Atrium — a native tvOS app for your Emby server

[Grumpy1 50]

Happy to report that everything seems to be working  . My TV DV indicator does indeed come on.

 

sent a pic in pm if you still wanted to see it 

 

thanks 

[vdatanet 1684]

10 minutes ago, Grumpy1 said:

Happy to report that everything seems to be working

That's the one I was waiting for — thank you. A DV set switching over is the one thing I had no
way to test here, and it was the last open question in 1.4.

And thanks for the picture — it arrived, and it's exactly the screen I needed: the line reads
"signalled to the TV" and your set agrees with it.

For anyone else here with a Dolby Vision TV: there's nothing to do, it's already in 1.4. The only
report I'd still like to see is the opposite one — if the Playback Information screen ever says
Dolby Vision was signalled and then withdrawn, that's the case I can't reproduce here.

[jasonmcroy 327]

@vdatanet Just checked out the new update. Nice! Skip intro and credits pull up correctly and work very well. Will have more time to test further tonight and tomorrow. I plan to give the app a good run.

One UI point I noticed and not sure if on purpose or not - on the "Continue Watching" Row, instead of showing the name of the episode under the thumb image it says "Up Next" (I believe in most apps that is where it would show the episode name. It then shows the season number/episode number and episode runtime (which is good). 

Is it possible to have it display the episode name instead of the "Up Next"?

[vdatanet 1684]

32 minutes ago, jasonmcroy said:

Is it possible to have it display the episode name instead of the "Up Next"?

Good catch, and yes — it's changed, and a bit further than you asked.

That line was deliberate, which is the interesting part: the shelf merges "continue watching" and
"up next" into one row, and the metadata line was what told them apart. Your report makes it
obvious the label was doing nothing useful — a next-up card already has no progress bar, so the
text was saying twice what the card already said, and never saying the one thing you were looking
for.

So episodes now read the same in both states, the way you'd expect:

  The Big Bang Theory
  S1:E8 - The Grasshopper Experiment

with the progress bar as the only difference between one you've started and one that's next.

One thing that costs you, and I'd rather point it out than have you notice it: the runtime is gone
from that line — the part you said was good. The bar now does that job on its own. If you miss it
once you're living with it, say so; you're the one who looked closely enough to spot the first
problem.

And thank you for the skip intro/credits report — that's the first time I've heard those two work
in someone else's house, which is worth more than it sounds.

[jasonmcroy 327]

Excellent. Such a quick response.

Yeah, the runtime isn't a big deal. I actually don't think I have ever seen it listed in other apps any way. Probably will look cleaner without it to be honest.

I do love the UI layout in general. The images look really nice and clean. 

I will be watching several movies this weekend so will report anything regarding playback. I don't have very much 4K content that I haven't already watched. It's mostly just 1080p standard blu-ray rips with 5.1 audio. I am playing mostly on a 1080 projector anyway and is why I don't much bother with 4K stuff anymore. My TV in the bedroom is 4K but don't watch in there as much. I am also playing to 2 Homepod Pros so audio becomes a big deal on most apps. Yours plays back just fine so far.

[Grumpy1 50]

Ui bug maybe

 

when you go down on the homepage it always goes to the middle poster and not the left ( not sure if this is intended ) but when you are in the tv or movie section it wil not go down to the last row if there is no poster under where you are focused .

[vdatanet 1684]

55 minutes ago, Grumpy1 said:

when you go down on the homepage it always goes to the middle poster and not the left ( not sure if this is intended ) but when you are in the tv or movie section it wil not go down to the last row if there is no poster under where you are focused .

Thanks for both of these — they're bugs, not intended, and they turned out to be two different ones.

The last row. When the last row isn't full, there was nothing directly below the column you were on, so the remote did nothing at all and those titles couldn't be reached. It wasn't only Movies and TV Shows — every grid in the app had it. Each row is now its own focus destination, so a short last row gets picked up whichever column you come down from.

The middle poster. Also not intended. The bar at the top is centred while the rows start at the left edge, so coming down from it landed on whatever happened to be nearest — the middle poster. It now takes you back to the card you were on, and to the first one in the row the first time you go down.

Both are written, and now they need the remote: focus behaviour is the one thing that never shows up in a test, only in your hand on the sofa. So no date from me — it goes out when it's actually right.

Please keep them coming. This is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to catch from here.

[jasonmcroy 327]

I have been watching movies today on a lazy Saturday. So far playback has been flawless! Enjoying that.

I have noticed a minor UI thing - When selected any poster or thumb image, as the poster/thumb expands slightly in size as it becomes the focus point, the text under it overlaps the image just a little bit. It sort of makes it hard to read while the image is focused. Maybe just a padding issue? 

Nothing else of note so far. 

[vdatanet 1684]

1 hour ago, jasonmcroy said:

I have noticed a minor UI thing - When selected any poster or thumb image, as the poster/thumb expands slightly in size as it becomes the focus point, the text under it overlaps the image just a little bit. It sort of makes it hard to read while the image is focused. Maybe just a padding issue? 

Thanks — and good to hear about the playback, that's the part we can't test from here.

You were right that it's padding, but it turned out to be a more interesting kind of wrong than a number typed too small. The space under the artwork was a constant, and what eats it isn't: on focus, artwork grows in proportion to its own height, so the taller the image the more of that gap disappears. A poster is the tallest thing in the app, which is why it's the one that reads badly — the wide Continue Watching thumbnails were escaping it by half a point, which is exactly why those looked fine.

So rather than reserving more space, the text now moves down with the artwork: the distance between the two never changes. It's what most apps do and what this should have done from the start. The wide rows and the cast row move the same way now, so nothing behaves differently from the card next to it.

While in there, one more thing came out that you'll see: the titles under artwork were smaller than the ones in Continue Watching, for no reason anyone could find. They're all the same size now, and they read a great deal better from a sofa.

It's fixed and the update is with Apple. Thanks for looking closely — that one had been there since the very first version and nobody had put a finger on it.

[jasonmcroy 327]

Excellent. Makes sense in your explanation. 
 

I hadn’t yet noticed the other thing you mentioned but nice catch. 

[Grumpy1 50]

Hi vdatanet

The "spotlight" on the home  page images are cut off on the top on my screen . was not sure if this is  an issue on my end since no one else reported it.

 

[vdatanet 1684]

3 hours ago, Grumpy1 said:

Hi vdatanet

The "spotlight" on the home  page images are cut off on the top on my screen . was not sure if this is  an issue on my end since no one else reported it.

 

Not your end — that one was mine, and you were the first to say it.

The featured area was a wide band across the top of the screen, and the picture in it is the item's backdrop, which the server keeps as 16:9. Filling that band edge to edge left about a fifth of the picture above it and the same below. The bottom cut never showed, because that edge fades into the page behind it. The top edge had nothing to fade into — so that's the one you were seeing, and with artwork framed tight, what lands on it is the top of someone's head.

It's changed, and not by cropping it better: the artwork now fills the screen behind the rows instead of sitting in a band. A 16:9 image in a 16:9 screen has nothing to cut, so the top of the picture is simply the top of the picture. It's how the detail page has always shown it, which is the other thing I liked about it — the two screens now look like the same app.

Measuring yours turned up something else on the same edge: a thin strip of flat background above the featured area, at the very top of the home screen. That's gone too.

No date from me. It's written, and now it needs a television: a gradient that dissolves perfectly on a simulator can show as banding on a real panel, and that's the sort of thing that only the sofa decides.

Thanks for asking whether it was you. It wasn't — and that question is what got it measured.

[Grumpy1 50]

Another question on the featured item 

what determines what is in the one library option ? 

for movies it only show 16  and for tv it only shows 10 which i have way more of both

[Grumpy1 50]

23 hours ago, vdatanet said:

Thanks for both of these — they're bugs, not intended, and they turned out to be two different ones.

The last row. When the last row isn't full, there was nothing directly below the column you were on, so the remote did nothing at all and those titles couldn't be reached. It wasn't only Movies and TV Shows — every grid in the app had it. Each row is now its own focus destination, so a short last row gets picked up whichever column you come down from.

The middle poster. Also not intended. The bar at the top is centred while the rows start at the left edge, so coming down from it landed on whatever happened to be nearest — the middle poster. It now takes you back to the card you were on, and to the first one in the row the first time you go down.

Both are written, and now they need the remote: focus behaviour is the one thing that never shows up in a test, only in your hand on the sofa. So no date from me — it goes out when it's actually right.

Please keep them coming. This is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to catch from here.

This is also now working great

 

thanks

[vdatanet 1684]

7 minutes ago, Grumpy1 said:

Another question on the featured item 

what determines what is in the one library option ? 

for movies it only show 16  and for tv it only shows 10 which i have way more of both

Good question, and the number is doing a bad job of answering it.

It isn't how many titles the library has — it's how many can be used as the featured item, and the app only ever looks at the 16 most recently added in that library. Of those, it counts the ones that have a backdrop image on the server, because that image is the whole featured area; a title without one can't be shown there. So "16" means all sixteen recent ones qualify, and "10" means six of that library's sixteen have no backdrop. Whatever ends up qualifying, at most five of them go into the rotation.

That's why the number stays at 16 or below no matter how large the library is — and reading it back, a bare number next to a library name reads exactly like a library count. That one's on the label, not on you.

Two practical consequences, in case they're useful: if a particular title never turns up in the featured area, it's the backdrop that's missing rather than anything about the title; and the featured item is always drawn from what's new in that library, not from the library as a whole.

[vdatanet 1684]

This one is almost entirely yours: nearly everything in it came from what was reported in this thread, or from digging into what was reported. Thank you — genuinely.

The two focus bugs. Both are fixed, and looking into them turned out to be worth far more than the two screens where they were spotted. The last row of a poster grid: when it isn't full — which is almost always — and you came down on a column sitting above the gap, the remote did nothing and those titles couldn't even be opened. That was in every grid in the app, not just Movies and TV Shows. And the focus now lands where it should rather than wherever is nearest: coming down from the top bar takes you back to the artwork you were on instead of the middle one, on a title's page coming up from a row returns you to the buttons instead of the audio button, and coming down from the bar now reaches the Home feature, which used to be skipped entirely.

Music playlists now show up. This one nobody reported, and it's the one item on the list that only ever went wrong on this server: your music playlists simply didn't appear. The app was asking for something the server doesn't send for playlists, so it threw them all away. It now works it out for itself — and it shows only your own, not other users'.

Continue Watching shows the episode name, as asked here, in the same form the server shows it.

The rest are small and you'll only notice them if they were annoying you: in Favourites no artwork is left off the edge of the screen any more, the progress bar reads over bright thumbnails, and the search field no longer has the bar sitting on top of its text.

There's also a switch in Settings > Tools and Information that hands video preparation back to the server. You don't need it if everything plays well — it's there so that, when something doesn't, we can compare both paths instead of guessing.

Please keep them coming. Sitting here, a test library has tidy full rows and nothing looks wrong; the things that actually get in the way only show up on a real library with a remote in hand.

[Grumpy1 50]

glad i could help in any little way 

 

The app is amazing already

[vdatanet 1684]

Atrium 1.6 is on the App Store.

Two of the things in it were reported in this thread, and one of them I left here with a "no date from me" — so this is me coming back to it.

The featured artwork isn't cropped any more. It's no longer a band across the top of the home screen: the picture fills the screen and the rows sit on top of it, so a 16:9 image in a 16:9 screen has nothing to lose off its top edge. What I said it still needed was a real television, and it's had one — no banding in the fade, and no line along the bottom of the image while scrolling, which were the two ways it could have gone wrong on an actual panel and never on a simulator. The thin strip of flat background above the featured area is gone too. And while I was in there: a title's own page had been showing that same artwork about 5% too large, losing a strip down each side, which is why moving between the two screens never quite lined up. They now show it the same.

The number next to each featured source says what it counts. It read "Movies · 16" and looked like a library count; it now reads "16 eligible", with a line underneath saying where the number comes from — of that library's 16 newest items, the ones that have a background image. That was asked here as well, and the question was right: the label was doing a bad job of answering it.

Libraries that mix films and shows now show up. This is the new thing in the release. If you have a library with both kinds in it — a recordings folder is the usual way to end up with one — the app wasn't showing it to you at all: not on the home screen, not in the library list. And at the same time it was quite happily showing you what was inside it, in search, in Continue Watching and in favourites. So it told you that you had no compatible libraries while putting your films on screen. It's now a library like any other: its own grid — films and shows, with no loose episodes, seasons or folders in the way — with its genres, its suggestions, its count and its own tile.

One thing to expect on the way there: that library gets its tile on the home screen, but no "Recent in …" row. The app asks the server for the library's newest items and gets an empty list back when the library has no declared type; asking exactly the same way for a normal Movies library returns all sixteen. Nothing else about the library is affected.

And a recording that is still being written now appears as the episode it is, season and episode number and all, instead of as a shapeless item — which matters because that is the moment you are most likely to be looking at it.

The app icon is new. You get this one whether you asked for it or not, so I would rather say it than have you find a different tile on your Apple TV. Where there was a columned façade there is now the atrium itself: the courtyard, the opening in the roof that lets the light in, and the basin underneath that catches it. It isn't a change of taste — the old columns came out under three points wide on the icon and read as a smudge — and it is the same mark everywhere now, in the app, in the Apple TV top row and on the website.

And new favourites appear without restarting the app, with the featured item noticing too: add or remove one, or change what feeds it, and it takes effect there and then.

As ever, if something looks wrong on your library, please say so here. Two of the items above exist because somebody did.

[arrbee99 1872]

Thought it might be interesting to try, but I can't even log in.

I tried adding a new user for me (non-admin) with no password and I get "Couldn't load you Libraries". This happens with other users as well, though the the youngest (very young), gets "The server rejected the sign in" and Error 2...something and a Jellyfin api error 0. Another gets to the enter password, which I don't know, so...

OK, now I've thought to delete it and re-add and I get further - I clicked on my name from the user list and it went straight to Who's Watching - why would it do that ?

[arrbee99 1872]

and clicking the back arrow does nothing, so can't go back to previous screen