Switch

Switch is a media playback, inspection, and conversion tool for professionals that gives you everything you need to play, inspect, and correct your multiformat media in one easy-to-use application.

Switch is available in three editions: Play, Plus, and Pro. Compare the features and pricing.

Note: Switch 4 is a free upgrade for customers with Premium Support; simply download Switch 4 and install. Please check your email for special upgrade instructions, or Contact Desktop Sales if you need assistance. For customers without Premium Support, Switch 4 is a paid upgrade.

New

• Added support for playing back files as they are being created (Does not support caption decoding while configured to play back growing files)
• Added localization for Chinese (Simplified)
• Added Dolby-E detection; tracks that are determined to be Dolby-E will be silenced to prevent the white noise that results from playing them back as PCM; decoding of Dolby-E is not yet supported
• Added playback statistics as a video overlay, including the number of dropped frames
• Added frame metadata display as a video overlay which details what metadata is attached to the current frame, such as timecode or captions
• Added ability to flag frames or sequences of frames and add notes to them; this can be displayed in the timeline
• You can now specify the timecode format that should be used to interpret SCC files, including frame rate and drop-frame or non-drop-frame
• Added support for decoding and playing back Teletext captions (OP-47 and OP-42)

Improved

• Added experimental support for complex CPL files in IMF packages
• All features can now be demoed before purchasing of the licenses that support them
• The colorspace settings and display within the inspector now have details that include color primaries, matrix coefficients, and transfer characteristics

Fixed

• Switch is now more lenient with MPEG-2 Program Streams that start with invalid data
• Switch now supports H.264 video streams that lack Access Unit Delimiters
• Fixed a bug that caused LXF MPEG-2 NTSC 4:3 videos to display as widescreen
• Fixed a bug that caused line 21 captions to be mapped to line 22 when sent out to a BlackMagic device
• Switch is now more lenient when opening DNxHD in MOV with an ARES image description extension that does not end with 80 bytes of reserved data
• Fixed a bug that caused interlaced ProRes exports to use the wrong field dominance
• Extended the amount of initial delay supported for audio in MPEG-2 TS
• Fixed a bug that prevented display of captions from HEVC inside an MPEG-2 TS
• Improved the quality of video when seeking; we no longer rely on IDR frame flags, and instead begin decoding at the second previous I-frame
• Fixed a bug that prevented opening ASF files created by ffmpeg with an extended stream properties header that has an average time per frame of zero
• Fixed a bug that caused frames to display out of order when playing an MXF OP-1a from Adobe Premiere if the body partitions do not start with I-frames
• Fixed a bug that prevented opening MP4 files from Vantage whose ‘meta’ atoms are written as a full box with an extra four bytes after the type
• Fixed a bug that caused EAC-3 5.1 audio with speaker labels in a different order than L, C, R, Ls, Rs, LFE to be played out to the wrong speakers
• Fixed a bug that prevented jumping to a timecode in a ProRes file
• Fixed a bug that caused audio/video synchronization loss in H.264 MPEG-2 TS due to audio packets being erroneously lost during the transition between stereo and joint stereo
• Fixed horizontal positioning of IMSC captions from MacCaption
• Fixed display of IMSC captions in terms of font, size, color, outline, and background
• Fixed loss of audio/video synchronization in TIFO files with mark-out frames
• Fixed a bug that caused progressive files to come out as interlaced when exporting XDCAM in an MPEG-2 PS or TS container
• When doing a frame rate conversion alone in the video processor, if we fail to configure the components due to an inability of the format converter, fallback to BGRA and try again; this prevents some export failures
• Switch will now prevent transcode exports of Dolby-E since decoding is not supported; pass-through is recommended instead
• Fixed several bugs that caused distorted audio when playing SMPTE 382M within a Digital Cinema Package
• Fixed a bug that caused a crash when exporting an audio-only file
• Added TTML to the list of supported extensions for the open secondary subtitle dialog; this allows them to be chosen without needing to change the extension to XML

Known Issues

• Decoding of closed captions is not currently supported while Switch is configured to watch for growing files
• Frames with long durations make time display appear to stall because it always shows the presentation time of the current frame
• ASF files with variable frame rate display incorrect frame rate in the inspector
• Detection of interlaced content in Windows Media files is not currently supported
• WMV sources exported to H.264 in either MPEG-2 TS or PS containers can results in A/V synchronization problems
• Publishing settings are lost when canceling to edit settings to meet requirements