May Release is Ready!

Release: https://geek-toolkit.com/Releases/DynaframeProMayRelease1.zip
Instructions/quickstart: https://1drv.ms/w/s!AqxjM4_uBDJgxdYxoCkOHzDwGuD2xA?e=LCl5RJ

Note: This release does NOT include frame Sync...we just coulnd't get it in. If you're using that feature please stay on the previous release till we can get it integrated. 

This is an exciting day...up till now we've provided bug fixes, but this release is our first feature filled release!  You should recognize some of your feedback in this release (and if we didn't get to yours, please remind us but know we may have it on our 'next release' charter simply because we couldn't do everything!)

In this release:

Animated Gifs Support! - Place your favorite animated gifs in a folder and watch as they play and even transition into each other with the same fade effect usually reserved for Videos

Raspberry pi 3B support!  A hugely popular ask given the dearth of devices out there, we found there was a bug in an underlying system that was causing this to crash.  This is now fixed and along with the performance improvements, you'll see reasonable performance on a pi3!  Please note we still recommend a pi4, but at least if you have a pi3 you're not out in the cold. 

Looping Videos!  If you have a video that is shorter than the duration of the transition time, you can have the video replay automatically.  please note due to an issue on the pi, it'll 'pause' briefly, but it will keep replying till the transition time. We added a setting as well for this.

Video 'Zoom' - If you're playing some video formats such as a horizontal video on a vertical screen, this will help it fill the screen. We've been impresed with how may horizontal videos, when zoomed, are watchable on the vertical formats despite the sides being cut off.  Also if a video doesn't fill up a horizontal screen it'll zoom.  This cuts off content as a result, but is a tradeoff that you may want based on content. We have a setting, so you can choose!

Font/infobar improvements! - The infobar of the past was hardcoded and didn't handle change well.  The new improved infobar is SO much nicer....you'll notice a nicer display when showing time formats.  The default font is nicer, but now in settings there is a dropdown showing you all of the font choices on the system so you can easily scroll through and try them out! They'll instantly show if you hit up/down arrows on that selection box, and you'll see we've loaded up some fun ones to get you started.  For advanced users you can install fonts on the system and they'll show up there, or you can use a new experimental trick...front updating (see the experimental section for that!)

Getting started Documentation - You'll notice at the top of this release is now a getting started doc. I can update that so that it's constantly improving, with a better FAQ and such.  The getting started portion has been the toughest part so far for Dynaframe, and I vowed to get better. This is a major step of having things written down and in such a way we can improve.  I've also worked to remove reboot needs on startup and make it more fluid.

Offline Support - There have been  recent asks to support running the frame when it's not connected to a network.  This is now possible and documented in the getting started guide. Basically a keyboard hooked up will allow you to hit 'O' while the frame is running and it'll put it in offline mode, and no longer will require networking to start showing content.  You can also hit 'W' to load the web config page on the pi locally so you can still manage it (it takes a few mins to come up).  Once done please reboot to get out of it.  To get back to online mode hit 'N' and then reboot.  Quick note: If you can't click on the settings hit 'H' as the infobar may be interfering.

Large File performance improvements Really this could just be 'wizardry was added' by one of our new developers, Louis, but many files from say cellphones that were over 1080p are now working much better for transition performance.  Also you'll find that this performance trickled down to raspberry pi 3s, and up to 4k...so while both of those are a bit rocky still, they are working much better than before. 

Blurbox Enhancements - The blurbox is a very CPU intensive task, and before every image took a hit on being blurred.  Now you can decide to turn that feature off if you want to run lean, or just have the black borders around your images.  There is also a new option which analyzes an image and then finds the dominant color, and sets the background to that (this is actually very CPU intensive and may slow down the playlist)

Overscan Controls - You may notice a black border when showing images on your frame. Some may not...this is because how every monitor works can have a difference in how it handles what is called 'overscan'.  Now there is a setting in the bottom of the webUI...if you see a black border, flip the setting called 'remove black border' to the other setting and reboot...it likely will remove it now giving you a much better looking digital frame. :)

Expanding filesystem - When imaging a pi, the file system doesn't always 'expand' we found.  So having a setting to fix that in the web UI is VERY handy.   If you hit an issue where you image a 128 gig drive and then find you have a few gigs free, then we now have a red button in settings that will work to fix that by running the raspi-config expand file settings command, and then rebooting when done.  

Factory Reset/Wifi Reset/Adhoc improvements - Sometimes when trying to connect to the frame people had issues...we found a few bad bugs here and have improved this greatly.  The other issue is sometimes people connected, and then hit an issue where they needed a way to 'disconnect' and there wasn't a good story.  Now hitting 'control - F' will factory reset the wifi. Rebooting will take you back to the first run page which is great for those reselling frames, or that just get jammed in the network code

enable/disable the linux shell UI - This requires a keyboard and likely a reboot, but you can now enable the linux shell UI which is usually hidden so you can manage the devices easier, and then hide it again with a keypress.  You may have to hit the keypress and then reboot to get it to 'take'.  This will make it easier for those that are comfortable with linux to manage the machines, but then keep the clean look on reboot of not having things show up.
Control -U to 'restore' the desktop (must be hit while Dynaframe is running) I find this one needs a reboot most often to take effect.
Shift-U to 'hide' it again.  Must be run while Dynaframe is running. 

Play/Pause command - We added seperate play and pause web commands for the automation enthusiasts by (most excellent) request!

Better diagnostics and logging - The 'log' page now shows how much space is left on yoru drives, as well as the resolution the frame is running at.  The logging is constantly being added to to help us (and you!) diagnose issues. 

Experimental Changes!  

Automatic Font uploading - If you create a folder called 'fonts' in your pictures directory, and then drag some ttf files into it, you should see in the log that they get installed and disappear.  Once that happens you should be able to select them in the UI (May have to refresh the web page or reboot the device).  This gives you a way to update without having to log in.

Large FIle upload support - A few of you hit the 200 meg file upload when uploading videos. I believe it's up to 2gigs now, but we'll have to test it.

Bluetooth media controller support - Very experimental, but if you pair a bluetooth controller that has volume up/down and track up/down, you should be able to control the frame with it just like the gesture controller.

Plugin Support - This will get documented as soon as we can, but there are ways now to tell Dynaframe to play a single particular file, even if it is off of the internet, or to control what the infobar says.  We don't have a way to deploy plugins, but it allows those that want to start developing plugings to work on them while we figure out deployment.  If you want to develop reach out to Lou on the discord and he can try to get you setup.

We know we didn't get everything you wanted in. And losing Frame Sync hurt...but if we kept at it we would've pushed into June, and I had titled this release "April".  I'm commited to working hard for you to support you and to provide value for this Patreon and the trust you place in myself and my team, and I'm thankful to have you.  We crossed 85 patreons this month!  The support has helped us with things like investigating other hardware to try to run this on, server costs, content and more.  you'll see some very exciting announcements in the next 2 months as some investments we've made in both this code base as well as in future pieces we are putting in place start to come online.  This patreon will be the place to learn about that, so stay tuned.

I hope you love this release.  We are going to step back and wait for feedback to come in so we can quick turn on any bugs. It was A LOT of code changes which means that we likely broke some stuff.  We have a team of 3 of us that will be monitoring the Discord and I'll monitor private messages on here as well as the comments on this post.  You'll notice some of the things we said we'd cut for this release made it..that was due to some heroic efforts by the team.  We are very excited and hope you enjoy this release as much as we are!

Next up:
 Audo output selection
 Frame sync coming back in
 Plugins (the framework is in there thanks to this release)
 Automatic updating (We put in the plumbing, but have some work to do)
 API documentation - This will come sooner than later

Thanks for the support!  Please let me know what you think and feedback below or ideally in Patreon (In Patreon the entire team can see it )

Joe Farro
Geektoolkit