Atrium — a native tvOS app for your Emby server

[vdatanet 1687]

Atrium 1.7 is on the App Store.

The sign-in trouble reported here this week is fixed. One word it didn't recognise in a reply and the app threw the whole reply away — which is why a single library of an unfamiliar kind stopped every account on that server from loading any libraries at all. So if you ever installed Atrium, got "Couldn't load your libraries" and concluded it didn't work with your server: it wasn't your server. Worth another go. "Who's watching?" has a way out now, too.

The new thing is Live TV. If your server has channels, Home gets one more tile. Each row in the list says what's on now and how long is left; there's a grid view that shows channels by their logo, which is how you actually recognise them; hold Select to make one a favourite and show only those. The player is built for live rather than for a film: no scrubbing bar, no chapters, no total duration — what's on now, and how much of the programme is left.

What it isn't, so you don't go looking: no guide grid, no recordings, no scheduling. Get in, find your channel, watch it.

And here's where I need your help. All I have is an M3U list of internet channels. If yours comes from a terrestrial, satellite or cable tuner, the signal is a different animal — interlaced, often MPEG-2 with MP2 audio — and the app asks your server to convert it. I've only ever tested that against signals I built here. Try your channels and say here how it went: if one won't start, which one and where it comes from; if they stutter on a connection that plays films fine, say that too — live opens at one fixed quality, with nothing lower to fall back to.

Also fixed: the screen saver interrupting a film, the time bar vanishing after a few jumps, scrubbing forward hanging the video, and the remote going dead with Playback Information on.

[arrbee99 1877]

I'm in. Yay. Excellent.

Thoughts after 5 minutes -

Like the details screen a lot, way better than the Emby one, though admittedly everything I've tried is better than the Emby one.

Not many items in Latest rows though, and maybe Continue Watching. The Emby app has way more (might actually be accidental, but still).

Pressing back seems to end up back at the first (highlight) item a lot. I guess Apple doesn't do long press ?

Live TV, List and Mosaic. List, click on an item and it plays, Mosaic, click on a channel and it gives a schedule for that channel. Seems inconsistent to me, but as I'm typing I'm thinking maybe not. Oh well.

Would be nice if sorting channels by type could happen, I like to have my dvb-s channels all together followed by iptv all together.

Playing dvb-s fine touch wood. Probably should have looked what it said about transcoding on the dashboard, but forgot.

I know you said no guide, but if you feel the urge...

[vdatanet 1687]

26 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

I'm in. Yay. Excellent.

Thoughts after 5 minutes -

Like the details screen a lot, way better than the Emby one, though admittedly everything I've tried is better than the Emby one.

Not many items in Latest rows though, and maybe Continue Watching. The Emby app has way more (might actually be accidental, but still).

Pressing back seems to end up back at the first (highlight) item a lot. I guess Apple doesn't do long press ?

Live TV, List and Mosaic. List, click on an item and it plays, Mosaic, click on a channel and it gives a schedule for that channel. Seems inconsistent to me, but as I'm typing I'm thinking maybe not. Oh well.

Would be nice if sorting channels by type could happen, I like to have my dvb-s channels all together followed by iptv all together.

Playing dvb-s fine touch wood. Probably should have looked what it said about transcoding on the dashboard, but forgot.

I know you said no guide, but if you feel the urge...

Glad you're in @arrbee99 and thanks for writing all of that down after five minutes. That's the useful
window, before you get used to anything.

In order.

Latest and Continue Watching being short: those are my numbers, not your server's. I capped each row
when I built the screen and never checked it against a real library. I'll measure before I move it —
the row also groups episodes under their series, so I want to know which of the two is making it
look thin.

Back landing on the top item: not intended, it should return you to the card you left from. Where
does it happen — home screen, inside a library, or both? It isn't the same fix in the two places,
and focus behaviour never shows up in a test, only with the remote in your hand. (There is a long
press, but holding Menu belongs to the system — it's what takes you out to the Apple TV home screen
— so it isn't mine to reuse.)

List versus Mosaic: you were right the first time. In the mosaic, Select opens the channel and Play
plays it, the same split as a poster anywhere else in the app; in the list, Select just plays. The
real problem is the one you didn't quite say: from the list there's no way to reach a channel's
schedule at all. That goes together with the guide.

Channels grouped by source: I want that too, and sorting is the easy half. The hard half is that a
channel doesn't tell me where it came from — nothing the server sends says dvb-s or iptv. So before
I promise anything: does your server's own order already put them in blocks? If it does, sorting by
list order is that feature already.

The guide is the next thing I'm building. No date from me.

On the dashboard — don't bother, that one's mine. Live playback doesn't report a session yet, so
there's nothing there to show you, and the app's own playback info screen doesn't fill in for
channels either. You'd have gone looking for something I never sent. Both are on the list.

Which makes the line you probably thought was an aside the most useful thing in your message: every
live TV measurement I have came from an M3U tuner with five channels in it. You're the first person
running this on a real one.

Edited 1 hour ago by vdatanet

[arrbee99 1877]

Thanks for the rapid reply. I imagine its late where you are, morning here.

Personally, I always like more items in Home screen rows, I up them from 16 to 128 in Firefox, for example. As mentioned the Emby app has plenty and doesn't seem to choke.

Back landing thing seems to just be when going to details of an item from the Home page, so pick a movie from Latest Movies, go to details, go back and it goes to play button for highlighted item. From a library, it goes back there as well not back to TV series thumb or whichever it was.

I have tags for my dvb-s channels tagged as, surprisingly dvb-s. Suspect NextPVR does that and it feeds Emby. My iptv channels aren't tagged iptv. In the emby Apple TV app I can filter for dvb-s (and others, but not for iptv - no tags for that). So, my channels are listed in the Dashboard Live TV section as a block of dvb-s then all the iptv, maybe because I get the dvb-s from NectPVR and iptv from Emby.

 

 

 

[arrbee99 1877]

50 minutes ago, vdatanet said:

So before
I promise anything: does your server's own order already put them in blocks? If it does, sorting by
list order is that feature already.

Does this mean it should already show channels in the same order they are show under Dashboard > Live TV > Channels, as I think at the moment its showing channels by channel number (which you don't actually show...). It shows two channel 3 next to each other, for example, which I'm assuming is dvb-s channel 3 and iptv channel 3.

[arrbee99 1877]

Not sure if actor bio's should contain more than the movies that are on Emby. No actual bio - Yet ?

I have just somehow managed to highlight Movies and TV shows thumbs at the same time. Probably a one off, but while I'm nitpicking...

The alphapicker down the rhs. Its a bit to the left, not down the centre, and IMHO the font is a bit big compared to eg Sort and Filter. 10 foot interface ?

Doesn't seem to show images I have for genres, for example in Movies. I have thumbs, I think 16:9 but maybe not. Maybe they're not the shape/size you're expecting.