[Buschel]

Good you found it. I could fix it now, nasty one. While fixing this I also decided to not show "Cancel" while the search is not active. This makes clearer when the search really became active, and it avoids some undesired behaviour from user point of view: you could activate the searchbar by clicking "Cancel", if the searchbar is not active yet.

[amasephy]

Good deal. I never liked seeing the cancel button when a search wasn’t active. Helps make the app more reactive to user input.


Btw, with the Now Playing poster art - when playing songs with party mode and having that displayed on Kodi server I find that the app actually loads the poster faster than Kodi server does! Really impressive for the app since it’s basically an extra hop from the source data.

[UlfSchmidt]

Coming back to the search bar issue on iPad. I am very sure that it worked in older versions. But good to know that there is already a fix in the making. Because on my iPad it currently even doesn’t work from the very beginning, I don’t have to touch Cancel before it dies, as amasephy reported. The search within albums is also no longer working, I wonder whether this is so closely related that it is also already fixed in the next version?

When I open e.g. my Music archive and the select a specific album, it is no longer possible to interact (i.e. touch and move) with the album list, only with the selected album. Is this a glitch or by intention? (Edit: seems to be a glitch, as it is not always the case and unfortunately I don’t know how to reproduce this)

Another really minor layout issue is with the High Resolution Audio logo which is slightly outside the box in portrait mode on my iPad. Any chance to get this resolved before the grand release?

Another still open issue is that the start of a slideshow is still taking a while as the playlist is updated for each and every single slide added, causing massive flickering and delays. But I fear I am the only one worldwide using Kodi for photos and such stuff, so this really doesn’t get any attention. :-(

Sorry when I sound a bit dissatisfied today, I have been doing my tax return all day…

[Buschel]

1. searchbar: Just check if this works for you, if you enable the search by clicking into the left half of the search field.
2. touch and move: I am not clear on what you describe. Sharing a video would be great.
3. HiRes: will look into this. Should not be a big deal.
4. slideshow: I am rarely using this and did not really take of this too much. This was always like this?

[amasephy]

I decided to look at the photo slideshow thing myself. I loaded in just a single photo from my dslr collection.

I don’t see the flickering issue. I’m guessing you are loading in images from more than one folder? What are you doing to trigger the flickering?


Also, strangely when I loaded in the photo playlist several of the photo items on the playlist view didn’t load their thumbnail. Despite this their full artwork did display on the now playing view. It took a force close and relaunch of the app to fix the playlist view.


Secondly testing the photos allowed me to confirm two suspicions I’ve had for awhile with fullscreen iPad view.

There is something really weird going on with the text when toggling between fullscreen nowplaying. The text seems to go between bold and not bold. Weird thing is if you do it enough the exact timing of the bold and unbold text changes. Sometimes it will bold the text right as the fullscreen button is pressed. Other times it won’t bold until the full screen is fully toggled. Race condition? This is really hard to see with movie description which is very long. With a photo exif data it becomes obvious.

Also, something I had feared and now confirm. I think the artwork plugin you use for the now playing artwork doesn’t properly handle the fullscreen image resolution. My photos which are very high resolution look terrible on iPad now playing in fullscreen mode. I suspect the resolution wasn't increased for the larger size of artwork possible with a full screen view. They look ok at the normal now playing view but even there there is a noticeable degradation in image quality. Is this something you can tune at least to handle full screen now playing artwork?


Edit: The bold problem is easily viewable and reproducible by simply repeatedly tapping on Now Playing on the main menu. Make sure you have the overlay enabled first. The text jitters everytime and seemingly random interval.

Edit 2: Seems like editing a photo playlist is not possible. At least it isn’t working for me. If that is the case then the Edit button should probably be hidden in this playlist view.

[UlfSchmidt]

1. searchbar: Just check if this works for you, if you enable the search by clicking into the left half of the search field.
2. touch and move: I am not clear on what you describe. Sharing a video would be great.
3. HiRes: will look into this. Should not be a big deal.
4. slideshow: I am rarely using this and did not really take of this too much. This was always like this?

1. Exactly, what is going on here?!
2. Video is difficult currently for me. Tap Music from main menu. Then tap on one album. Each of your taps opens another “window”. Sometimes these can be moved from left to right by touching them somewhere. Sometimes not, they are fixed on the screen then.
3. Thanks
4. If you don’t add just a single image, but a whole folder full of images to start a slideshow, images are added one after the other, causing a redraw of the whole playlist after each added image…

[Buschel]

Also, something I had feared and now confirm. I think the artwork plugin you use for the now playing artwork doesn’t properly handle the fullscreen image resolution. My photos which are very high resolution look terrible on iPad now playing in fullscreen mode. I suspect the resolution wasn't increased for the larger size of artwork possible with a full screen view. They look ok at the normal now playing view but even there there is a noticeable degradation in image quality. Is this something you can tune at least to handle full screen now playing artwork?

Did a quick check, and to me all looks correct. The app does not scale down the NowPlaying covers as it does it for library view images. You may search Kodi advanced settings to send images with larger resolution through the API (see https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#imageres).

Edit: The bold problem is easily viewable and reproducible by simply repeatedly tapping on Now Playing on the main menu. Make sure you have the overlay enabled first. The text jitters everytime and seemingly random interval.

Yep, I see what you mean. I am not sure why this happens and have no solution for this now. I could only make use of a non-bold font, which is not showing this behavior.

Edit 2: Seems like editing a photo playlist is not possible. At least it isn’t working for me. If that is the case then the Edit button should probably be hidden in this playlist view.

Yes, this can be done.

[Buschel]

1. Exactly, what is going on here?!

I needed to do a bit of an unorthodox workaround. This requires a tap-area on top of a "dead" searchbar. When touching the tap-area the active searchbar comes up. Problem was that the tap-area was not covering the full width (on iPad about 2/3 starting fro left) due a coding error. So you could end up enabling the "dead" searchbar which is not having any functionality at all.

2. Video is difficult currently for me. Tap Music from main menu. Then tap on one album. Each of your taps opens another “window”. Sometimes these can be moved from left to right by touching them somewhere. Sometimes not, they are fixed on the screen then.

Ok, understood. I am not experiencing this. Please let me know once you found a way to reproduce, then I will look into this.

3. Thanks

Done.

4. If you don’t add just a single image, but a whole folder full of images to start a slideshow, images are added one after the other, causing a redraw of the whole playlist after each added image…

I remember I once already looked into this and confirmed Kodi sends a notification for updated playlist each time. Maybe this can be improved by adding a debouncing on the App's side. For sure not for next release though.
Edit: Prepared a change for this, which debounces by restarting a 0.2s timer for each notification, so the playlist update only is called once. We can add this into a test build once the release is done.

[Buschel]

Yep, I see what you mean. I am not sure why this happens and have no solution for this now. I could only make use of a non-bold font, which is not showing this behavior.

Finally found and fixed it.

[amasephy]

Good deal. Sorry to have thrown all that last minute when you are looking to do a final release really soon. Appreciate you sneaking these last minute fixes in. 👍🏻

[Buschel]

Yes, the plan is to add the fixes quickly to a new build before releasing. Of course it is unfortunate some of the issues were found weeks after the related code change, but that‘s life.

[Buschel]

1.15 build 4465
Release Notes

This build is the Release Candidate for 1.15 and fixes the issues reported in the past days (searchbar, HiRes logo, EXIF font change, edit for picture playlist). In addition I am making a minor layout change.


1.15 build 4451.42
This is a build for @amasephy and @UlfSchmidt purely for test reasons. It was provided as a test build before the 1.15 RC to keep the RC on top of TestFlight to receive more test depth. This test build addresses two main things:

1. Not queueing up commands while being disconnected. As this might have an influence to the connection process this needs some testing.
   
2. Debounce playlist updates. This could improve the problems around creating slideshow playlists with huge amount of pictures.
   

[amasephy]

Thanks for the quick new build. All of your fixes seem to be working fine. I will test the special build later.


I know this isn’t what you were hoping for but with more testing I found a few more issues surrounding photo slideshow playback…

1) When you have a slideshow playlist once your playlist has navigated from the first image you can never get back to the first image by tapping it in the playlist view. It is only possible to get to it using the skip back button. This isn’t a problem for music and video playlists.

2) There seems to be some problem with the random button in picture playlists. Once you enable it, it is forever enabled.

3) Photo playlist view should not have a time elapsed label over the currently playing photo but if you happen to have a music playlist active and then start a photo slideshow playlist then the currently shown photo has the elapsed label stuck at 0.


4) Regarding the overlay: Is there a reason purely text codec info doesn’t scale? For example I can clearly see the MP3 logo enlarges in full screen mode but the kbit/s string stays the exact same size.

[Buschel]

Thanks for the quick new build. All of your fixes seem to be working fine. I will test the special build later.

Thanks for quickly verifying the fixes!

I know this isn’t what you were hoping for but with more testing I found a few more issues surrounding photo slideshow playback…

No worries The slideshow is not really concerning me. It anyway shows strange behaviour from Kodi side, and most of what you describe is not caused by the App and like this forever (issues 1 and 2). Issue 3 I will look at, but this will not hold back the release.

I did not look into text scaling for the overlay codec info yet. Not sure how difficult it would be to make this a smooth transition ...

[amasephy]

Thanks! I suspect 3 is also related to the strange Kodi behavior because normally you can’t have two active playlists but pictures defy that logic. Since music is playing the playlist seems to expect an elapsed time.

Also forgot to mention. Until you actually “stop” a music playlist the photo art will not be displayed on the now playing screen and all navigation buttons won’t interact with the photo playlist. Probably working as expected though.


Like UlfSchmidt said though, he’s probably one of the few people worldwide using this functionality.


Forgot to mention, with the text scaling. There does seem to be some little jitter only present in the text codec labels. Possibly as it’s making its transition between locations?