November Mid Month Updates - Release immiment

Hey Patreons! Lots going on, so wanted to give some updates and answer some questions that have been asked directyl to me via messages as well as in the discord, as well as provide some updates on development.   The 'release imminent' posts are always my favorite...it means the work we've been doing for months is about to become something we can all enjoy!


Next update

First things first...a release is imminent.  All reviews are complete, we had a late bug that we had to fix, and we're moving to packaging of the release.  This release will include plugins, and will be compatable with the two in the store to give access to the scheduler and Pixabay.  This will also enable other plugins to be developed. We have some overlay fixes, video thumbnails, editor improvments and other work as well. It's been a while since we did a full update, but getting plugins right was critical.  


Raspberry pi 5 / Bookworm update
We're starting to have users that have raspberry pi 5's joining...and to be honest, we're not quite ready for it.  When Raspberry pi 5 dropped, we were in the middle of the plugin work we're just now releasing, and the amount of work and changes to support that 5 is going to take us a bit.  With the Pi 5, a new OS was released that changes how graphics are handled (known as the window manager (x11) which is moving to the Wayland compositor).  When we tried to move to the 'bullseye' OS we hit major issues where rotation didn't work for videos, and we had extreme flickering in other areas.  We decided to stay back an OS and wait for the next update, and now that it's out, we're going to work to move to it. I expect this work to start in January to work on this, and we'll push a beta as soon as we think we have it working well enough to test. Please note...this is VERY likely going to require a fresh image. Please work in the meantime to backup your images/playlists/assets folders.  We'll be providing tutorials on how to explicitly do this and try to make the migration as painless as possible.

Bug Fixes

The team all has family during the upcoming holidays, so I am going to ask that they don't go too deep into any major features, but focus on smaller bug fixes and tweaks where we can.  I myself plan on working on some holiday packs.  

Common issues we're seeing

- Black screens when playing videos - Please ensure that the video out cable is next to the power cable. This is our #1 support request by  a HUGE margin.
- Gesture sensor issues - Please make sure you're on the latest release.  To get the sensor to work simply flip the 'enable' button on the settings menu and reboot.  If you're on the September release and do that, things should just work. No need for any further installs or anything.
- Black screen on startup - If you get a black screen or it appears to turn 'off', please reimage the card. We're seeing this sometimes when the image gets corrupt...it's not clear why.  Also please make sure you have an 'A2' micro SD card if possible
- Imaging - PLEASE download the image we provide and write that to the SD card.  We commonly have people coming from Dynaframe 2 that are installing an image of Raspbian and then trying to install DF on top of it.  Dynaframe Pro is provided as an image for simplicity to save you a ton of setup hassel (we setup samba shares, networking, etc.)

- playing youtube videos - The 'experimental' page will let you send a youtube video directly to the frame.
- Video playback issues - If you're seeing issues with Dynaframe playing back videos, please try this:
  Hit 'escape' to exit Dynaframe. You'll see a menu at the upper left side, use that to launch 'vlc'
  launch the file from VLC and see if it plays back.  Dynaframe supports 1080p 30FPS videos in .h264 format, but also should play anything VLC can play back reliably.  We filter videos which MAY play back in VLC ok, but have shown instability over time (and then give you settings to override that decision if you choose to or want to see if your videos are ok).  

We're always trying to make things better and figure out ways to fix issues like that so that our users always have a great experience from start to loading images.  Please keep the feedback coming and we're going to keep the features rolling.  

Remember, we have extensive DOCS here!
https://tinyurl.com/Dynaframedoc

Thankyou
As always, thankyou for your support.  When this started...5 years ago? and was a simple python script, I couldn't dream of it becoming what it has today.  This next few months is going to be wild.