iBicha/playlet v0.11.0

on GitHub

[0.11.0] - 2023-09-10

This version went through a major refactor, which resulted in a different arcitecture of the app to support new features, the rewrite of many pieces, as well as new features.

Added

• The concept of a Queue. Videos can now be queued to play one after another.
  • Currently the queue is funcitonal, but no proper UI to support it, such as seeing the queue, clearing it, and so on.
  • UI for the Queue will be introduced in a future version.
  • Videos and playlists can be queued from the web app
• Support for Playlists
  • Home screen now shows both created and saved playlists
  • Playlists have their own view to scroll through their videos
  • Playlist videos play one after the other
  • Playlists show up in search results
• Continious scrolling of feed where supported (pagination)
  • Subscriptions, Search, Playlists and Search based feeds (like Funny and News in the home screen)
  • Not yet supported in the web app
• Home screen placeholder items while items are loading
• Settings screen has been rewritten with a better design
• Access to public instances
  • New UI to list public instances, or to specify a custom instance
  • Testing system to make sure the instance is properly setup and usable
• Playlet now tolerate certain missing configurations in Invidious (such as not configuring the domain)
• Better error handling, error dialogs, with more information on what went wrong
• Multiple Brighterscript plugins to support different functionalities of the app
• Testing framework, and some tests
• Performance imporvements
  • Lazy loading where applicable
  • Screens do not load until opened for the first time
  • Not all feeds are loaded at once, feeds are loaded on demand while scrolling
  • App profiled, some bottlenecks identified and fixed
  • QR Code generation happens on background thread
• More consistent logging, and the ability to retreive a log file of current run and the previous run
• New HttpClient for making web requests, which supports SendAndForget and Cancellation, with a reduced rendezvous
• Open API spec file describing available APIs in the Playlet Web Server

Changed

• Lots of refactors and rewrites in general
• The developer settings are now always visible in the web app
• The web server is now decoupled from Playlet specific logic
• When not logged in, authenticated feed (like user Subscriptions and Playlists) show a "Login to view X" message, with a QR Code that redirects to the login screen
• [Breaking change] web apis changed a bit (for example the /api/command endpoint is removed) refer to the Open API spec
• If the Invidious auth token is missing permissions (A token aquired using a previous version of Playlet) you will be auto logged out.

Removed

• roku-requests package. A new HttpClient has been written to fit the need of Playlet instead. Some of the reasons to do this:
  • It was causing a lot of rendezvous
  • It has no real way to send a request without waiting for it to finish (send and forget)
  • Some of the API was quirky (need to specify parseJson: false to ask it NOT to parse the response)
  • It reads the response data, headers, error codes and etc even if they are not needed
  • Excessive logging without a way to toggle it, or redirect it to a file
• Some unused parts of the code (Like basic auth in the server, WebSockets, RegistryRouter, Kanji QR Code)
  • These were unsued and/or feature flagged features. Things can be restored as needed.
• The video player loading spinner when the video is minimized: this added too much hacky code with minimum value.

Fixed

• Different issues caused by background tasks in the home screen
• An issue caused by manipulating the loading spinner on the video player
• An issue where the web server hangs if the payload contains unicode characters