Release Notes

Major Changes

• Personalised Home Screen with Dynamic Recommendations
  The home screen now features a completely redesigned, personalised experience that adapts to your viewing habits. Every time you open the app, you'll discover a unique mix of content tailored just for you.

Note: First time load will take some time to build cache, subsequent load times will be negligible

• Smart Recommendations: Multiple recommendation types, including "Starring [Actor]", "Directed by [Director]", "Written by [Writer]", and "Because you watched [Movie]" sections
• Actor-Based Discovery: Discover movies featuring actors from films you've recently watched
• Dynamic Layout: All sections are shuffled on each load, creating a fresh browsing experience every time
• Intelligent Caching: Recommendations are cached for up to 48 hours to reduce load times, with recently watched movies cached for 6 hours
• Parallel Loading: All recommendation sections load concurrently for lightning-fast performance
• Genre Integration: Personalised sections are seamlessly mixed with genre carousels for varied content discovery
  The system analyses your recently watched movies to generate relevant recommendations, ensuring you always have something interesting to watch next.

Minor Updates

• Enhanced Subtitle Experience
  • Subtitles now use the system's default sans-serif font for better consistency and reliability across devices
  • Removed custom font dependency for cleaner, more maintainable subtitle rendering
  • Consistent subtitle styling across both ExoPlayer and MPV backends
• Improved Track Selection UI
  • Audio and subtitle track selection menus repositioned to the bottom of the screen for easier access
  • Added scrollable menus with height constraints to handle long track lists gracefully
  • Better usability when browsing through multiple audio and subtitle options

Under the Hood

• Performance Optimizations:
  • Recommendation sections now load concurrently using coroutines, dramatically reducing home screen load times
  • Added mutex-based thread safety for concurrent section loading
  • All intensive operations moved to background threads (Dispatchers.IO)
• Database Schema: Upgraded to version 20 with new caching tables for personalised recommendations
  • New tables for top people cache, person sections, and movie sections
  • Improved cache serialisation for better reliability
• Improved Data Handling:
  • Recommendation generation now uses recently played movies for more accurate suggestions
  • Enhanced actor selection logic with better filtering and variety
  • Added comprehensive logging for recommendation generation debugging

What's Changed

• feat(Home): Add dynamic, personalised content sections to Home Screen by @MakD in a9cef25
• Refactor(home): Improve actor section generation and data handling by @MakD in 22ff833
• refactor(Home): Implement dynamic and shuffled home screen sections by @MakD in edc1bfe
• refactor(Home): Improve home screen section loading performance by @MakD in 849f66c
• perf(Home): Optimise person section loading and add caching by @MakD in 7580ae5
• refactor(player): Improve subtitle rendering and track selection UI by @MakD in befdd14
• chore: Bump version to 0.2.1-beta by @MakD

Full Changelog: v0.2.0-beta...v0.2.1-beta