"Decrese to HD" downsizes to 1280px or 720p regardless of aspect ratio

Is there a particular benefit for SVP to behave in its current way that I am unaware of?

It would make sense to me if 1280px width or 720p was a common laptop, monitor, or TV resolution...but unfortunately it is not.

Other than 10+ year old laptops (1280x800), 10+ year old monitors (1280x1024), and tablet/mobile devices that don't use x86 CPUs (1280x720 and 1280x800), nearly all displays are 1360x768 at minimum (including TVs that are advertised as 720p).  This means that nearly anybody using the the downsize to HD (720p) combined with fullscreen is going to be doing some sort of upscaling, so you'd ideally want to have as much of the source resolution as possible without it causing a reduction in performance.

For example, I currently use "downsize to HD" on my PC that is connected to a 1080p display as the PC's performance is inadequate for SVP to process at a full 1080p.  For videos with a 16:9 aspect ratio like 1920x1080, I'm getting the full resolution possible that my PC hardware could handle.  However, with any other aspect ratio like 2.4:1 and 1920x800, the fact that it downsizes all the way to 1280x534 means I'm actually leaving performance and/or resolution on the table as that is something like 25% fewer pixels than 1280x720.

The way I see it, because the resulting image is almost certainly going to be upscaled anyway, why wouldn't the user prefer a higher resolution result that would still have identical performance to the likes of 1280x720?

The profiles only change the interpolation settings, not the downscale or crop settings which are only applied globally and must be changed manually.

Thing is though, CPU performance isn't the issue in that I can run SVP at such high settings at 1280x720 to the point of the interpolation artifacts becoming problematic, but rather it's my GPU than can't handle interpolating anything greater than maybe 1440x800 or so.

The issue here is total pixel count and resolution, performance is merely a side-effect as it happens to partially result from those values.  1280x720 is around 0.92 megapixels while 1280x534 is around 0.68 megapixels making the latter considerably below what is considered "HD".

Ideally downscaling based on total pixels vs horizontal/vertical pixels would be two separate options (similar to the way SVP 3.1 had both "1280px width"/"720p height" as well as "75% of original size").

As already mentioned, unless it's a non-x86 tablet or smartphone, 99.99% of all displays marketed as "HD" are actually 1366x768 rather than 1280x720.  Remember that 1024x768 is the minimal resolution for Windows 8 and newer, and you obviously can't fit that on a 1280x720 display without downscaling (which would be sub-optimal for text clarity).

I'm using the pro version and have been since SVP 4 was in beta as I backed the original SVP4 Indiegogo fundraiser (you'll notice my username is present on the "Version and credits").

Nevertheless, unless I'm missing something, you actually can't resize the video resolution to whatever － that only applies to cropping; the only resizing options are "decrease to screen", "decrease to HD", and "resize to screen" and are applied globally.  This is one area what SVP 3.1 was actually more flexible in that it allowed you to resize to a variety of different sizes on a per-profile basis.

Could we please not drift too far off topic with regards to the original point of this thread?

Uhh, because I don't?  FHD is defined as 1920x1080.

High definition yes, but not "full HD" as that's defined as 1920x1080.

1080p by definition means 1080 vertical pixels in progressive scan, and 831 is less than 1080.

Contrary to what marketing may claim, a 1920x800 movie is not actually 1080p but rather is more akin to 2k (which is defined by horizontal pixel amount, not vertical; though even that technically refers to the cinema resolution of 2048px wide rather than 1920).  However, the likes of a 2.39 aspect blu-ray movies will in fact technically be 1080p as the letterboxing is "burned" into the video stream itself, meaning the actual video stream of the movie on the disc is actually 1920x1080 even if a good chunk of that is just encoded as black bars.

Much in the same way that "4k movies" don't have 4000 pixel widths even though 4k technically means it should, and much in the same way that 720p TVs will almost always be 768p, and much in the same way that 23.976fps and 29.97fps are commonly called "24fps" and "30fps" even though they're actually different from 24.00fps and 30.00fps.

Just because a term is used in a specific way does not mean it's actually accurate.  Most of these come down to human nature of feeling its "close enough", but this causes issues when one is trying to deal with specifics.

HD/UHD/SD is a television standard where the common display is 16:9; movie standards follow different resolutions such as 2k (2048x1080) and 4k (4096x2160) which use the slightly-wider 1.85 aspect ratio.

My point was that the specific "decrease to HD" function is therefore not particularly beneficial to those 768p users and they'd be better served by "decrease to screen" (which is SVP's default setting anyway).

There's nothing wrong with SVP's current resizing behavior, but its exposed functionality is a bit limited when compared to SVP 3.1 nevertheless.

SVP's "resize to screen" handles any resolution including non-standard ones, so the ability for SVP to downsize to such non-standard resolutions.

My apologies but I was completely unaware of the existence of this setting under "all settings".

Nevertheless, I'm at a loss on how to actually use such a setting on a per-profile basis as my understanding is that such settings are applied globally.