Dev Log - Welcome March Patreons!

Welcome March Patreons! And thankyou to my supporters from Febuary.  
I want to post an update on some of the requests I've had come in, and the plan for March.  I also want to talk a bit technically about video playback for those that are interested in the technical behind the scenes.

First things first:
Latest build: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqxjM4_uBDJgxdMFwPdaLt1ZRR07SA?e=kVlaZp
Username: pi
Password: dynaframe

Please use the video port closest to the power port.
SSH and VNC are both enabled by default.  

Note: The rest of this post is not required reading, but for those that want to know more about progress or behind the scenes.

March Plan: Responding to feedback
I've had a lot of feedback that I'm gathering...everyone that asks a question I write down a note about the 'root' of the question to gather data on where things aren't smooth.  The most obvious thing I'm noticing is setup is still rough.  There's a number of bugs and things that aren't clear, and basic stuff like including instructions with the download instead of on Patreon need to happen.  I hear that feedback and am working on it. Expect the March release to have instructions with it that include a setup walkthrough.

Network issues - I've had a few reports of network issues. I'm working on a solution for those. If you're setting up and the wifi is not powerful where you're setting it up, please hardware it or try to set it up closer to the router and then move it further away. The initial setup needs a reliable connection.

The other feedback that I'm seeing are around issues with certain configurations.  When plugging into a 4k monitor, sometimes the pi is connecting at 4k.  While a pi4 is capable of outputting a 4k signal, processing it in the way this app is doesn't work well.   However to change the 4k it's requiring users to plug in a keyboard and change settings..something I try to prevent as it means I've failed at providing a reliable solution. I'm working on adding these features to the web UI.

Ok for the next part I'm going to technical deep dive into the video playback for those that are curious.  

The video engine is built on an app called VLC.  It uses a library called libVLC which allows me to seamlessly use VLC to render videos.  There are some bad quirks however...
1) I can't currently draw on top of the window. This is why the infobar doens't work.
2) I can't currently fade the window in any way - This is why transitions do not work
3) I can't play the video in anything other than fullscreen and keep it performant

Those three limitations are why video playback is the way it is. I put a logo image up (The dynaframe logo in the background) currently so that it doesn't look like it's a black screen, but without being able to fade or overlay, my options are very limited.  I've spent about 4 hours in the last two days researching ways around this because...well...it stinks and needs to be better. In the end I realize that I'm dependant upon the frameworks I'm working with, so I opened up a bunch of issues across the board to get support from them. We'll see how that goes over the next few days, but I'm hopeful that one of the many posts I did tonight will bear fruit and we'll find some way to get the overlays working on videos.

You may ask why not use another engine? Well many have the same limitation. And most do not have great performance when playing a full 1080p video..that requires hardware acceleration.  But I constantly try various ones...Mplayer, ffplay, omxplayer, etc.

So that's a deep dive into the state of video. I'm hopeful to push hard to get some changes here and figure out ways to make it better.

Thanks as always for your support! I should have another dev update out next week, and then I'm targeting the March release for the third week of the month.

Joe
Geektoolkit