April Members! Start here, and latest updates

Wow, April already! Spring is here and outside is calling.  In this post I'll talk about the April release coming up and some great progress in a number of areas requested by the Patrons.

But first....for new April members, welcome!  I want to thankyou for your support, and here's the info you'll want:
First things first:
Latest build: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqxjM4_uBDJgxdMFwPdaLt1ZRR07SA?e=kVlaZp

The build has a root password and username of:
Username: pi
Password: dynaframe

NEW! Discord channel (updated 4/15): https://discord.gg/FVAn6DyjG8

Below is a list of updates for April that I am targeting, and even includes things out to May.  The thing about this is we have a plan, but the schedule is complicated by life...I have a 3 year old daughter, a full time demanding development job, this, and I work to keep the youtube channel going.  That being said, we are working hard to get a release out this month that will be a great setup for the next few releases because it enables a ton of features.

(Note: I use "I" and "We" interchangably....that is purposeful...there's a team of 3 of us, but most of this is on me.  So when I am talking about something that is happening as a team, I say 'we' but when I am talking about something that is on me, I say I.)

Community Portal - Discord set up!  
Discord gives us a dedicated chat room for discussion ideas, topics and support.  One thing I can't do well here is provide FAQ's.  While Patreon is great for getting members connected to me, it doesn't help them connect to each other to share ideas, tips, artwork, etc.  So there are two plans for this...a forum (working on it still) and a discord.  You can find the Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/XwbhVEZ7

 Upcoming features targeted for the April release:

Raspberry Pi 3B+ Support

I had a breakthrough on this today and was able to get it to launch on a pi3B+ again. It's rocky, similar to how things were with Dynaframe 2 for those that tried it, but it will enable those that are still having troubles finding pi4's (like the...well..entire world) to have something to try out until they can get one. If you turn off transitions or lower them it's acceptable.  This will be in the next release, targeted for this month. 

Video Looping

I get ALOT of requests for enabling looping videos...there's good news and bad news. The good news is I will have it in the next release. The bad news is that the loop isn't seamless.  There is reports that VLC 4.0 will enable this, but for now there is a noticeable 'pause' between when the video stops and starts again, I'd say of about a full second.  That being said, if you have longer video loops and want to you use Dynaframe to control them, you'll be in great shape

Factory Reset

I have a pending feature for a commercial partner that I'm going to also ship here..it'll have 2 parts to 'factory reset' the device.  This will include loading a new appsettings.json in case that gets corrupt, as well as resetting the wifi.  I've had reports that sometimes the wifi gets 'stuck' and can't be reset...that's a terrible place to get to.  So factory reset will be designed to fix it.

Plugins

I'm working hard to get Plugins into the April release.  Our second developer, Lou, has written a kodi prototype that changes the frames to movie posters when movies play and back when they stop.  This has had a lot of requests, and is the start of where we can take this with extensability.  I can't guarantee Kodi will be ready in April, but we will see what we can do.

Transparency support
The infobar has been rewritten to be a transparent window.  This will allow for it to be much more responsive so that we can do things like have the clock not hang when it transitions.  It also means we can make the entire window transparent, which opens up scenarios for having a full web browser (think chromium in kiosk mode) load to show data. This could be a home assistant dashboard, a twitter feed, etc.

April stretch goals
Playlist support - Showing the fully playlist in the webUI, and enabling a user to click on the picture or video they want to see on the frame by filename. 

Playlist removal - Enabling the deletion of playlist items.

May/June plan
Autoupdate

This is still on the table, though it may be a May release sadly. I wanted to get this in immediately so you wouldn't have to reimage each release, however plugins required a large rewrite.  Part of that rewrite though will make things come faster in the future, and that's always a good thing. 

Raspberry pi settings

sudo raspi-config is a super useful tool to control things like hostname, root passwords and such. My goal is to put as much as I can into the web UI so that these settings can be controlled from a web page and you don't have to remote into the device.  These will start showing up in the April build, but will likely take a few months to fully migrate over.  Some of the first ones will be the overscan.

Cut for Dynaframe pro (Raspberry pi edition)
Sometimes I spend days on trying to accomplish features that simply can't be done on a Raspberry pi 4 currently.  One of them turns out to be putting the infobar over video.   We know that the code works on other devices, which I'll talk more about in the future, but the raspberry pi simply isn't capable of putting graphics on top of video and keeping it running well. You can test this with VLC by using the 'logo' feature, or turning on subtitles.  VLC 4.0 may fix this, but it's been in development for years.  Note that VLC on other devices is fine, even in linux.
  So that being said, I have to give up on that for Dynaframe pro.  I'll announce more later.  This means that if you want to use the infobar, you'll have to use image playlists currently.

Thanks all, and looking forward to an amazing April release!