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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lehmden" data-source="post: 1307291" data-attributes="member: 109222">Hi.There is something brand new from Media-Buddy... I am currently rewriting Media-Buddy from the ground up with the help of AI—and this time, it is being built to be completely platform-independent. For this reason, Media-Buddy V2 is being developed in Python. Python is nearly ideal for creating cross-platform applications using an accessible, easy-to-understand language. It will still be quite some time before the first public test version is ready, but several features familiar from V1 are already functional. Most of these have not simply been carried over; they have been modernized, both technically and functionally. As always, users will be able to configure all of these "new" features themselves.For instance, various Dolby Vision profiles are fully preserved during processing. With profiles 8.1 and 8.4, this can be achieved (almost) losslessly, even when re-encoding the video. For profiles 5, 10, and 20, however, this is only possible via "stream copy"—meaning the video codec or file size cannot be altered. If such changes are nonetheless selected, the program will override them to ensure the resulting video remains functional. A special case is profile 7 (typically found on UHD Blu-rays), which consists of multiple layers. If you wish to retain all layers (such as the FEL—Full Enhancement Layer), you cannot re-encode the video. However, if an 80 GB Blu-ray rip is simply too large for your collection, you can convert profile 7 to profile 8.1 and then re-encode the video to a much smaller size. While this does not preserve the complete Dolby Vision experience, it comes quite close using profile 8.1. The user can choose whether to keep profile 7 as is or convert it to 8.1; the program handles everything else automatically. Furthermore, Dolby Vision profile 20 presents a unique quirk: it is incompatible with the Matroska container, meaning such videos cannot be saved as .mkv files. Should Media-Buddy encounter one of these extremely rare files, it will automatically use the .mp4 container, which is fully compatible.Quality settings have been updated to a much more user-friendly 7-level system. Users no longer need to understand technical terms like "CQ24"; they simply select the quality level they prefer, and the program automatically determines the appropriate settings for that level based on the codec being used. Furthermore, the software provides a preliminary estimate to warn you if the resulting file might end up larger than the original—an outcome you generally want to avoid. With a fixed quality setting, this can indeed happen, leading to unnecessarily large files; after all, it is technically impossible to achieve "better" image quality than the original through re-encoding. In such cases, the selected quality level is automatically adjusted downward to prevent the creation of an unnecessarily large video. To help you determine which quality level suits your needs, there is a built-in test feature that re-encodes segments of your source videos at various quality levels and saves them side-by-side. This allows you to experiment and find the quality level that is sufficient for you, without generating excessively large files. It is best to try this out for yourself, as the perception of quality is highly subjective and significantly influenced by your own hardware. What might look "perfect" to me could appear as a "blurry mess" to you (or vice versa). It also does not matter whether you use x264 or HEVC_NVENC as the output codec; the resulting video will consistently maintain roughly the same level of image quality. While different codecs will naturally result in files of varying sizes, the most important aspect—the image quality—remains highly consistent.There are also new developments when it comes to handling high-quality audio tracks. If you have a DTS:X or Atmos audio track, you cannot normalize it or apply dynamic range compression without losing the associated metadata. In such cases, Media-Buddy can—if desired—generate two separate audio tracks: an "everyday" track that has been normalized, alongside the original, unaltered high-resolution track.The scrapers (used to fetch metadata from TVDB, TMDB, and Fanart.tv) have also been overhauled and modernized. For instance, if a description is not available in German—or whichever language the user has selected—it will now be automatically translated, provided that previous attempts to retrieve it from various sources (TVDB, TMDB, etc.) have failed. The system first checks TVDB; if no German description is found there, it proceeds to check TMDB. If nothing suitable is found there either, it retrieves the English description and translates it automatically. This ensures that the user always receives a description in their preferred language (provided they have enabled the translation feature).All of this is already functional and tested. The next step now requires the GUI. To that end, the first window is currently functional and nearing completion:[ATTACH=full]219396[/ATTACH]All buttons and "expandable" sections are already functional; this is no longer just a mockup. However, the actual underlying logic—the specific actions these elements are intended to trigger—has not yet been fully implemented. You can already use the "Search" button to select the relevant folders, which then appear in the input fields (as shown in the screenshot). If you click "Let's Go," however, a notification appears stating that the functionality has not yet been implemented.That is the current state of development. I am very excited to test the initial features in day-to-day use. So far, all CLI tests have been successful. The source code will be made available on GitHub later on; however, that is not yet possible, as I first need to find a way to "hide" my API keys so that they cannot simply be read from the source code. Doing so would open the door to misuse and would likely lead to the keys being blocked very quickly...</blockquote>

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