devedeng-extended/ROADMAP.md

Roadmap — devedeng-extended

Direction for the hardsub/auto-split fork of DeVeDe-NG. Ordered by leverage: the safety net comes first because everything after it is safer to build once it exists. Checkboxes track status.

Phase A — Safety net & correctness (do first)

• A1. Automated test suite (pytest). DONE — tests/ with 43 headless tests covering the split planner + chapter helpers, compute_high_profile_bitrate, ffmpeg command generation (profiles, text/image hardsub, 2-pass, even pad/crop, AC3 448k, progress-to-file, -ss), ffprobe subtitle detection, and executor I/O. CI in .forgejo/workflows/tests.yml. Caught/guards the 448k→384k clamp bug.

• A2. Harden subprocess I/O (kills the deadlock class). DONE — the executor now drains child stdout/stderr with background reader threads into thread-safe buffers, consumed by a GLib timer on the main thread, so a stalled/wedged main loop can never backpressure-deadlock a child on a full pipe. stdout can go straight to a file, stdin is fed from a thread, the retained log is bounded, and wait_end runs once. Verified a 2MB- output child completes with the main loop never running.

• A3. Surface real errors to the user. DONE — the error dialog now leads with a focused summary (failed step, its command, last stderr lines) built from the executor's bounded stderr_data, with the full log still in the expander. Markup-escaped + unit-tested.

• A4. Narrow bare except: blocks. Config loading, pre_function/ post_function, ffprobe JSON parsing, etc. use except: pass, silently swallowing real bugs. Catch specific exceptions; log the rest.

Phase B — Finish & polish current fork features

• B1. Multi-disc burning flow. The split feature makes N ISOs but the done-handler only offers the last one. Add "burn disc 1 → prompt to insert disc 2 → …" so the split workflow is complete end to end.

• B2. Per-disc menu space in the split planner. plan_disc_split reserves menu space only on disc 0, but per-disc menus now exist on every split disc. Menus are small (a few MB) and fit in the 10% margin, so this is a correctness nicety, not urgent. Reserve menu bytes per disc.

• B3. OCR for image subtitles (optional path). Image subs (PGS/VOBSUB) are currently overlaid as bitmaps. Add an optional tesseract/OCR path to convert them to styled text when the user prefers crisp text and the tool is installed (this was the originally-discussed "OCR optional" branch).

• B4. Progress UX. One raw-percentage bar per core, no overall view. Add: ETA per encode, an overall "disc N of M / file X of Y" indicator, and persistent per-file labels. Matters most for long unattended batches.

• B5. "Already DVD" guard. Warn when the input is already 720×480 MPEG-2 (likely a previous DVD output) to avoid a needless second- generation transcode.

Phase C — Modernization & reach

• C1. Drop the avconv/avprobe backend. libav/avconv has been defunct since ~2018 and doubles the maintenance surface for every encode change (each ffmpeg edit must be mirrored). Remove it once ffmpeg is the assumed backend; simplifies converter.py and the converters.

• C2. CLI / headless mode. Everything requires the GTK GUI. A devede-ng --project x.devedeng --output dir/ (and ideally a direct input video → hardsub → 480p NTSC → split → ISOs one-shot) would enable scripting, server use, and far easier automated testing.

• C3. GTK3 → GTK4. GTK3 is maintenance-only; this is the long-term wall. Large effort; schedule deliberately.

• C4. Consolidate UI construction. GLADE .ui files are hand-edited XML (fragile — newer widgets are built in Python instead). Pick one approach (likely programmatic or GTK4 templates) and converge.

Known limitations carried from current work

• Split discs: burning is manual per-disc (see B1).
• High profile uses a 3000k quality floor / 9000k cap; near-cap bitrates stress old players (acceptable — it's the explicit "high quality" choice).
• No tests / no CI yet (A1).