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A note about plugins
🕑 Added 2023-05-07 07:56:34 +0000 UTCThis is mainly targeted at developers, but I know some of you have been waiting for plugins and I'm working on delivering on some past promises that have been held up. Here's the status:
A few months ago I promised plugins, and had written an entire engine around them. I want to give an update on where that is for the project as it's an important one, and it's about to undergo a major change.
Plugins were originally designed to be code based addons that would allow users to extend the capabilities of Dynframe. A developer would make the plugin in c#, compile it, deliver it, and then a user could decide to turn it on/off and get content such as pixabay or deviantart or eventually instagram photos.
I made it, it worked, and well, I thought I as done. I went to write a document on it and started hitting very bad issues. Questions arose like 'what if the plugin crashes or fails...how does a developer figure that out?'. 'how do users easily deploy these?'. 'why are we asking developers to rewrite stuff they've probably written half a dozen times in python for all of the other extensible systems like Kodi?' 'Why limit this to c# developers when Python is such a more accessible language?'
Then during the Kodi plugin investigation, we realized that Kodi has an excellent plugin system, is python based, and has a TON of stuff out there that could become very useful for us. Content such as the image plugins would work just as well on Dynaframe if we could get the content.
So today, I'm scrapping the plugin system, and starting over. This will delay it, but the new plugin system I hope to write will bring in python files and manifests, make things much simpler overall, and will hopefully also be much more stable. If you've developed a kodi plugin it'll look very similar.
This month there is alot going on. There's content work, some major changes, and things like HEIC are FINALLY getting taken care of. I'm excited for where we end up with this months build. We're only 7 days in and already there's some great things going in...more in a few days!
Comments
Joe Farro
Perfect thankyou. I'll get some tests against those to verify. I'll also think about some transcoding ideas in the future. Right now we actually do magic to make alot of things work on a pi that ..well...normally wouldn't. Getting some method to make a high res iphone video work would be nice, but we have to make sure that the platform can handle it. Some of the things we're doing already stress the pi4 pretty badly, let alone some of the other platforms people have gotten this running on!
Yes correct iPhone videos.
Joe Farro
I believe that’s in this months. We did the plumbing last month but haven’t exposed it. I’ll look it may be exposed via the web API and report back tonight
Can you tell us when you will have file filters so one can disable playing videos?
