RMVOD r0.9.3 is here!

 Hi folks!  

Well, TV Series Playlists are here, as well as some fixes to Recommendations.  Here are the release notes:

RIBBBITmedia Video On Demand - Tag 0.9.3 (Get it here)

Introduces TV Series Playlists, consolidates Playlists and Recent Episodes to List/Search tab, some bug fixes.

TV Series Playlists

This is a new feature which provides the ability to create (and edit) playlists of TV Series, such that the user's watch history is scanned to find the most-recently watched episode of each series, and plays the next (one) episode for each series listed in the Playlist, in the order listed.  Playlists can be set to repeat a series when the end is reached, and continue playing the Playlist over and over until the user stops it.  If a Series is set to not repeat once the end is reached, it will be skipped and no longer appear in the sequence of played episodes, unless the user manually initiates playback of an earlier episode in the series.  In that case the next time the Playlist is invoked, it will resume playing the previously-ended Series from the episode following the one manually played. Also, a playlist can be associated with a single user or set to be "sitewide", meaning all users on the Server have access to it.  Users can create and edit playlists, and the editing takes place in the Edit tab.  Any information in the Edit tab at the time the user opts to create or edit a Playlist will be wiped out.  Note that the behavior of the Playist edit function is different in that the "Update" button must be pushed for the changes to be posted to the server.


Rework of left-side of List/Search tab

The left side of the List/Search tab used to have the "Search Factors" and "Recommendations Quick Lists", which spilled off the bottom of the tab, requiring a scroll bar.  The "TV Series Playlist" and "Recent Episodes" lists have been integrated into the left side of the List/Search tab, using a collapsible tree view widget.  By default, the "Search Factors" section is exposed, but the caret-in-square-braces at the left of the section label can be clicked to expand or collapse each section, and if it does spill off the bottom of the tab, a scroll bar will automatically appear just for the left side of the tab, meaning that the list area on the  right of the tab no longer "double-scrolls".  The  "Recent Episodes" section has been refactored to make more efficient use of screen space, and displays the relevant information in three columns, rather than 5.  The name of the Series, the Episode last played (which is a button to replay that Episode), and the word "Next" (which is a link to play the next Episode in the Series.


Significant bug fixes

For internal Javascript links/buttons, added  "cursor: pointer" to style for the functional spans.
"Artifact Play Progress" functionality begun, but not finished.  No sharp edges exposed to user.
Fixed some session cookie persistence issues

RMVOD v0.9.1 is HERE! It's a DOOZIE!

 Hi folks!

So, I've created a new tag on the RIBBBITmedia VideoOnDemand code repo, and this one undoes the whole "feature complete for release 1.0" thing.  Many new features.  Oops!

In this tag you'll find several new features.  Notably:

0) Config file.  I'd planned for some time to implement this, and this seemed a really good time to do it.

1) Recommendations (Recs).  This is a new tab in the RMVOD screen, which provides a "carousel-like" interface for browsing artifacts based on connections to viewing trends on the server.  The Recs interface shows artifact details in a floating box when the artifact's image is clicked.  For TV Series artifacts, options are presented to start playing the series from the beginning or to select a season, and browse episodes to select one to play.  Recommendations are cached on the server and expire after a period of days set in the API's config file.  There is a "Refresh Recs" link on the Settings tab to force a refresh of the recommendations.  Recommendations functionality requires a new table in the database.  See README.txt in the root of the code tree for details on upgrading an existing system to support this feature.  For systems where the DB is hosted on the same box as the API, and the box is really-low resource... like a RasPi 2 something even less capable... Recommendations should be disabled in the API's config file.

2) Quick Search Links.  This is a new set of links on the "List/Search" tab which present the lists of artifacts from the Recs tab in the familiar list format.  This also depends on Recs being enabled on the server.

3) "Last Search" display.  Now, when you execute a search, the "search factors" will be displayed below the artifact list to remind you of what you searched for, whether the search is single factor or multi-factor.

4) "Play fullscreen" option.  This is a checkbox on the Settings tab which asks the player to initiate playback in full-screen mode.  This currently only works for playback initiated by the user clicking the artifact to initiate playback.  When playing a series, the second and later episodes played will not be in full-screen.  This is a known issue related to a security feature in popular browsers.  I'm looking for a work around, but for now, it eludes me.

5) "Populate Episode Details" link. In the Artifact Details box for a TV Series, at the bottom, to the right of the "Edit" and "Associate Episodes" links, there is now a "Populate Episode Details" link which initiates an operation on the server to query IMDbAPI for the details relating to the "series" artifact and each of the episode artifacts.  This requires that the series artifact already has episodes associated with it, and has its "imdbid" value set appropriately.  The use of this feature requires a "key" for the API which can be obtained by visiting here https://www.omdbapi.com/ and setting the key value in the API's config file.

Download the latest "stable" code here:

https://github.com/taobear68/rmvod/releases/tag/v0.9.1