thornbill.dev

Favorite Things of 2023

2024-01-16T00:00:00Z

I started making lists of my favorite (new to me) things for the year 2020, inspired by the series from Tested. I have always had the intention of publishing these lists to this blog, but I was uncertain if anyone would find them interesting. If nothing else, publishing these here will be easier for me to reference than being locked away inside various note-taking apps.

Hardware

Vertical mouse — I have dealt with some wrist pain for some time that tends to flare up after long sessions of computer usage or driving. This strange-looking mouse seems to have alleviated a lot of that discomfort for me.

Development

TanStack (React) Query — This library for server state management makes a lot of complex problems (caching, refreshing, and de-duping API requests) really simple.
Zustand — This library is a refreshing take on client-side state management. It is really everything that I wanted from mobx, with official support for features like state persistence.

Technology

Mastodon | IceCubesApp (app) — I have never been a very active user of Twitter, but the anti-features that have been rolled out in the past 1-2 years have led me to completely stop using the service this year. Mastodon was not entirely new to me. (I had an account several years ago on a now-defunct server.) However, this year I setup a new account (thanks to the folks at Fosstodon for hosting their public instance!) and started using the excellent Ice Cubes app as a client on iOS. There may not be as much content available as there was on Twitter, but I really don't care as I find the quality of content much higher (at least for my general interests in open-source software and self-hosting).
RSS | FreshRSS (server) | NetNewsWire (app) — Another service that effectively died for me this year was Reddit. Their open hostility toward users, moderators, and third-party developers prompted me to stop using the service. This left me looking for a replacement for following current events, and I found myself returning to using RSS for the first time in several years. I set up FreshRSS to use as an RSS aggregator and web reader. The experience is much nicer than the aggregator I used years ago. Coupled with NetNewsWire on iOS, it has mostly replaced the use case I had for Reddit, but entirely using open-source software and open web standards!
Seek (app) — This is probably a bit of an outlier compared to the other apps on this list. Seek is an augmented reality-type app that attempts to identify animal and plant life. I have found it very useful while on hikes and outings with Scouts or just while in my yard.

Entertainment

Jury Duty — This is just a fun situational comedy show with a different take on a "reality" style show.
The Witcher — I'm a bit late to this one and entirely unfamiliar with the related books and games, but I still really enjoyed this sci-fi/fantasy series. Although I am somewhat concerned about the next season's transition to a new actor playing the main role.
Ready Player One (book) — Definitely not a new book, but it was a really fun read. I had previously watched the movie, and while they are substantially different, I think the movie did a decent job of capturing the spirit of the book.
Wargroove — My son randomly picked up this game on the Xbox, and it immediately became one of my favorites. The game play reminds me a lot of the Advance Wars games for the Game Boy Advance, and the developer even lists this as a source of inspiration for them. They released a sequel (Wargroove 2) this year also, but I have not picked it up yet.

Miscellaneous

Record player — I think that owning physical media is really important in the age of everything being digital and ownership rights generally disappearing. I was given a vintage record player in 2022, but I didn't really have speakers for it until the end of the year. Now I have it all setup in my office and have a few records from my favorite artists to switch out during my work day.
Hot Wheels Batmobiles — These are just desk toys for me to fidget with during meetings, because who doesn't like the Batmobile??? (My personal favorite is the Batmobile from Batman the Animated Series.)
Funko Pop — Yes, they can be rather silly-looking, but they are affordable and cover a huge range of different fandoms. I think they are fun.
Bro Thor's New Asgard (LEGO set) — This is a small set that packs in a ton of detail, and "Bro Thor" is one of the funniest characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Work In Progress — March 2022

2022-04-12T00:00:00Z

It has been a little while since my last update… in addition to the usual holiday craziness, I was dealing with some sickness at the end 2021 that seriously reduced my open-source activity. Then at the end of January I started a position with a new employer. It has taken me awhile to get back into the full swing of things, but I believe I am getting there now.

Here are some of the open-source contributions I made in the month of March.

This month I have reviewed a total of 74 PRs in 10 repositories.

Jellyfin

There have been some major new releases for Jellyfin projects in March!

Android TV v0.13 was released this month. A huge shout out to Niels, Cameron, and all the other contributors for this release. (I really only fixed one minor bug for this release.) You can read the release post for additional information about the new features and improvements.

The long awaited Beta 1 release for Jellyfin 10.8.0 is now available. As usual, make sure you have proper backups available before trying any pre-release builds. Details can be found in the release announcement.

jellyfin-web

The majority of my focus has been towards jellyfin-web recently. A lot of this has been geared towards fixing minor issues in 10.8 in hopes of making it our most polished release to date. A release branch for 10.8 was created as part of the release process for the first beta. This means that work on 10.9 has already started on the master branch. I have started working on some general code cleanup and minor refactoring as part of 10.9. There is still a long way to go, but my hope is that cleaner code will foster new contributions in the future.

jellyfin-web#3538: Move screensavermanager to scripts
jellyfin-web#3537: Update libraries comments that reference Vue migration
jellyfin-web#3536: Remove setTitle function in app router
jellyfin-web#3534: Cleanup duplication in webpack dev config
jellyfin-web#3531: Remove broken method of registering routes for plugins
jellyfin-web#3527: Fix rewatching next up status
jellyfin-web#3498: Restore missing MessageUnauthorizedUser error message
jellyfin-web#3495: Fix any type warning
jellyfin-web#3493: Add default-case-last rule and fix issues
jellyfin-web#3489: Add headings to display settings screen
jellyfin-web#3480: Fix more accessibility issues
jellyfin-web#3478: Fix click on item details poster playing wrong item
jellyfin-web#3473: Move rewatching in next up to display option and remove home section

jellyfin-expo

I made some updates to the jellyfin-expo project to support Jellyfin 10.8, fix some minor issues and warnings, improve test coverage, and make some tooling updates. A new app release will happen sometime before Jellyfin 10.8 is released to ensure compatibility.

jellyfin-expo#356: Add basic render tests for screen components
jellyfin-expo#355: Update npm cache in GH actions
jellyfin-expo#354: Add tooling support for typescript
jellyfin-expo#353: Refactor fetch with timeout to separate utility
jellyfin-expo#352: Remove support for server versions <10.3
jellyfin-expo#350: Use uuids for internal server ids
jellyfin-expo#349: Add eslint rules for sonarqube issues
jellyfin-expo#348: Fix react-native version
jellyfin-expo#347: Fix native-stack warning
jellyfin-expo#345: Remove exitmenu as a supported feature

jellyfin-sdk-typescript

Work on the TypeScript SDK is still ongoing. I thought I was more or less finalized with the API of the SDK, but the approach I had taken did not allow the SDK to be tree-shaken properly. This was a pretty big issue due to the size of the generated client. The new API can be seen in jellyfin-sdk-typescript#149 which is still in progress since I need to add some documentation for upgrading.

My plan is to work towards moving the SDK to the Jellyfin organization after the next release, since this will (hopefully) be the last major change needed for the API.

(In Progress) jellyfin-sdk-typescript#149: Fix tree-shaking of the SDK
jellyfin-sdk-typescript#148: Remove unnecessary exports
jellyfin-sdk-typescript#147: Move output directory to lib

jellyfin

I did manage to contribute a few small updates to the Jellyfin server codebase this month despite my lack of experience with C#. I made some adjustments to the behavior of the new "rewatching" feature in the next up home section (although it is still buggy in some cases). I also made some updates to how studio images are provided and where they are sourced from.

jellyfin#7423: Remove unused poster support from StudiosImageProvider
jellyfin#7396: Update artwork repository urls
jellyfin#7383: Include played and unplayed results in the same next up request

jellyfin-androidtv

jellyfin-androidtv#1560: Fix crash getting badge image with null base item

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Work In Progress — October 2021

2021-11-16T00:00:00Z

Here are some of the open-source projects I have been working on in the month of October.

Eventually this has to stop, but I did set another personal record for the number of pull requests I reviewed in a month. I reviewed a total of 122 pull requests across 8 repositories! 🚀

mobx-sync-lite

I started a new project this month called mobx-sync-lite!

MobX is a state management library for JavaScript/TypeScript projects. mobx-sync-lite is a hard-fork of the mobx-sync library that is used to sync MobX state to a storage backend. I started using mobx-sync in jellyfin-expo and I really like the simple API and feature set that it provides. Unfortunately, the original author had no plans to continue support due to some significant changes made in the latest version of MobX. This fork aims to continue development and add support for new versions of MobX (eventually).

mobx-sync-lite#1: Fix the example project
mobx-sync-lite#3: Add dependabot and github actions
mobx-sync-lite#15: Ignore major version updates for mobx
mobx-sync-lite#16: Add rollup build check
mobx-sync-lite#17: Add badges and compatibility table to README

Jellyfin

The first alpha release of Jellyfin 10.8 has been released!

Most of my Jellyfin time has been working on updating dependencies and making some quality of life changes for the Jellyfin iOS app (jellyfin-expo). I also fixed a few small bugs in jellyfin-web for 10.8.

jellyfin-expo

jellyfin-expo#297: Add lint rules
jellyfin-expo#298: Fix import order warnings
jellyfin-expo#299: Fix eslint issues on save in vscode
jellyfin-expo#300: Update codecov config to be less strict on coverage changes
jellyfin-expo#301: Update to Expo 42
jellyfin-expo#303: Remove feature request link
jellyfin-expo#304: Update icons
jellyfin-expo#305: Update dependencies
jellyfin-expo#306: Update react-navigation
jellyfin-expo#307: Add beta badge
jellyfin-expo#308: No scroll indicators
jellyfin-expo#311: Update AsyncStorage
jellyfin-expo#312: Remove deprecated device id
jellyfin-expo#315: Remove duplicate eslint override
jellyfin-expo#316: Use mobx-react-lite
jellyfin-expo#317: Use mobx-sync-lite

jellyfin-web

(In Review) jellyfin-web#3017: Fix header centering on large mobile devices
(In Review) jellyfin-web#3018: Fix audio player overlapping on small screens
(In Review) jellyfin-web#3019: Enable multiserver in development environments

jellyfin-sdk-typescript

As promised last month, I did write a dedicated post about the reasoning behind and current state of the TypeScript SDK for Jellyfin.

Some new functionality for finding the best potential server address and getting image URLs was added to the SDK. There were also some changes made to how URLs were being parsed internally. The SDK should be in good state for anyone to start using it and begin reporting any issues or missing features!

jellyfin-sdk-typescript#26: Add server recommendations
jellyfin-sdk-typescript#42: Remove usage of parse-url
jellyfin-sdk-typescript#43: Add method for getting an item image url

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

A New TypeScript SDK for Jellyfin

2021-10-13T00:00:00Z

I recently published a new project that I have been working on, a TypeScript SDK for Jellyfin. This project is not (currently) an official Jellyfin project. I wanted the project to have a solid set of basic functionality before proposing it to be moved into the organization. This allows me some freedom in making larger changes as I deem necessary while the project is still in early development.

The goal of the SDK is to provide a generated API client with some additional helpers and utility functions for all TypeScript and JavaScript environments (browsers, node.js, React Native, etc.). It is very heavily inspired by the excellent work @Niels has done on the Kotlin SDK.

Why another SDK / API client?

I was motivated to start working on a new TypeScript SDK, because in my opinion, the current API clients had some pretty fundamental flaws.

The Jellyfin API Client for JavaScript began as a fork of an Emby project that is used throughout jellyfin-web. The project relies heavily on browser APIs which makes it poorly suited for a modern JavaScript ecosystem where JavaScript is run in environments such as servers and mobile applications. It also includes utilities that seem completely unrelated to interacting with a Jellyfin server such as an event bus implementation and a data store. There is no way for changes to the Jellyfin API to be automatically added to this API client. Any change in the API must be made manually which is tedious and error prone. The project is also very poorly organized. It consists of thousands of lines of JavaScript but is only divided into six files. Finally, very little documentation is available to help other projects make use of this API client.

Next is the Jellyfin API Client for Axios. This API client was just recently created by @ferferga and is a massive improvement over the older JavaScript API client. The project is automatically generated from the Jellyfin OpenAPI specification. This means that any API changes will be included in the client without requiring any manual changes. This is great, but... it only provides the generated client. That means that any application using the client needs to write a lot of boilerplate and utility functions for common functionality.

I thought the best option would be to use some of what we learned from the Jellyfin API Client for Axios and make it more like the Kotlin SDK. The core could be generated from the OpenAPI specification but with all the boilerplate and some common utilities included.

What is the current state of the project?

The new TypeScript SDK is at a point where it should be usable and fairly stable. It can be installed from npm today! A basic demo of how to use the SDK can be found in this CodePen. There is also usage documentation in the README and the integration tests can be used as a reference. TypeDoc documentation is available in the repository.

The SDK currently includes utilities for authentication and server discovery and validation. Also included is initial support for device playback profile generation added by @ThibaultNocchi. Generating a complete profile is still a long ways off, but it will be great to handle device profiles in a common place as they are notoriously difficult to get right. I am currently working on a utility to generate item image URLs, so that should be available in the next release.

If you are working on a TypeScript or JavaScript project that integrates with Jellyfin, I would encourage you to give my new SDK a try. Of course if you think the SDK is missing some utility or find a bug, feel free to open an issue. Hopefully this will make it much easier for anyone who wants to make a project connect to Jellyfin!

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Work In Progress — September 2021

2021-10-05T00:00:00Z

Here are some of the open-source projects I have been working on in the month of September.

Jellyfin

The biggest update for Jellyfin is that the 0.12 release of the Android TV app is finally live! This was a massive effort taking over a year since the 0.11 release. More information can be found on the Jellyfin blog.

A quick note to any Fire TV users, at the time of writing the app is still pending approval from Amazon, but your devices should automatically update once it is approved.

Jellyfin 10.7.7 was also released in September. The release consisted of a couple minor bugfixes and a fix for an issue where user settings could get in an invalid state which could prevent clients from loading.

I once again set a new personal record for the number of pull requests I reviewed in a month. I reviewed a total of 119 pull requests across 11 repositories! 🚀

jellyfin-web

Most of my development time was spent trying to get jellyfin-web ready for a beta release of Jellyfin 10.8. The biggest change needed was to fix the direct play logic to match some server-side changes. Most pull requests were for minor improvements to make the user experience more polished. One nice feature for iOS 15 users is the addition of theme color support in Safari.

jellyfin-web#2912: Disable warnings in webpack dev server overlay
jellyfin-web#2913: Reorder item details sections
jellyfin-web#2939: Log warning instead of error when dictionary has not loaded
jellyfin-web#2940: Fix direct play logic when direct stream is disabled
jellyfin-web#2943: Fix play all and shuffle buttons
jellyfin-web#2945: Fix media indicator color
jellyfin-web#2946: Disable sync correction by default on mobile
jellyfin-web#2948: Restore missing placeholder error message
jellyfin-web#3001: Update apiclient
jellyfin-web#3002: Add theme color support
jellyfin-web#3016: Remove unused sass mixins
(In Review) jellyfin-web#3017: Fix header centering on large mobile devices
(In Review) jellyfin-web#3018: Fix audio player overlapping on small screens
(In Review) jellyfin-web#3019: Enable multiserver in development environments
jellyfin-web#3021: Move the selected player name next to cast icon

jellyfin-apiclient-javascript

The JavaScript API client needed a new version published to include some required changes for Jellyfin 10.8. The first version did not properly target ES5 environments, so a fix for that was published as a bugfix release.

jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#288: Bump version to 1.9.0
jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#304: Fix babel target
jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#306: Bump version to 1.9.1

jellyfin-androidtv

I only had a couple pull requests for the Android TV app this month to fix some last minute issues in the 0.12 release.

jellyfin-androidtv#1125: Fix now playing bug layout
jellyfin-androidtv#1138: Remove unused tile colors and update default theme

jellyfin-sdk-typescript

This month I published a new project that I have been working on, a TypeScript SDK for Jellyfin. This project is not (currently) an official Jellyfin project. This was my first time doing much in TypeScript, and I am loving it. More information about this project will be published in a separate post soon!

thornbill.dev

I have made a few updates to this website this month also. Since I updated the layout of the blog post pages, I have wanted to apply a similar layout to the home page, and now it has been updated. I also added a footer to every page of the website that specifies the license.

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Work In Progress — August 2021

2021-09-13T00:00:00Z

It may be a little later than usual, but here is a summary of the open-source contributions I made in August.

Jellyfin

August was a (relatively) slow coding month for me. However I think I set a new personal record for the number of pull requests I reviewed. I reviewed a total of 107 pull requests across 7 repositories in the Jellyfin organization! 🚀

jellyfin-androidtv

The Jellyfin Android TV app is continuing to prepare for the final release of the 0.12 version of the app. The pull requests I worked on this month focused on improving codec support, fixing some bugs, and a little bit of code cleanup. We released three updates to the 0.12 beta in the month of August and are getting very close now to a final release.

jellyfin-androidtv#1076: Allow user sessions to be set to null again
jellyfin-androidtv#1102: Restore direct play support for avi with libvlc
jellyfin-androidtv#1103: Enable multichannel audio support for Fire TVs
jellyfin-androidtv#1108: Add guide card to live tv library views
jellyfin-androidtv#1110: Downmix audio by default on Chromecast with Google TV
jellyfin-androidtv#1111: Remove useless check method

jellyfin-web

The changes I worked on in jellyfin-web this month focused mainly on developer experience. Several improvements were made to our CI workflow and reduce the amount of build time warnings that were produced. I also fixed a minor regression in unstable that caused the "continue watching" section of the home screen to show images in the wrong aspect ratio.

jellyfin-web#2821: Update merge conflict action trigger
jellyfin-web#2829: Fix continue watching card shapes
jellyfin-web#2848: Update dependabot frequency to run weekly
jellyfin-web#2853: Update workbox
jellyfin-web#2858: Fix build warnings

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Work In Progress — July 2021

2021-08-04T00:00:00Z

Another month has passed, so it is time for another report of the projects I have been working on. I spent some time visiting family this month, so I made noticeably fewer contributions in July.

Jellyfin

The beta release of Android TV app version 0.12 is now live! A huge shoutout to Niels for all his work making this release possible! 🎉 This release includes over a year of work including a completely revamped login workflow, design improvements throughout the app, and a ton of bug fixes. Additional information and installation instructions can be found on the Jellyfin blog.

In addition to the changes below, I reviewed 48 pull requests in 7 different Jellyfin repositories this month.

jellyfin-androidtv

The changes for Android TV that I made this month were mostly polishing the user experience for the pending 0.12 release. The most significant was probably some playback profile fixes for Fire TV devices. The profile was limiting codec support to what was supported by the first generation Fire Stick devices when newer devices support additional codecs. There was also an issue where the maximum supported resolution was not included in the device profiles.

jellyfin-androidtv#993: Fix audio delay popup positioning
jellyfin-androidtv#994: Change default step value in NumberSpinner
jellyfin-androidtv#995: Remove unnecessary createPopupMenu util
jellyfin-androidtv#1013: Playback fixes for Fire TVs
jellyfin-androidtv#1019: Change default screen

jellyfin-web

You may have noticed that sometimes after updating Jellyfin the web interface will not load properly until you refresh a few times or clear the browser cache. This was due to some issues with how caching was setup in our webpack configuration. After 10.8.0 this should no longer be an issue as the main JavaScript file name will not change, but will instead use a URL parameter for cache-busting. Hopefully this will make your update process go more smoothly. 🙂

jellyfin-web#2784: Fix ATV 0.11 using wrong icon
jellyfin-web#2789: Update stalebot configuration
jellyfin-web#2790: Fix webpack config for bundle caching

jellyfin

I found a server issue introduced in 10.7 that caused the server to not honor a device's maximum supported resolution for video playback while working on the Android TV app. Luckily this was a pretty easy bug caused by an API migration, so I was able to submit a fix.

jellyfin#6274: Restore max width and height params
jellyfin#6300: Update stalebot configuration

ossgit

Ossgit has been updated to the latest version of Gitea once again. There were a few minutes of downtime during the update due to some template changes that needed to be made for the new version.

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Work In Progress — June 2021

2021-07-02T00:00:00Z

Happy Independence Day 🇺🇸 to those in the US and a happy (belated) Canada Day 🇨🇦 to our friends to the north!

Here are some of the open-source projects I have been working on in the month of June.

Interdoc — A “new” open-source project

Interdoc is a project that I wrote several years ago and I finally decided to release it under an open-source license. Interdoc is a RESTful API and minimal web interface for converting HTML and/or Markdown to a multitude of different formats including DOCX, EPUB, LaTeX, ODT, PDF, various wiki formats, and more! The project relies on the powerful Pandoc command line utility on the backend. I primarily used this to convert from Markdown to MediaWiki Markup because I could never get the syntax right. 😂

Considering the source had been sitting untouched for three years, getting everything up to date on a modern version of Node and updated dependencies was fairly painless. A demo is currently hosted at interdoc.thornbill.dev and the source can be found on my GitLab profile. Hopefully someone will find it useful!

Jellyfin

This month I made it a priority to review pull requests for the projects I work on regularly for Jellyfin. In particular jellyfin-web has fallen a bit behind with reviews and dependabot can be a bit ruthless. In total it looks like I reviewed 95 pull requests this month. Unsurprisingly most of those were in jellyfin-androidtv (41) and jellyfin-web (41). 🚀

jellyfin-androidtv

We are still working towards that fabled 0.12 release for Android TV. To that end, a lot of the ongoing work on the app has been focused on polish and stability.

This month I have worked on updating the appearance of the user and clock view shown in the upper right corner of the screen so that it matches the new toolbar used on the home screen. Also the player overlay received some minor layout tweaks for the text and logo as well as a fix for the positioning of the audio delay popup.

jellyfin-androidtv#920: Refactor clock view
jellyfin-androidtv#921: Fix nullability issues
jellyfin-androidtv#943: Improve null handling in PlaybackHelper.getItemsToPlay
jellyfin-androidtv#947: Fix broken layout on grid pages
jellyfin-androidtv#966: Update clock bug to match toolbar
jellyfin-androidtv#973: Update playback overlay layout
(In Review) jellyfin-androidtv#977: Fix user information not reflecting updates
jellyfin-androidtv#978: Fix crash when watching and recording live tv
jellyfin-androidtv#979: Fix crash when previous channel id is empty
jellyfin-androidtv#980: Add glide app module for configuration
jellyfin-androidtv#981: Fix crash due to missing context on grid
jellyfin-androidtv#983: Update background filter transparency
jellyfin-androidtv#993: Fix audio delay popup positioning
jellyfin-androidtv#994: Change default step value in NumberSpinner
jellyfin-androidtv#995: Remove unnecessary createPopupMenu util

jellyfin-web

React support is in! 🎉 If you run unstable or the master branch of web, the search page is now a React component... and it looks exactly like it did previously. It is another very exciting step forward to me though as it allows us to move past the limitations and issues inherit with building out all pages in the app using DOM manipulation and HTML string injection.

Another feature I worked on this month was adding the ability to define custom links to show up in the menu in Jellyfin. It was apparent after our move to the current webpack build system that a lot of people were manipulating the source files of their Jellyfin install to achieve this. With my change, links can now be defined in the web config.json file. Additional details can be found in the documentation.

jellyfin-web#2683: Add React support
jellyfin-web#2698: Fix live reload
jellyfin-web#2703: Add error logging for missing translation keys
jellyfin-web#2704: Fix continue reading card shape
jellyfin-web#2705: Add support for custom menu links in config.json
jellyfin-web#2706: Update icon used for syncplay
jellyfin-web#2736: Fix invalid import path
jellyfin-web#2742: Update dependencies
jellyfin-web#2743: Remove html from syncplay toast messages
(In Review) jellyfin-web#2758: Use album artist for listing artist albums
(Awaiting Backport) jellyfin-web#2759: Fix serviceworker paths

thornbill.dev

You may notice I have made some updates to this website this month also!

There is now an RSS feed available so you can follow my posts.
Post pages have been redesigned slightly and now sport a navigation header.
Tag support has been added including a basic page listing all tags for browsing.
Licenses have been updated. All code for this site is available under the BSD-2-Clause License and all other content is provided under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise specified.

The source for this site is also available on my GitLab profile.

ossgit

Things have been a little quiet for ossgit.org this month. There are a few new repositories being mirrored there including the newest project to join the Jellyfin organization: Swiftfin. Otherwise there is not much to report on this front. 🦗

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub. An option for custom amounts and one-time contributions is now available.

Work In Progress — May 2021

2021-06-07T00:00:00Z

Here are some of the things I have been working on in the month of May.

jellyfin-androidtv

Most of my time this month has been spent working on the Jellyfin Android TV app in hopes that the 0.12 update will release at some point in 2021… 🤞

I have mainly been focusing on UX issues and regressions in the app. This has included some improvements for subtitles, focus issues on Fire OS, and improving performance of rendering blur hash placeholders.

I also worked on refactoring the player profiles. This should make it easier for people to contribute fixes for issues when the profile is inaccurate.

jellyfin-androidtv#861: Improve subtitle rendering
jellyfin-androidtv#862: Add workaround for koin logging issue
jellyfin-androidtv#870: Fix null media url crash
jellyfin-androidtv#873: Add horizontal padding to subtitles
jellyfin-androidtv#874: Fix Fire OS focus issues on login
jellyfin-androidtv#875: Fix default value for DefaultView preference
jellyfin-androidtv#876: Change subtitle delivery method for dvdsubs in exoplayer
jellyfin-androidtv#877: Remove text dimming on inactive cards
jellyfin-androidtv#888: Refactor alpha picker in Kotlin and fix Fire OS compatability
jellyfin-androidtv#895: Fix subtitles out of bounds crash
jellyfin-androidtv#898: Remove transparency from card badges
jellyfin-androidtv#899: Refactor player profiles
jellyfin-androidtv#903: Grid view improvements
jellyfin-androidtv#905: Decode blur hashes in background thread
jellyfin-androidtv#907: Disable AC3 for Fire Stick Gen 1 devices
jellyfin-androidtv#911: Add flac support to exoplayer profile
jellyfin-androidtv#917: Allow wildcard imports in detekt
jellyfin-androidtv#919: Hide live TV section when unavailable
(In Review) jellyfin-androidtv#920: Refactor clock view
(In Progress) jellyfin-androidtv#921: WIP: Crash fixes

jellyfin-web

Some very exciting changes are in the works on the Jellyfin Web side of things also.

For developers, I recently found a fix for live reload when running the site with the webpack dev server. I also have an open PR to add support for rendering pages with React. Hopefully this will improve security and make it easier to develop new pages!

Speaking of security, a fix was made for an XSS vulnerability that was disclosed. This also prompted me to cleanup some of the code for toast notifications.

jellyfin-web#2647: Fix mov support in Safari
jellyfin-web#2648: Fix alpine python package
jellyfin-web#2657: Bump jellyfin-apiclient to 1.8.0
jellyfin-web#2675: Fix sharing url
jellyfin-web#2676: Fix xss via displaymessage
jellyfin-web#2681: Cleanup toast messages
(In Review) jellyfin-web#2683: Add React support
jellyfin-web#2698: Fix live reload

jellyfin-apiclient-javascript

For the JavaScript apiclient, changes were made to make our npm publishes automated. This should prevent some of the issues we have had around releases of jellyfin-web in the past.

jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#208: Add GH Action for npm publishing
jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#209: Bump version to 1.8.0
jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#210: Remove unused typescript configuration
jellyfin-apiclient-javascript#211: Add dependabot config for GH Actions

Other Jellyfin contributions

A few other minor changes were made to jellyfin-expo, jellyfin/.github, and jellyfin although nothing of note in my opinion. 😉

ossgit

Just a couple updates on ossgit. If you noticed any instability or long load times, there was a server misconfiguration causing some issues that has finally been resolved. ossgit has also been updated to use the latest release of Gitea.

If you are interested in supporting my work, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Jellyfin on iOS Hack Week Retrospective

2020-09-09T00:00:00Z

I decided to take the last week (30 August 2020) to hack on some of the issues with the iOS experience on recent versions of Jellyfin. Below is a summary of the progress made.

Quick Wins in Jellyfin-Web

Support for Picture-in-Picture (PiP) will be properly detected in future Jellyfin versions! This will prevent the PiP control from showing in the video playback controls on devices when it is not actually supported by the device (iPhones and older iPads). See the pull request for additional details.

iPad detection will now be more robust in future Jellyfin versions! Recent iOS versions made it more difficult to detect if a website was opened on an iPad. It is important for Jellyfin to be able to accurately determine what device it is running on in order to properly report what media the device can support. This pull request added some logic to improve our ability to detect iPads in these cases.

Playback Issues

If you have tried Jellyfin on an older iOS device and found that nothing would play, you will be glad to hear that a fix was found! There was an assumption in jellyfin-web that all iOS devices would support the AC-3 and E-AC-3 audio codecs. Based on this support matrix, older iPhones and iPads lack support for these codecs though. A change was added in jellyfin-web to properly report those codecs as unsupported for these devices. More details can be found in the pull request.

Another issue was discovered that caused progressive playback of audio transcoded to the AAC codec to fail to play. This was resolved by this pull request in the server repository.

Additional transcoding issues are still being investigated. If you are encountering video playback failures on iOS when transcoding, please provide details in this issue including the media format information and any server and ffmpeg logs.

iPad Rotation in the Jellyfin App

The issue that causes iPads to switch orientation when launching the Jellyfin app was fixed upstream by a contributor to the Expo project. I had hoped we could upgrade the library and release a fix for the Jellyfin app, but Expo did not release the update for the current Expo SDK version. As a result, this will be on-hold until the next release of the Expo SDK.