This update fixes the two most common complaints from reviews: translations of fast-changing text (movie/FMV subtitles, cutscenes) arriving late, and in-game chat windows not being translated at all. Instead of adding options, we measured where the time actually went and reworked the pipeline. All numbers below are from our own measurements on real game footage (18 recorded sequences, 6 repetitions each) and synthetic subtitle/chat scenarios; your results will vary by game.
IMPROVED: Subtitles and other fast-changing text now appear much sooner. Previously the display logic waited for the same new text to be seen twice before replacing the old translation, which cost a full cycle (about half a second) on every subtitle. Now a clearly different text is replaced immediately, while small OCR wobbles are still filtered to avoid flicker. Measured on real footage: median display delay 658 to 579 ms overall, and on subtitle-style content up to 1167 to 363 ms (Mortal Kombat 11 credits) and 981 to 622 ms (hard-subbed video); missed texts halved (208 to 106) and texts that never got shown fell by two thirds (150 to 50).
IMPROVED: Chat windows are now translated. The old change detector compared the screen on a coarse grid and simply could not see a small chat panel adding one line, so in full-screen auto mode a typical MMO chat box was translated once per minute (95% of lines missed). The new detector looks for text-like changes (edges appearing or disappearing), adapts to how much each area normally moves, and watches the places where text was last found more closely. On our chat scenario missed lines went from 95% to 0%, and wasted OCR runs on moving video backgrounds dropped by about 75%.
IMPROVED: Setting a shorter auto-translation interval now actually makes things faster. Previously an internal queue could hand the worker a stale frame, so a 200 ms interval was slower than 400 ms; the worker now always processes the latest frame, and manual translation (hotkey) always takes priority over the automatic cycle. Drawing a region around a subtitle bar is also no longer slower than full screen (the OCR input was being upscaled for wide crops; it no longer is). We also added a safety net for the high-quality background option: if it is too slow for auto mode on your PC, the app temporarily falls back to the standard background for auto mode only and tells you once.
FIXED: Traditional Chinese texts and the "Low-VRAM mode" description no longer show stray Markdown symbols. Various diagnostic and test improvements under the hood; recognition accuracy is unchanged (verified character-for-character on our test corpus).
DLC: The free "High-Quality Chinese Pack" is still under Steam store review after we updated the AI disclosure. It is included in this build; once the store page is approved you can add it to your library immediately. We will post here as soon as it is live. Thank you for your patience.