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 7 hours 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.

[jasonmcroy 327]

@vdatanet So tonight I noticed a new thing with the App. When the end credits started and the next episode button popped up, I didn't get a chance to select it right away and it went away after a few seconds. When I hit the up button on my remote to bring back the timeline the button was still gone and I couldn't get it to come back. 

Is there a way to make it persistent? I am not sure if the skip intro button is doing the same thing because the show I was watching doesn't have an intro.

[vdatanet 1687]

@arrbee99

Morning there, evening here — and you've answered both of my questions, so this one is mostly
answers back.

Latest rows: you were right, and it's going up. I measured each library first — a movie library gave
16 cards when I asked for 16, and 128 when I asked for 128, in 0.08 seconds. So there was never a
ceiling I was working around: just a number I picked when I built the screen and never checked
against a real library. You're the second person to report that same number, which is usually the
point at which it stops being a coincidence.

One row won't change, and I'd rather say so than have you wonder: a TV library groups new episodes
under their series, so what you get is one card per series with something new, however high the
limit goes. Here that was 15 either way. Movies and music are the ones that grow.

Back landing: that pins it. The screen's own default focus is Continue Watching, so if that were
winning you'd land there instead — landing on the billboard's play button means the focus is being
dropped on the way back and the remote picks the top-left thing it can find. One thing I still need,
because it's a different fix either way: from a library, does back put you in the grid but on the
wrong item, or does it take you out to the home screen entirely?

Tags: this is the useful one. The app never asks the server for tags at all — I request the
programme description and nothing else, so those dvb-s tags never reach me. That's a one-line change
at my end, and it's presumably the same route the app you're comparing against is taking. My own
tuner is an M3U list with nothing tagged on it, so yours are the only tagged channels I have any way
to test against.

Channel order: no, it isn't the dashboard order, and it never has been. I don't ask for any sort, so
what you get is that endpoint's own default — and two channel 3s next to each other says that
default is by number, with both tuners mixed together. As for the number not being shown: the column
only appears when most of the list has one. Your dvb-s channels have numbers and your iptv ones
don't, so if the iptv side is the bigger half, the column hides itself and you're left sorted by
something invisible. Roughly how many of each do you have?

Genres and actor bios: nothing to do with the shape of your images. The app doesn't ask for genre
images at all, and doesn't show a biography on a person's page — neither is built yet. Worth saying
plainly so you don't go re-cropping anything.

The alphabet strip I'll have to judge on the TV rather than from here, so it goes on that list. And
if two thumbnails light up together again, tell me what you were pressing.

[vdatanet 1687]

2 hours ago, jasonmcroy said:

@vdatanet So tonight I noticed a new thing with the App. When the end credits started and the next episode button popped up, I didn't get a chance to select it right away and it went away after a few seconds. When I hit the up button on my remote to bring back the timeline the button was still gone and I couldn't get it to come back. 

Is there a way to make it persistent? I am not sure if the skip intro button is doing the same thing because the show I was watching doesn't have an intro.

That isn't meant to happen, and I think I know why.

The button lives between the credits mark and the last 30 seconds of the episode. It stops there
deliberately: that's where tvOS's own next-episode card is supposed to take over, and having both at
once would be offering you the same thing twice. But the card only appears if autoplay next episode
is switched on — and the button doesn't know that. So with autoplay off, the button goes away and
nothing replaces it, which is exactly what you're describing.

Could you check that setting for me? If it's off, that's the bug, and the fix is the obvious one:
when there's going to be no card, there's no reason to stop the button early. If it's on, then your
episode's credits mark just lands a few seconds before the handover, and my question becomes whether
the card turned up at all.

Skip intro works from a different mark, with an end to its window, so it shouldn't behave this way —
but if you ever see it vanish the same way, that's worth knowing.

[vdatanet 1687]

3 hours ago, jasonmcroy said:

@vdatanet So tonight I noticed a new thing with the App. When the end credits started and the next episode button popped up, I didn't get a chance to select it right away and it went away after a few seconds. When I hit the up button on my remote to bring back the timeline the button was still gone and I couldn't get it to come back. 

Is there a way to make it persistent? I am not sure if the skip intro button is doing the same thing because the show I was watching doesn't have an intro.

Correction to what I told you, and the sooner the better: I sent you to check the wrong setting, and
it can't have been that. The button is behind the same autoplay switch the card is, so with autoplay
off you wouldn't have seen a button at all. You saw one — so that wasn't it, and sorry for the
detour.

What it actually was is in your own description: "after a few seconds". The button used to give up 30
seconds before the end of the episode, because that's where tvOS's own card is meant to come in. When
the credits mark lands only a little before that — which is common, plenty of shows have short
credits — you get a button that appears and then leaves while you're reaching for it. Nothing you did
brought it back because by then it no longer existed.

It now stays until the episode ends. In those last 30 seconds you may see both it and the system's
card; they do the same thing, and I'd rather offer it twice than take it away mid-reach. It's written
and tested — no date from me.

One thing I'd still like to know, if you remember: when the button went, did the system's own
next-episode card turn up in its place, or was there nothing at all? That one's a different problem
and I'd rather know than assume.

[arrbee99 1877]

I'm not, as you might have noticed, too bright. so I'm still not getting the TV Series thing. Are you saying when something is added under Lastest TV Series, its actually adding its included episodes as well, so it adds up to a lot of items ? Otherwise, I'll just say I have 128 for TV Series as well as movies (and documentaries) and it works just fine.

Back landing - go to Movies (or...). Pick a Movie, go to details, press back, its back to the right poster, click back again, its back to top left highlight Play button.

Looking in the Emby Apple TV app, it says channel sorting is by default channel order, not channel number, and it shows dvb-s ch no's 1,2,3,4,5 not 1,2,3,3,4,4 as Atrium does (I only have channels 1 and 2 in dvb-s).

I do have a lot more numberless iptv channels than numbered dvb-s ones, hence...

Haven't quite got the two thumbs being highlighted yet, but its something to do with - be on Movies (say), go down to first recently added to Movies item, back up again, down and across to a different one, go up, it briefly highlights/goes to the one above, say TV Series them back to highlight just Movies again.