New interface
With this new release, Opencast usability is taken to a new level by addressing its main weakness: The web application.
A lot of efforts have been put for making the web application more functional, by improving both its UI and UX.
The single page application now presents the following views:
- The home page
Shows the state of the player and a queue of the coming up media. It displays interface elements to interact with the player, just as you would expect from any media player. - The library
Shows the media categorized by playlists, artists and albums.
Features
- Artist model
Artist models are auto-generated from the metadata extracted from all medias.
On the web interface, artists can be queued, played, shuffled or used as a filtering criteria. - Album model
Just like artists, albums are automatically generated. The same set of functionalities are available for both models.
The thumbnail is fetched through Deezer's API or falls back to the one of the media. - New interface
There is still a lot to describe here: re-orderable and virtualized playlists, downloading progress, a player seeking & control bar ... - Notification system
Backend errors finally make it to the user interface. Represented as toast messages, they contain information related to both sync (web request/response) and async (downloading events) operations. - List suggestions
Provide basic suggestions from your library to populate your lists
Improvements
- Serialization improvement
2x faster models serialization! Serialization is OpenCast's bottleneck when it comes to performance. While it can still be improved by replacing marshmallow with a similar solution, it can already easily handle ~1000 items on a raspberry-pi 3 - New video attributes
A media now has a duration, last play time and cumulated play time. This allows for showing lists of favorite and last media played. - Web socket unification
Unify web sockets to keep only one per client. - Port configuration
The ports on which the backend and frontend run are now both configurable though their config file and integrated in the tools providing monitoring services.
Bug fixes
- Install opencast as a user service (systemd).
This fixes issues related to starting the service before others and/or not having the correct access rights.