MediaVault releases

@walkero

Great progress, I'm really looking forward to podcast support! More coffee from me coming up

Thank you so much Daniel. Your support is tremendous.

Just to let you all know guys, I am going to present MediaVault at this year AmiWest, on the second day. I will talk about the app, but also about the challenges I had while I was working on it. I hope it will be interesting, especially to those that think to start developing their own ideas.

I just released MediaVault v1.4.0.

This version brings the following:
* You can now search for podcasts based on their title, see info and their
avatar and a list of the latest 100 episodes
* By selecting an episode and clicking the play button the audio is loaded to
the player and starts playing
* Changed the way the avatar images are downloaded, which is now faster and
solves a lot of errors with network access, which resulted connection error
messages to appear.

Find more info at https://ko-fi.com/post/MediaVault-1-4-0-released-F1F76GYRS

I would like to thank my supporters at https://ko-fi.com/walkero, who help me a lot on the further MediaVault development.

Of' course, the development does not stop here. I am already working for the next release, which I plan to be a smaller one, with some fixes and changes here and there, and maybe add more filter selections on podcasts section.




You can download it at OS4Depot and from my Github at
https://github.com/walkero-gr/mediavault/releases/tag/v1.4.0

The project is open source and you can find the code at:
https://github.com/walkero-gr/mediavault

If you have any requests or you would like to report any problems you found, you can do it at:
https://github.com/walkero-gr/mediavault/issues

Hope you will enjoy this new release.

@walkero

Not seeing any podcasts.
No errors, just nothing appears.
Tried "amiga" and podcasts listed on the podcast site you link to.

Everything else works as normal so far.

Cheers

@TiredOfLife
Nothing appears at all at the list? Can you please check the date and time of your system, that it is synced correctly?
I will check this out and let you know.

I had a look on that on one of my system, that had the same problem. If you sync the system clock again, then the podcast request will work fine.

You see, the online service I use to get the podcast data, has a 3 minutes window on time for the requests. If your system time is wrong, then this fails.

@walkero

Yeah that's got it.
Didn't have anything set in the NTP server, time was out by 10 mins.
I'm guessing this got lost when updating at some point.
Enhancer or Hyperion keep offering a Time Prefs update depending which one is installed.

Working fine now.

Cheers

@TiredOfLife
That's great. I probably should add a user message for these cases.

Hope you have fun with it.

@walkeroQuote:
Just downloaded and gave it a quick try. The Radio stations work well and I could find some of my favorites. One thing that would be nice, if it can be added, would be to display the bitrate of the stations. This would allow easy identification of high quality streams.

I can't seem to get PodCast to work but I didn't try very hard. I can obtain the pod cast list via a search and I can select a "chapter", but when I then press play, AmigaAmp displays an error message, like "timeout", or "Stop", or "Unsupported Format". Can you recommend search parameters which will allow me to get to a podcast you know works?

Great work....keep going!
I vote for a "favorites" list next.

@ktadd
I am glad you like MediaVault. Next update will be a minor one with bug fixes and new search options for podcasts.

About the bit rate, that would be something you would like to see on the list I guess, right? Although it might take some more space?

About the Podcast links, yeah I saw that too, but it is a problem of the AmigaAmp,, unfortunately. I know that Amiga Ireland podcast works fine. I would recommend to save the urls that do not work from AmigaAmp as a playlist and contact the developer, sending him that file. He might want to fix it and make them playable.

I had yesterday night a look about which player would play better radio and podcasts audio, and I found that the only one is Emotion. But since this is a commercial application, I cannot make it mandatory.

So, on v1.5.0 I will add a preferences window, where the user will be able to select default player. This way if you want to use Emotion, AmigaAmp or TuneNet, that will be possible.

I am afraid that favorites feature will be lower in priority, although it is a feature I really would love to have. So I will put a lot of effort to have it as soon as possible.

@walkero

I do not have a problem finding a podcasts. However, I have a problem with listening to the episode to the end. Unfortunately, when you play back the material, after some time (about 5 minutes), the material is looped and starts to be played from the beginning. Because during the play of the podcast does not work the navigation buttons in Amigaamp, such as a scroll progress bar, basically a podcast operation function today is not very useful, because you can not listen to the end of the material that has more than a few minutes long.

I am waiting for a new version, with handling other players, because it is possible that the problem is actually a problem on the side of AmigaAmp.

Thanks for a good job!!!

@mufa
Thank you for trying MediaVault and for your kind words. To be honest, at first I thought that this "incompatible" podcasts wouldn't be that many, but it seems that a lot of them are not working on AmigaAmp. I'd like to see AmigaAmp supporting them. But I understand what you say that currently podcasts are not quite usable.

I am thinking what can be done for those who do not own Emotion and would like to have a free solution. Is there an alternative player that could work with that?

I will do my best to solve that issue the best way I can.

@walkero
Quote:
I was thinking in the list as it shouldn't take much more room, but an alternative might be to display it under the play button somewhere when a stream is selected. Displaying the stream format by the play button might be a good idea as well. Then, especially with Poscasts, we would be able to tell if it would work in the players or not.

Quote:
Understood. I can be patient. Your doing a good job with the progress you have already made.

Quote:
Would be great. If you want to do a quicker implementation first, maybe use a tooltype where the user could set a path to the player of their choice. Call it a beta feature.

In any case, keep up the good work. It's getting better and better!

Yeah. I got a fast solution for that, which we actually talked about a couple of months ago and I had at the back of my head.

The solution is to have a script that starts the player. Anyone will be able to edit that script and make MediaVault use any player you like.

I also tried ffplay and it works great. So there is a way to listen to podcasts and radio stations free of charge.

In the script there is going to be examples of various players. I am thinking to add some checks, if a player exists, to use this one, or let the user enable the player he prefers. By default I would say to have AmigaAmp3 enabled, because I am not sure how many have ffplay and Emotion installed. What do you think guys?

This is already developed, so for sure will be on the next 1.4.1 release.

A rather small update of MediaVault is coming.

Today I finished a new way to discover interesting podcasts in MediaVault, using the trending endpoint from PodcastindexOrg API. Now, you can search for the best podcasts of the world and filter them out based on category and language.

Also implemented the idea I referred to on previous posts, where a new script is used to launch the player. This script can be edited by anyone and you can set which player to be used. There are a couple of examples in there to make it easier for all of you.

A beta version already reached my monthly supporters at https://ko-fi.com/walkero with extra cool new features. If you want to get early beta versions, please consider to support my work at the link above. And remember, 50% of the donations will go to others.

@walkero,

Congrats for your soft that SOUNDS ^^ very promising.

Regarding the new feature "podcast", the list was at first empty when I clicked on [Discover] button. Thanks to this forum, I understood that I needed a NTP sync and indeed, it works now. I think you should add this (new) requirement in the readme file.

But I don't understand why we need a NTP sync ? Is it not possible to use the OS time instead ? Or at least be able to choose ? I didn't sync my Amiga until now.

Or maybe a better rule could be :
if sync time <> 0
use sync time
else
use OS time

Just my two cents ^^

Anyway, well done!

@glames
Thank you for running and testing my MediaVault.

You can set your system time from the time prefs manually, if you want. The best way to do it is using an online NTP server, because this way this is going to be automatic. For me is not right my app to sync system time, because this is not enough. You have to have the right timezone as well. And this should be done by the user. I expect that no one wants his computer to run having a wrong time set.

Also, I don't know what "sync time" means on your message. Would you like to give me some more info on that?

I am going to add the necessary information about it in MediaVault documentation as soon as possible. But right now I am working on the next release. For now, I added a helpful error message in the app, when such thing happens.

@walkero

By "sync time", I mean "Remote time".

As you can see in the Time prefs screenshot, by default, distant time isn't filled, In this case, podcast searching doesn't work.

My idea was to use System time (at the bottom) when distant time is not filled. But of course, you do as you like.

I can fill the time server field then click on [Get time] and it works. But I think that a few people don't want to use a time server. That's why I think about it.

Good work on the next update!

Ps: I have regular "freezes" of the Amiga (reboot required) when using Mediavault but for now, I don't know what exactly makes it happen. Sorry.

@glames

Quote:

I don't have to do with how the system time is set. My program requests, using AmigaOS API, the time of the system, and that's what I use. I don't know from where this comes from, or how it is set.

Probably, the time you have there is not the right one, and when you sync it with an NTP server this is fixed. You see, the time window that MediaVault uses is only 3 mins. So if your system time difference is more than that, then the podcasts will not work.