I suggest posting the specific features you're interested in
I would say there was quite a lot done to video in MC30 but it would be fair to say that quite a bit of it is work on which subsequent, user facing, features can be built. For example video analysis/black bar detection in itself is not so useful but combine it with jrvr making use of that & it's v useful.
With that in mind, I think you either wait til the job is done and then pay or you fund the ongoing development and hope it gets there in the end. Both choices are valid but obviously you need enough of the latter to exist otherwise it's not going to get there in the end. In any case, seems likely that a detailed MC31 announcement post must be coming soon given the board is public so there can't be long to wait if you're in the "wait and see" camp 
The first MC release for me was MC28, because I heard about JRVR. Both MC28 and MC29 had a lot of impressive work done on the video renderer, subtitles rendering, BluRay playback, DolbyVision and HDR support. I was surprised to see no major changes (except the addition of the software deinterlacing) in MC30. Like I said, I was using MC29 till two weeks ago as I was missing nothing.
I did not ask explicitly for anything in my previous post, as I already saw in the past that it does not seem to have any relevance to what gets developed during a release. It seems like the focus of the development for a release is already decided by the time the new release announcement, so I just asked to see what the plan is.
Going by a
post on the same topic in the MC30 section of the forum, seems like not revealing what will be worked upon is intentional to make people pay upfront a smaller fee even if they later discover they will not get anything interesting to them in return: "You can wait and see or take a chance." I've already played the "Insert coin, try again" game once and won nothing, was hoping not to once more.
Since I don't want this to sound like I'm just throwing a tantrum as there's nothing to do anymore for JRVR & DVD/BluRay playback, here's a list of fixes and features I asked for in the past:
- fixing playback of BluRay and DVD ISO files straight from Theater View in MC, so that ISOs are not mounted twice, in two virtual disc drives, when you start playback of such an iso file (very old bug, reported since MC28 several times);
- make the Theater View "Explore" plugin, which is a file browser, act like a file browser; this means display file names not metadata "title", and let the user browse inside a BluRay or a DVD folder to play an individual m2ts file for instance;
- an update of the libbluray library; it's now at v1.3.4 while MC is using a commit a bit after v1.3.0;
- support for the remote color keys for BluRay playback (as libbluray supports sending the keys to it)
- change the JRVR gamma processing option into an useful feature, such as to let you view video content as if your physical display gamma was set to 2.4 while your actual display gamma is 2.2 for instance; I manually change the physical display gamma from 2.2 (for PC work) to 2.4 when I want to watch a movie in MC, as leaving it to 2.4 all the time is too dark for PC work, and that could be taken care of by gamma processing in MC instead
Author
Topic: What features will version 31 have (Read 7997 times)