Summary
- MODIFIED: [PLM + MTM & GEN] Quality of life, performance, and stability improvements
- FIXED: [SLM] Cleaning process for Amazon Stream Links
- NEW: [SLM] Stream Link Mapping using patterns (REGEX)
- NEW: [GEN] Wiki and other documentation updates
MODIFIED: [PLM + MTM & GEN] Quality of life, performance, and stability improvements
Playlist Manager has had several under the hood and visible adjustments to make life better, starting with...
- MODIFIED: [PLM/MTM] Various code adjustments to help speed up some processes.
- MODIFIED: [PLM] Significant gains in load time performance for 'Parent Stations' and 'Manage Playlists'. Similar gains were also found in 'Main' and 'Manage Assigned Stations'. All of this is still impacted by total number of stations, but to different degrees.
For instance, with about 4,000 stations, the former group came back instantly and the latter group took less than a second. However, in a situation like this with nearly a million stations...
... it took about 11 seconds for the former group and 30 seconds for the latter group.
Part of getting this to work also involved:
- FIXED: [GEN] Sorting while ignoring articles (i.e., 'the', 'a', 'an', etc...) could fail and cause a crash when special characters were involved, especially in the 'first word' position.
No matter the amount of stations, that gain in 'Parent Stations' is particularly important because...
- NEW: [PLM] Delete multiple parent stations at once.
Under Preferred Playlists, there is a new option for 'Delete':
You can then select this for multiple parents at once, resulting in all of them being deleted on save and their child stations being unassigned.
Should you try to create a new parent using the 'Delete' tag, it will be assigned 'None'.
Beyond this, several updates were made to deal with some specific scenarios and edge use cases:
- MODIFIED: [GEN] Maximum uploaded file size increased from 25mb to 200mb to accommodate very large playlists.
- MODIFIED: [GEN] Processing time for files before timeout increased to deal with very large playlists
- MODIFIED: [PLM] When parsing an m3u, if it was missing a
channel-id, there is now a test to make sure that value is unique. If not, it will force uniqueness with a numbering system. This also impacts thestation_playlistvalue. Together, this resolves a rare situation that could cause infinite loops and crashing.
In order to further support these, the following adjustment was made:
- MODIFIED: [MTM] 'Playlist Manager: Update Station List' automation now has a frequency option.
The default is 'Every 24 Hours', which is also the recommended selection for most people. However, if you are a user that has a value to do this more frequently, you can also use this in conjunction with the previously released 'Refresh Channels DVR m3u Playlists' automation:
FIXED: [SLM] Cleaning process for Amazon Stream Links
The cleaning process for Amazon Stream Links was being too aggressive as it was only doing exceptions for amazon.com instead of amazon. anything for all counties. This has been corrected.
Do note that you will still have to update your mappings to make sure it works in your region:
NEW: [SLM] Stream Link Mapping using patterns (REGEX)
A new option is available for 'Stream Link Mappings' in 'Settings':
Using this, you can do pattern recognition using regular expressions (REGEX) in order to accomplish a replacement. For instance, here is one for getting the provided PeacockTV Stream Links into a format that can be used with Android/Google TV:
- If 'Stream Link' contains:
peacocktv.com/watch/asset/.+?/([a-zA-Z0-9\\-]+)$ - For 'Object Type:
MOVIE or SHOW - Do this activity:
Replace pattern (REGEX) with... - Using this:
peacocktv.com/deeplink?deeplinkData={"pvid":"\1","type":"PROGRAMME","action":"PLAY"}
This resulted in the following for a Movie and TV Show:
- Example Movie started as
https://www.peacocktv.com/watch/asset/movies/reality-bites-a-hannah-swensen-mystery/b6347be0-cbe9-34c5-afef-3307ea382849and ended as...
- Example TV Show episode started as
https://www.peacocktv.com/watch/asset/tv/pride-and-prejudice/6377756605557637112/seasons/1/episodes/--episode-1/e2c7c82f-1f4e-3916-a6af-b1983bef8bcdand ended as...
In recognition of this additional feature, a small cosmetic update was made to the headers of 'Stream Link Mappings'.
NEW: [GEN] Wiki and other documentation updates
The Github repo has been redesigned so it is no longer just a wall of text. Now, there is a Wiki with individual articles and a navigation pane:
Most notably, there are now easy-to-follow paths for installation and maintenance instead of having everything mixed together by subject area:
The main page and website will now direct you to this area:
All of this all required some small code changes to point some links to the correct place.