Tools - Twan Wintjes

History

Here you can find some screenshots of AVCHDCoder prior to AVCHDCoder 10.08.03. As you can see it started as an extension of AVCHD Bitrate Calculator. After that you can see it evolve. The first public release was Beta 2 that was released on February 1st 2009. Later on I will write some comments to explain everything.

September 2008 - Before AVCHDCoder

At the time I was using MediaCoder to convert my videos. After doing this for a while I came with the idea to build an application to calcalate the bitrate for the videostream. There wasn't an application to do this. On forums people where talking about 7%, 8% overhead. I wasn't satisfied with that so I focussed on finding a better formula. The application I came up with was called 'AVCHD Bitrate Calculator' which I later renamed to 'AVCHDCalculator'. This calculator was far from perfect and it evolved over time.

December 2008 - The beginning

Still converting my movies with MediaCoder I asked myself: why do I need so many applications to just create 1 AVCHD disc? and why do I need to wait for each process to be finished before I can continue? At this point I came up with the idea to create a converter myself.

But what needed to application to do? I came up with this list:

• Handle MKV files
• Extract audio stream or downconvert it to AC3
• Automatically add borders to the video - Major feature, no other application did this
• Use a default encoding profile that cannot be changed - Major feature
• Handle srt files
• Convert to DVD5 or DVD9
• Generate ISO file so it is ready to burn
• Adding jobs to a queue
• Adding a movie to the queue within 30 seconds. - Major feature, I demanded it could be done very fast. Waiting while adding files is pointless.

With almost no development experience I started working on an extension for 'AVCHD Bitrate Calculator' to convert movies. I called it X264toISO and it was not publically available. Alpha 1 was born.

Februari 2009 - First release

Soon I realized it was better to create a seperate application for converting movies. The first thing I needed was a name. AVCHDCoder was the first thing that popped up and comes from AVCHD and MediaCoder. On februari 1st I released Beta 1. The bitrate calculator was the biggest feature. There was no need to calulate it yourself. It did work but contained a lot of bugs. Then I released a lot of versions in the first 3 weeks:

• Beta 2
• Beta 2.02
• Beta 2.05
• Beta 2.08
• Beta 2.09
• Beta 2.15
• Beta 2.23
• Beta 3.08

At this time I've choosen month.day to be my version number. This way it is very easy to tell when a specific version is released. After the release of Beta 3.08 most major problems were solved. It was the first version that worked fairly good. It was the first milestone for AVCHDCoder. These major features where added from Beta 2 until Beta 3.08:

• Internal srt
• M2TS input support
• Extract core of DTS-HD
• PGS support
• Chapter editor
• BD25 output
• Multilanguage

Beta 4.18 - Major upgrade

After the release of Beta 3.08 I started working on a major upgrade of AVCHDCoder. I came with new features like basic menu's and secundairy subtitles track. But the biggest improvement was the User Interface, in previous releases it looked horrible. Using AVCHDCoder became so much easier and clearer. After Beta 2.23.1 AVCHDCoder was fairly reliable and easy to use. This was the second milestone.

Beta 09.06.07 - Biggest improvement since the first release

to be continued...

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