yewee v1.4

First release under the yewee name — and the first with real installers.

Downloads

Platform	File	Notes
macOS (Apple Silicon)	Yewee-1.4.0.dmg	Signed (Developer ID). Not yet notarised — first open on another Mac needs right-click → Open.
Windows 10/11 x64	yewee-setup-1.4.exe	Unsigned — SmartScreen will warn: More info → Run anyway. Per-user install, no admin needed.

Licensing is live: unlicensed installs run in full for 72 hours, then hold their outputs until a key is entered. Keys are issued from the Licence Admin and verified offline.

What's new since v1.3

Capture, proven on a live festival rig

• Cameras are now selected by device name, not list position. Camera indices genuinely shuffle between processes and replugs — on this rig the same Blackmagic UltraStudio Recorder 3G sat at index 0 and index 1 minutes apart — and the old picker could open the wrong camera with no error. Names are resolved against OpenCV's own enumeration (including its internal uniqueID sort) at the moment of opening. Saved sources survive replugs and reboots; a missing camera fails loudly and lists what is connected.
• Verified end-to-end at a festival: Blackmagic SDI feed in, faces cutout out, on both program and cutout outputs.

Windows

• A real installer (Inno Setup): desktop icon optional, no services, nothing at startup, uninstall keeps your licence and settings.
• onnxruntime-gpu on a machine without CUDA no longer crashes at launch (cublas64_12.dll missing). GPU providers that fail to load now fall back to the CPU detector, and --doctor reports which one actually works.

macOS

• The app is code-signed with the hardened runtime, and the camera-permission prompt now genuinely appears on first launch and is waited for. (It had never worked: the request needs the main run loop, a registered block signature, and a foreground app — all three were missing.)
• Packaged apps write settings and logs to ~/Library/Application Support/yewee/, never inside the bundle.

Identity

• Renamed from facetrack to yewee, new mask-style icon, site at yeweetracker.letissier.ie.

Known limits

• Windows build is unsigned (certificate pending) — expect the SmartScreen warning.
• macOS notarisation pending — expect a right-click → Open on first launch on Macs other than the build machine.
• NVIDIA GPU accelerated detection needs the CUDA 12 runtime + cuDNN installed on the machine; without them the CPU detector (YuNet) is used automatically.

Latest build

Rolling unsigned build from the most recent manual run.

facetrack v1.3 (superseded by v1.4)

Superseded: this tag predates the rename to yewee and never carried installers. Download the current release instead: https://github.com/legofsalmon/facetrack/releases/tag/v1.4

facetrack v1.2

Capture cards, mask shaping, and machine-load safety.

Capture cards

• Capture format and Capture driver are now panel controls (Input card). Pro cards usually refuse "auto" and need an exact signal — ask for 1080p50 and pick DirectShow and Blackmagic DeckLink / Magewell Pro / AVerMedia PCIe / AJA KONA come up on Windows. USB devices (Elgato, Magewell USB, AJA U-TAP) keep working everywhere.
• Re-applying the same source reconnects with the current settings — also a manual kick for a card that has wedged. The camera scanner now probes 8 slots for multi-card machines.
• README documents the per-vendor paths, plus an honest ST 2110 / Blackmagic IP10 status: no native software path (needs PTP NICs + Rivermax/MTL; IP10 has no public SDK), so use a DeckLink IP card inbound or an NDI→2110 gateway outbound.

Machine-load safety

Nothing previously limited how much of a machine facetrack could take — the AI runtimes default to every core. New Machine load panel card, both settings also enabled by the Power saver preset:

• Limit CPU use — caps the ML runtimes to about a third of the cores, always leaving some in reserve (2 cores → 1, 12 → 4). Measured 448% → 347% CPU at the same frame rate on a 12-core Mac. On macOS only the ONNX models are capped (the OpenCV wheel uses GCD, which ignores thread limits); Windows caps both.
• Auto relief (on by default) — if the pipeline cannot hold the frame budget for 5 seconds it sheds quality in three steps (silhouette less often → face finding every other frame → detector size capped), restoring itself once there is headroom. Your own settings are never rewritten.
• Frame-rate ceiling — every source now paces to its own fps, so a 30 fps camera caps the loop at 30.

Cutout and panel

• Silhouette margin (−30…+30 px): the people-shape equivalent of cutout margin. Shrinking trims the background fringe matting models leave on hair and shoulders.
• Performance card bars now scale against the priciest stage so small stages are visible, with a stable layout at any value width.

Fixes

• fps was reported optimistically — the average over-weighted cheap frames when work landed on alternate frames (a 30 fps source read as 37–41). It now averages frame time.
• The frame pacer banked timing debt and burst to "catch up" under load.

Install: download the source ZIP below, then double-click Facetrack.app (Mac) or Facetrack Windows.bat (Windows). Model licences unchanged — see LICENSE (RVM is GPL-3.0, commercial use fine; SCRFD remains under InsightFace research terms).

facetrack v1.1

Everything since v1.0, headlined by:

• Cutout system: faces feed with rectangles / soft ovals / people silhouette; three swappable silhouette engines — PP-HumanSeg (fast), MODNet (quality), RVM video matting (best) — with margin, edge softness and steadiness controls
• Outputs matrix: Program / Overlay / Faces / Mask, each to NDI and/or Syphon-Spout with identical controls; new Mask feed (luma matte or on-alpha) for external keying
• Performance meter: per-feature cost bars in the panel + a header load%% chip
• Show hardening: keep-awake, 30s watchdog, per-feed error recovery, black-on-signal-loss, double-launch guard, panel PIN, crash auto-restart + log file
• Panel: switchable preview tabs (incl. Mask), brand colour, sticky preview, remote log view, truthful feed status
• Icon launchers (Facetrack.app / desktop shortcut), self-bootstrapping setup, models bundled in the repo

Install: download the source ZIP, double-click Facetrack.app (Mac) or Facetrack Windows.bat. Model licences: see LICENSE (RVM is GPL-3.0 — commercial use fine; SCRFD remains under InsightFace research terms).

facetrack v1.0

First stable release: live face detection + tracking to NDI with a web control panel.

Install: download the source ZIP below (or clone), then double-click Facetrack.app (Mac) or Facetrack Windows.bat (Windows). Everything — Python, packages, models — is bundled or auto-downloaded. First run takes a few minutes; every run after starts in seconds.

Highlights

• YuNet (CPU) / SCRFD (NVIDIA GPU) detector, auto-selected
• Stable track IDs + optional expression labels
• Dual NDI output (program + graphics-on-alpha overlay), Syphon/Spout texture share
• Web control panel: presets, live tuning, source switching, pause/restart/quit, optional PIN
• Auto-saved settings, crash auto-restart, log file, self-check (--doctor)

Models are included in the repo/ZIP. Note: the SCRFD model (GPU detector) is under InsightFace's non-commercial research terms — see LICENSE.