Development updates and some FAQs answered

Hello again Patrons!  Development update and status on some of the things I'm working on for the next builds.  

FIrst I'd like to celebrate 50 Patrons!  That's a great milestone and the bigger the community, the better it is for everyone.  Even in the first month with 20 patrons I've gathered a ton of great feedback to make things better, and have been busy answering questions and emails.  Please don't be shy to ask questions, I'm here to help!

Development wise, a number of asks have led me to realize that some serious work is needed around performance, playlists, video playback, and we had a surprise development around plugins.  Here are some updates for all of the work going on.  Also there have been requests for Forums and ways to communicate outside of Patreon, and I have some progress there.

1) Playlists - Ideally there would be a system to allow for the saving and loading of playlists, and then the displaying and editing of said playlists. This becomes important to make home automation scenarios easier all the way to a basic concept of 'I want to turn off these 3 pictures in this folder without removing them'.  There's a ton of scenarios around playlists and investing in making that better to view, manage, load, and even save them off is important.  This also includes Exif filtering so you can say 'create a playlist of images that have this person in them'.  To do that the playlist engine needs an overhaul, and I'm deep into that rewrite to get the program there. I'm hoping to have that ready by end of the month, though there's alot of stability I need to put back in, so I may release it as a beta build this month.

2) Performance - I've had a large number of you ask about if this can work on a pi3b...I'm investigating a 'performance mode' to try to get the system requirements down to allow for the features of Dynaframe Pro (such as web uploading, new UI, etc) but have it work either on a pi3B+, or to have it work in 4k (both are ironically similar situations).  That work is being done in parallel to the rewrite, but I honestly won't know if I've moved the bar till I get time to test it. Again when it's ready I'll release a beta to the Patreons so you'll have that to try if you'd like.

3) Video playback - I've had a number of requests around trying to get videos to play 'back to back' better, or to loop a video, or to have the infobar work on top of a video.  I'm working on all of this, esp. Video looping which has become a hot item.  the way it would work is if  you have say a 10 second video and a 30 second transition, the video would loop 3 times or until the transition time is up, and then move to the next video. This will make it nice for those that have short video loops to be able to play them for longer (or if someone wants to loop a video for say an hour at a time...you can set the transition time to an hour).  

Having the infobar show up over the videos has proven to be incredibly difficult.  Technical reason: If a 1080p video is playing on a pi and is not in 'exclusive full screen mode' then it loses performance.  This means that a video that is not full screened to allow something to be placed on top of it gets a bit...jittery. I'm working to see if I can do anything about it.

4) Plugins - Plugins are the next major feature, though they appear to be something that will land in April currently.  That being said, we are developing prototypes to see what can be done.  And by We I mean our new developer, Louis, who has joined me on this (which is great because he's an Amazing developer and long time friend).  Lou has a Dynaframe seutp, and suprised me one day by showing a Kodi plugin he wrote working with it....I don't want to spill the beans fully, but it showed me a future where this could integrate in a very smooth way with other things to show say movie posters when the movie is playing, and then return to art mode.

Forums and Discord
 I'm working on setting up a Discord channel (chat based communication and support) as well as Forums for feature requests, support, sharing setups and such. I have a wordpress site setup, expect an announcement around that in the coming week!

I hadn't updated in a bit and saw a stream of new Patrons come in, so wanted to share the latest. I'm, as always thankful and flattered by the support and will work hard to continue to make this the best digital frame ever.  Every single piece of feedback that is on here has been cataloged so I can go through and work to address it.  If any of you are having any usability issues please let me know.  I'll have forums up which will make it easier as well soon.