[Buschel]

Just updated my 14 Pro to iOS 17.6. Still all good. Is there any special use case? For example I recall you configured the app to start in remote screen. Maybe you can share a video right from app start?

[amasephy]

Bizarre. Here’s a video. I launched everything fresh for the video. I had to press the down arrow because of a new Kodi server bug where if I don’t interact with Kodi before my Phillips hue addon launches then Kodi freezes so you can ignore that.

Then of course I hesitated because I was trying to recall the exact steps. Basically the important things I do are attempt to display subtitles then execute a command. This lets you see the inconsistent dimensions (green toast visible below red toast).

[Buschel]

Now I see it on my device as well I was using a totally different use case, comparing toasters of the embedded remote and the normal remote. But this is related to toasters in the custom button view vs remote screen. Will try this in simulator now and see what I can do.

Edit: Found and fixed.

[Buschel]

1.16 build 4562
Release Notes

First 1.16 mainline build with a huge amount of changes from last weeks. It contains the faster playlist / slideshow loading, the playlist/olayback rework around slideshows, autosizing of settings menu and virtual keyboard, longpress support for source folders and more bugfixes and improvements (see release notes).

[UlfSchmidt]

So many changes, too many to verify all these for unwanted side effects this evening, but my first impression is very very good, no obvious bugs or glitches. Good work! Thanks!

[Buschel]

Thanks for the fast response. The changes piled up a bit over some weeks, and some are still not merged (e.g. the font scaling changes, as well as the "Play using" feature). This caused some rework of later changes due to older changes only getting merged today. Special focus will be needed around NowPlaying / playlist behavior, especially around slideshows.

[UlfSchmidt]

The only strange thing I noticed with respect to image playlists is that one cannot select the very first image of a slideshow by tapping on it. It works only beginning from the second entry. For all other playlist types, each entry, including the very first entry, can be selected by tapping on it.

In addition, it would of course be desirable if the automatic positioning of the playlist on the currently displayed or played element would be canceled as soon as one manually scrolls through it. This unwanted behavior is not so obviously noticeable with music tracks or even videos, as the playback time per element is then obviously longer as compared to images within a slide show. But it makes it almost impossible to manually jump within a slide show using the playlist view.

But everything around slide shows is already so much better than before - such a huge improvement!

Another thing related to images is the EXIF information, where you currently don’t show the manufacturer, only the camera model. I think, I asked for this before? Some manufacturers include their name in the model field, others don’t. Unfortunately, I use cameras from Sony, and they don’t include “Sony” in the model field. Also some other EXIF fields are currently not shown (like ISO or flash mode), is there any specific reason for these omissions?

[Buschel]

The only strange thing I noticed with respect to image playlists is that one cannot select the very first image of a slideshow by tapping on it. It works only beginning from the second entry. For all other playlist types, each entry, including the very first entry, can be selected by tapping on it.

Yep. Know bug in Kodi since long time. Needs to be fixed on Kodi server.

In addition, it would of course be desirable if the automatic positioning of the playlist on the currently displayed or played element would be canceled as soon as one manually scrolls through it. This unwanted behavior is not so obviously noticeable with music tracks or even videos, as the playback time per element is then obviously longer as compared to images within a slide show. But it makes it almost impossible to manually jump within a slide show using the playlist view.

That's true. Similar feedback I got related to editing the playlist somewhere and then experiencing to jump to the current playing index. Might worth looking at this. At least trying to block this move-to-playing-index while editing or while scrolling.

But everything around slide shows is already so much better than before - such a huge improvement!

Thanks .)

Another thing related to images is the EXIF information, where you currently don’t show the manufacturer, only the camera model. I think, I asked for this before? Some manufacturers include their name in the model field, others don’t. Unfortunately, I use cameras from Sony, and they don’t include “Sony” in the model field. Also some other EXIF fields are currently not shown (like ISO or flash mode), is there any specific reason for these omissions?

I took the data to be shown from prior lists I found in the web, this can be changed of course. But: ISO is already shown.

[amasephy]

Definitely a big release! Took me awhile to review the release notes and go through and test what I could.

I found a few issues which I presume have been around for awhile and a couple of disturbing issues that are newly present in this build. Other than those it’s a solid release. 👍🏻

Likely pre-existing issues:

1) Now playing : navigating back to main menu or right hand pane by swiping while your finger is near or on the progress bar causes instant panning to either left or right instead of following your fingers motion.

2) Scrolling too far down now playing playlist causes progress counter label over inline artwork to disappear and have to reinitialize.

3) There seems to be a random problem with the movie/show tags in the details view. Some of my media have strange gaps between tag header and the description. I checked my metadata in Ember and no such gaps exist in the text. See the gap between Summary and the description. Also see there is a larger gap between the description text and the Parental Rating header compared to the rest of the tags. Note: the tag that has a gap isn’t the same across different media and in fact the gap size itself is inconsistent. What IS consistent though is the gap and where it is on a particular media item.



Now for the disturbing issues that are only present in this release. I tested between this TF and previous build and restarted app and Kodi server and issues were consistently repeatable….

4) Movie and global search library views are slower to initialize than previous build. Obvious spinner visible before the library displays.

5) Syncing libraries (by pulling library list down) takes about 4x longer.


I agree with UlfSchmidt - the photo playlist recentering over the currently displaying photo is annoying. The other playlists don’t seem to exhibit this behavior.

[Buschel]

1) Now playing : navigating back to main menu or right hand pane by swiping while your finger is near or on the progress bar causes instant panning to either left or right instead of following your fingers motion.

True, experiencing this for the first time and never tried this. Not sure, if I will work on this.

2) Scrolling too far down now playing playlist causes progress counter label over inline artwork to disappear and have to reinitialize.

Can you explain in more detail (or share a video)? I am not clear on the issue you describe.

3) There seems to be a random problem with the movie/show tags in the details view. Some of my media have strange gaps between tag header and the description. I checked my metadata in Ember and no such gaps exist in the text. See the gap between Summary and the description. Also see there is a larger gap between the description text and the Parental Rating header compared to the rest of the tags. Note: the tag that has a gap isn’t the same across different media and in fact the gap size itself is inconsistent. What IS consistent though is the gap and where it is on a particular media item.

Will look into this. Obviously a layout problem, most likely related to calculating the label height for the given text (the plot described under SUMMARY).

4) Movie and global search library views are slower to initialize than previous build. Obvious spinner visible before the library displays.

Must be related to adding the feature to also support search for plot and actors. This seems to overly increase the payload. I will roll this back.

5) Syncing libraries (by pulling library list down) takes about 4x longer.

Other libraries than movie or global search as well?

I agree with UlfSchmidt - the photo playlist recentering over the currently displaying photo is annoying. The other playlists don’t seem to exhibit this behavior.

The behaviour is generally similar for all playlists. A new item played updates the old item (deselect and hide progress bar), highlights the new item (select and show progress bar) and scrolls the new item into the middle. This way the current played item stays in the middle of the of the screen and you can easily see the previous and next items. For music/videos this happens typically after minutes or even hours. For pictures this happens each few seconds, so it is far more disturbing as it interferes with users interaction easily.

I need to rethink how to do this. Just blocking "scroll to middle" while scrolling is not a good solution. Imagine you scrolled down, then stop scrolling to review the playlist and then another update kicks in. I guess the best would be to stop "scroll to middle" after manual got applied. And "scroll to middle" is only restored after leaving/re-entering playlist view or after changing the playlist type.

[amasephy]

Thanks Buschel. I’ll post a video later on the playlist thing.

I didn’t notice the delay as much on the music library but it might be related to how much content I actually have loaded into the library. My music library might be small enough that it doesn’t reach the threshold required to notice the increased delay. Overall it was anecdotal. I didn’t want to record and set timers unless required. Global is so slow to load I thought the app was broken when I first went to it.


Thanks for explaining the photo playlist thing. Now it makes total sense why I thought the other playlists didn’t exhibit that behavior. I’m sure it’s a ton of work but that does sort of tie into a UI enhancement I believe I proposed awhile back in one of my mockups. You could have the currently playing item have its own section at the top and make the rest of the items in that list into a scrollable list. Then currently playing item is always visible and the rest of the list is detached. Even if we all think that’s a good idea I’m sure it’s a ton of work.

[Buschel]

They layout/rendering topics seems to be (again) an iOS issue. Using the same font size and dimensions it renders well on iOS 15, but not on iOS 16/17. iOS 16/17 renders the text with 1 line less as iOS 15, but still report the same height via boundingRectWithSize, which it would need for the additional line.

Screenshots:
https://ibb.co/xFGkjXd

@kambala, I did not find any hint on the web on this. Seems like boundingRectWithSize does not report the size which is really used for rendering the text. Could be related to lineFragmentPadding, but I have no idea how to move on from here.

[UlfSchmidt]

Coming shortly back to the photo playlist issue. Wouldn’t it be a simple solution to re-introduce the Edit button also for this type of playlists and just pausing the auto scroll to current item feature while editing?

[UlfSchmidt]

They layout/rendering topics seems to be (again) an iOS issue. Using the same font size and dimensions it renders well on iOS 15, but not on iOS 16/17. iOS 16/17 renders the text with 1 line less as iOS 15, but still report the same height via boundingRectWithSize, which it would need for the additional line.
…

Hey, this error (or a very similar one) is also visible in the official YouTube App, so we are in good company!

[Buschel]

Coming shortly back to the photo playlist issue. Wouldn’t it be a simple solution to re-introduce the Edit button also for this type of playlists and just pausing the auto scroll to current item feature while editing?

I removed it for pictures because you simply cannot edit those playlists.

Btw, just imptemented some changes to improve the whole behaviour while editing which is pretty straight forward. More difficult is to think on how to block auto-scroll after the user dragged the playlist. I am not ok with this yet. Maybe this needs a timer which enables auto-scroll after some time again.