December Progress - Overlay Demo!

The above pictures are previews of the upcoming Overlay Support.  There is a lot a picture can't tell you, but I'll work to explain that over the next few days now that we're moving into a 'fit and finish' portion of development on it.  This is the last major engine rewrite for a while, so the next few months we will be focusing on documentation, bugfixes, and features such as the 'offline user' one and some automation items on the backlog.  

This feature should close out many of the EXIF requests, and will give us a platform that should delight any of you that use Exif data or want to embed text into your images such as who is in them, where they're located, and more.

"What is an overlay?"
An overlay is an invisible 'window' on top of the images that you're showing which can be used to show more data, other images, or even animated gifs.   You can place many items onto an overlay (the one above has 13!).  Overlays will allow for you to add custom text, logos, banners, images and to showcase information.  If you're a home user that wants to have the name of their home theater on there..you can!  A musem that wants to add an exhibit name...or a gallery that wants to showcase the name of a work and some additional information about it...now all of that is achievable. If you're a photographer and want to know what camera model, Fstops and shutter values were used on a photo...if the data is there, you can show it, and you control what, where, and how the data is displayed.  You can control if it's on the left side or right, the font, and the color, and adjust each element seperately.

What you're looking at above is an overlay I designed.  The upper left is an Exif showcase...now any tag that is in the Exif spec and that is contained in an image should be accessible for you to add to an overlay.The upper left shows things like ISO Speed, Shutter Speed, the make of the camera and White Balance, but there are dozens of tags related to photography that can be added. As each new image loads in, the data loads with it.

The upper right shows that you can now have multiple clocks.  We've added 24 hour support (thanks to your feedback!) and you can now add as many clocks as you'd like and format them.  The upper right shows the date and time seperated...a much requested feature.  Keep in mind this is 2 'clocks' and so if you want the date in another location you can place it anywhere on the screen you'd like.  Note also the fonts are different for the two clocks....each element can be fully customized.

The lower left is a new feature...you can now just add static text.  This allows you to show the name of a Gallery, Theater, or just a 'welcome' message to guests. It can be used like a watermark or however you see fit.

The lower right is a demo of the file information...file name, size, width, height and other info is now available.  In the future we'll work to make this smarter.

Did you notice the little fourish in the lower center?  That's an image...you can now apply an image as an overlay..wherever you want! When I get some design time I'll show how powerful this can be, but for the Home Theater groups wanting to have a "Now Showing" and "My Theater" type overlay on posters...this enables that. It also enables the addition of digital picture frames around images.  I'm sure you'll come up with many more uses.  Transparent pngs maintain transparency, and so do animated gifs.  Yes..you can now add your own animated gifs on top of an image.

What doesn't work:
Right now, due to limitations we're hitting on a raspberry pi...we can't get these on top of videos.  I believe it may be an OS limitation, and am investigating if we can get around it using a different version of Raspbian with a different compositor.  

I have not completed the work yet (hoping to in the next day or so) to convert a GPS coordinate to a city.  but with this engine we should be able to do that, so hoping to sneak that in this week.

The "Sci fi" theme is behind.  This is due to a need to rewrite the way the themes are handled, but I'm trying to get out of 'rewrite the world' type work so I can focus directly on your feedback and bugs.  So it may be a few months before Scifi has all of the functionality of the base theme for now.  The way I use it is I go to the base theme, get my settings in order, then switch to sci-fi and use that for control.

Frame Sync is still broken, but I've investigated and have a plan to fix it. I'm hoping to get that in this month as well (I'm taking advantage of a week off of work :) )

Finally, the goal is to have it so that each playlist can choose an overlay.  Right now a single overlay is able to be edited. I'm going to try to get this in by end of month.  That's where things get very interesting...your folder of movie posters can choose a movie poster appropriate overlay for instance.

My goal is to get this out as an Alpha release in a few days...as usual find QwkSilver in the discord to jump on that.  We'll take the feedback, move to beta in early January, and my goal is to have this stable and out by end of January.

What else is happening
There's other work going on to.  We have a few bug fixes we've turned around, as well as an entire video rewrite for better performance and memory handling.  There's a new, much more granular logger coming which will help us debug issues and develop faster (it was already helpful with this work!).   We're also prioritizing bugs and plan on spending a good portion of January and February addressing those.

Patreons...Thankyou!
Patreon wise we have crossed 200 Patreons which is amazing.  We usually dip at the end of the month but our dips are getting smaller, and our community is growing.  We have incredibly ambitious plans for 2023, and if you've been following us hopefully you see we aren't slowing down, but plan on keeping things going even faster as we move forward.  January is going to be an automation focused month...for both integrating into home assistant and such, but also we have some features that we plan on adding direction to the frame. I also want to take some time to document things so that other developers that want to extend and build plugins have what they need.  

This project has come SO far from the old python script it started as.  It's challenging and fun and rewarding in all the right ways, and I want to thank all of you for your support, but also just being a great community.  The alpha feedback we get, the features you come up with, getting to see your builds, hearing the stories of loved ones getting to enjoy the work.  We love all of it, and we appreciate you.

We'll keep working hard to make things better. Until next time...hope everyone's having a great holiday and is getting ready for the new year!