• Joiner → Queue Joiner List to Batch, or Queue to batch in the Joiner window, queues the join instead of running it now. It asks the same questions Create Video does, keeps your answers with the job, and uses the Batch Manager's profile and output folder like any other job.
• A join you have already started can be handed over too. The Joiner now uses the same progress window as an export, with Send to Batch, and the join carries on in the Batch Manager from where it was rather than starting again.

💬 Subtitles

• Subtitles came on by themselves in every exported .mkv. A broadcast recording does not say whether its subtitles should be on, and the export marked them as the default track, so most players switched them on. They are no longer marked. For files you have already exported, the tools/fix-subtitle-defaults tool clears the flag in place — it shows what it would change before changing anything.
• The export summary says which subtitles the file kept — "DVB subtitles (eng)", say, or "None" — read from the finished file itself, and the summary in the log says the same, batch exports included.
• Tools → Show video programme information now lists the subtitle streams: type, language, PID and page.
• A join that has to be re-encoded cannot carry subtitles, and until now it dropped them without a word. It now says so in the summary and the log. A join of scenes that all match is not re-encoded and keeps them.

🪟 A faster first start on Windows

Windows Defender checks every file Snipwright loads the first time it starts after a reboot, and that roughly doubled the first start. The Windows installer now offers, at the end, to exclude Snipwright's own Python folder from those checks.

It explains the trade-off first — Defender stops scanning that folder altogether — and does nothing unless you say yes. It needs administrator permission for that one step, so Windows will ask. Later starts are quick either way, and Snipwright's log now records how long each start took.

Smaller things

• A channel could keep switching between logos that were as good as each other, on differences of a fraction of a percent, announcing "a better logo" every time. A logo now has to be clearly better before it takes over.
• Ticking or unticking Favourites Only in Save Video jumped back to the first profile in the list. It keeps your choice now — or, if the box hides it, the nearest favourite with the same container.
• Save Project As could ignore the format you chose, and choosing EDL could save a file called name.vprj.edl. The format you choose now decides, and the name follows it.
• The export summary was mostly English in the German build: only its title was translated. All of it is now.
• The user guide now says how to open the watcher's window — a left-click on the tray icon — and what the right-click menu offers.

Bug reports are welcome, especially with a sample recording — a short clip cut with ffmpeg -ss … -t 60 -i recording.ts -c copy sample.ts is usually enough. If an export comes out with audio missing or out of sync, or with a subtitle track missing, the log from that run is the single most useful thing you can attach. The full changelog is in CHANGELOG.md.