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Would be great if we could set up permissions for different areas of the frame. A login for admin then maybe an open one or a "visitor/guest" login.
For the guest login I was thinking that the actions available to them would be uploading images/videos, forward, back, pause and the ability to choose a playlist.
To give you a scenario, we had people staying with us and wanted to load some photos up onto our frame - I gave them the IP to load them, but I don’t want them to be able to mess with any settings or be able to delete anything already on the frame.

Running the May release (Build: 1f73f91, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1). I wanted to start using overlays. Just toggling it on causes the screen to stop rendering and Dynaframe web UI to stop working.

How I "fixed" it was to hard reset and if you get the timing right there is a small window where the Web UI will work for a brief period of time that I can flip the toggle back off. Then everything works as it did.

Within a household with techies, you will always find somebody having pictures already organized and store somewhere, may it be a Synology, a Mac, or an Unraid Server,...

In the end, it could be interesting for the user to just point the frame to the local network location potentially via different protocols:

SMB/CIFS
FTP
...

Then what would need to be determined is how to handle a share becoming unavailable. Automatic reconnection when available?

Mobile Device:
Android
Browser:
Firefox

When using the hamburger menu from Android Firefox browsers. I get get the menu to expand but the screen flickers and won't collapse back down. It's just causes me to have to scroll down past the menu to get to the screen.

Current Environment:
UpTime: 0.00:51:09, Temp: 61.604 C, Memory: 169 mb, Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Database items: NYI, Drive space: /: 47.97 GB/58.24 GB, Automatic Mode: True
Build: 958d92a, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1

Video playback more or less requires videos to be 1920x1080 or 1080x1920 or smaller based on orientation. So below I will list some tools that make it easy to do that for your collection, and with a little ingenuity you can even batch this so it will go through and make your collection curated to fit.

Long Term, we want the frame to do this for you and cache the modified video, but it's a while off since the PI 4 doesn't really have the spare processing power to make it feasible and keep the frame running smoothly.

First tool is called Media Info: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
Second tool is called ffmpeg: https://ffmpeg.org/

Resource/Sample Website is: https://ottverse.com/change-resolution-resize-scale-video-using-ffmpeg/

Media info can be used to determine the active items in a file, codec, frame sizes and so on, just useful things to know.

The convention of things in <> being that you provide the information and omit the <>.

ffmpeg -i <input.mp4> -vf "scale=1080:-1" -preset slow -crf 18 <output.mp4>
where <input.mp4> is the file you want to start with, if spaces or odd characters are in the name you would use quotes, ex. "my big file name.mp4" <output.mp4> is the same situation, ex. "my big file name-1080.mp4"

The above command 1080:-1 will resize to a fixed width size the height to match the original aspect ratio. You could use 1080:1920 which might deform a video, or others like -1:1080 & 1920:1080 for landscape (0, 180 orientations)

Feel free to ask questions below. These commands can also upscale video, but will not usually improve quality in that case, just making the files bigger.

Background:
I would like to be able to tell that the Dynaframe core application is in a healthy state. Meaning that the engine is responsive to request and processing image/videos as expected, etc.

Request:
I would like the Dynaframe API to expose a "health check" or "ping" endpoint that would be a reliable source of status for the responsiveness of the Dynaframe application. Returning 200 OK should be reflective of an exit code zero (0) meaning all application checks pass. Any other http status code would mean an unhealthy state and user action should be expected.

Immediate request:
How can I accomplish this now? I'm currently running a python script to monitor the RAM and CPU utilization and feeding it into an InfluxDB so that from Home Assistant I have some information to see the health of the raspberry pi. Can you please tell me what I might check via another script to tell if the Dynaframe application is healthy?

I would plan on running this script every 5-10 minutes so it shouldn't be too taxing on the system.

Note: I'm currently running a Raspberry PI 2B with 1GB of RAM and the application is working well and has only hit a an average of 67% RAM and 52% CPU.

Thanks for making this awesome tool!

I completed a fresh install yesterday, on boot I didn't get a qr code as stated in the install notes. Has something changed that's not been updated in the 'how to' install instructions?

Preferably translating the coordinates into something that is human readable.

This relates to Build 821e376.

When an overlay is used to display text on top of the image, the overlay text appears to change at the beginning of an image transition. Therefore during the transition the text from the next image displays immediately, even though the current image will continue to display (albeit fading) for some seconds. This would be fine if a very short transition time was used, but the standard longer transition time will show incorrect text for some time.

Maybe the new text needs to be delayed until midway through the transition, or later, or fade out and in in sync with the image transition.

When using the web interface to create playlist directories and upload files, the files and folders are owned by root with permissions 755. This means someone using the samba share (as guest) can not add or delete files in those directories. If using the samba share exclusively, this is not a problem, but the permissions do not allow complete mixed use of methods of playlist management.
I discovered this while building a Mac Applescript utility that syncs an album from the Photos application of MacOS to the DynaFrame.
(it uses keywords associated with each image to place images in playlist folders on DynaFrame)

One question I have concerns the Infobar Setting / Image Info field? I assume this is an EXIF field? Which one?

Well these don't happen often, but a few things might cause it, hitting run too fast and the zip not being finished, or power outage at the worst moment, or a corrupted sdcard come to mind as top reasons. However it happened, here is how to get back up and running.

The last running version of dynaframe should be found at: /home/pi/.dynaframe/dfupdates/...
There will be up to five old versions, and there will be a folder with a date telling you when the update was done.
If you pick the newest folder and move it to /home/pi/Pictures. Then reboot. Then all should come back.

To do this you can use ssh or vnc to access the frame terminal and do things in the frame os directly

If you have a machine that can connect to the share: /// to open the share and you will see logs and media, in logs you might see dfupdates, depending on what image you started from.

cd /home/pi/.dynaframe/dfupdates
ls -l
cp -rv <directory name of latest update> /home/pi/Pictures/dfupdate
sudo reboot

If you have all this same thing, go into the dfupdates folder and you should see dated updates. simply copy the newest to the media folder and rename it dfupdate, and reboot.

finally if Dynaframe isn't booting at all
once you have dfupdate in the pictures directory you may have to use ssh to issue these commands:
sudo chmod +xv /home/pi/Pictures/dfupdates/run.sh
sudo ./home/pi/Pictures/dfupdates/run.sh &

after it's fixed up, do reboot one last time to make sure it all sticks, and if this isn't enough to get you going again, do find us on discord and let us know where you are sticking.

of course at any time you can download the image file, and make a new card, and start fresh
or get a link to download the update file, download it, unzip it, and put it in the right place, we can help with this on discord too.

Thanks for being a subscriber, hope this helps you get going that much faster.

Background:
I want to use the Dynaframe as my screen saver on HDMI1 for my TV that uses the FireTV stick on HDMI4. I am using Home Assistant to watch that when the FireTV stick goes into Standby mode I manually have to call a CEC Client command on the Dynaframe to get the TV to switch to HDMI1 to show the Dynaframe slide show.

Feature Request.
I would like the current Dynaframe API to have a section where I could expose a custom GET command.
ex: http://10.0.0.1/command/?CUSTOMCOMMAND=[USER_SPECIFIED_CMD_NAME]
http://10.0.0.1/command/?CUSTOMCOMMAND=CED_AS_CMD.

On the Dynaframe API custom commands could be a separate thing to not conflict with Dynaframe's own API.
Form inputs:

• Command Name: 40 nvarchar (ex: CEC_AS_CMD)
• Command or Script: 200 nvarchar to directly enter the command or point to the .sh file to run. My command is 'sudo echo as | cec-client -s -d 1'
• Response would just be exist code.

Future, this could provide a very powerful utility for users to get additional features for our own edge causes that the Dynaframe team shouldn't have to own/support for all clients.

I don't fully understand the limitations of the Dynaframe tools so this ask could be too big

File name in the infobar is not updating correctly.
Update - error self corrected after the frame had been running for a 5-10 minutes.

Just installed Pro! Love it.

When clicking the editor, you can only edit the active playlists. The only way to edit a playlist is to enable it, then click editor and edit the playlist.

I should be able to edit the playlist before it is enabled. ie, what if I uploaded the wrong image and want to delete it. I can not delete it until it is enabled and possibly seen by people.

In the April release the navigation menu shows different options depending on what page you are on.

Expectation:
Regardless of what page I'm on the menu has a consistent state.
Meaning:
1)The same menu items are always shown regardless of page.
2)This is not accounting for sub-menus or if dynaframe supports permissions for different users.

Test Environment
Computer: Windows10
Browser: FireFox

Current Environment:
UpTime: 0.00:51:09, Temp: 61.604 C, Memory: 169 mb, Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Database items: NYI, Drive space: /: 47.97 GB/58.24 GB, Automatic Mode: True
Build: 958d92a, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1

Example1: /Dynaframe/Playlist.html

Example2: /Dynaframe/index.html

For those of us that use Dynaframe to display family photos, seeing the date a particular photo was taken is a very nice to have feature.

I was wondering if it's possible to toggle a progress bar for video playback duration?

Thank you

This relates to Build 821e376.

Would it be possible to add a "text wrapper" around selected controls. For example, I would like to display something like "Image contributed by" in front of the EXIF author field, or "Today is" in front of the clock control. I realise this can be achieved using simple text and managing the margin offsets, however this is not so great when the field is right aligned and of variable length. A "wrapper" would make the text plus the control all into one element with common font and colour settings. Ideally the text wrapper could prepend as well as append text.

Please help me to help you. With every issue created I'm sure your Dynaframe team would like to know a basic level of information to help you track and troubleshoot problems.

Feature Request:

Ideal:
Please add a copy to clip board button on the "/Dynaframe/Debugging.html" page so that I can easily click it and it should copy the basic info you all need that is not sensitive to my environment.
Include

• Browser and Version
• (Maybe)Desktop/Mobile Device and Version viewing browsers from
• Dynaframe environment stuff

Exclude

• Wifi Info
• IP Addresses
• Other home network related info that shouldn't be out on github and publicly searchable.

Option2:
Provide an easier format for me to highlight copy and paste from so I don't have to work around the sensitive info I don't want to share. Basically, don't make me think. :)

I've noticed that my photos are distorted (stretched vertically). After some investigation, I found that there is a mismatch between the RPi display output resolution (1920 x 1080 = 1.8 aspect ratio) and my computer monitor display resolution (1920 x 1200 = 1.6 aspect ratio). The photo distortion I am seeing (original = 1.5 versus distorted = 1.35) matches the display mismatch (1.8 / 1.6 = 1.5 / 1.35). How do I fix this?

This relates to build d2db213.

When trying to edit an existing overlay, the various properties of the selected overlay item do not all display correctly. This applies only to EXIF type fields. When an existing EXIF item is selected for edit, the properties such as font size, foreground color and positions all update to reflect the previously set values. However the "Exif Tag" drop down always shows "Image Width" regardless of what tag was previously configured for this item. The actual JSON file has the correct data, but it does not get taken from the file into the UI.

This UI may be more intuitive if it used a "SAVE" button to save all changes to the overlay item after the various changes are made. At present it seems some of the properties are save as they are changed, but this is not intuitively clear.

In the April re-release I noticed the mobile UI has worsened. I primarily use my android phone and firefox browsers for the Dynaframe web UI. (see attached image of bad mobile user experience)

General High Level ask:
Please improve mobile grid response points to allow for labels and buttons to be seen so that only vertical scrolling is required.

One Possible Solution:
You could setup the labels and the controls to stack on top of each other so that they can take up the available width of the mobile device in it's vertical orientation. You would still notice the rows by the row outline and alternating colors, so you don't go scroll

blind.

Current Environment:
UpTime: 0.00:51:09, Temp: 61.604 C, Memory: 169 mb, Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Database items: NYI, Drive space: /: 47.97 GB/58.24 GB, Automatic Mode: True
Build: 958d92a, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1

This relates to Build 821e376.

The text boxes shown on the Overlays page do not line up. Depending on the control type selected (text, exif, date/time), one or more rows of controls will be presented that are specific to this control type, followed by font, colour and location settings that are common to all controls. The top set of controls appears to be independently scrollable (which may not be needed) and the text boxes appear to be right justified whereas the text boxes in the lower section appear to be left justified. On wider screens the top group of text boxes is way off to the right. At a screen width of 880 the controls line up, but when narrower or wider the top couple text boxes a re mis-aligned with the bottom ones.

I upgraded to May Release (1f73f91). I'm able to get the application to crash consistently after 2 days. Example boot time 5/12 06:00 to 5/14 18:45. (2 days 12 hours and 45 minutes).

If you can let me know:
1)How to write the logs either to a network share or I have a graylog instance available too if that is easier.
2)What logging should I enable to help you troubleshoot this issue.

General comment:
I found that the December release was the most stable. Since then it feels each release while adding features is not holding very steady on the stability.

Build: 1f73f91, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1

What do you think aboout a password protected area on the web ui for all the settings.
Now everyone can control my player who has access to my network. Maybe the controls for play/pause/skip are available for all, but the rest not.

Upon my first boot, I used VNC to access the Pi and I get a very small screen in portrait mode. If I hit escape, I see the Dynaframe wall paper, but I can't navigate any part of the Pi GUI with much success. I installed the image while connected to Ethernet and now I need to configure WIFI, but using raspi-config doesn't seem to create a successful configuration. I get no DHCP response for the mac address on the Pi.

How do I login with VNC and see my Pi desktop in full?

When I press the pause button, I can't see any difference between the slideshow being in Pause mode or not. Is there a way to see what's the status?

My apologies if it is available somewhere and I missed it.

Fix: Change the Pause button appearance or write the status somewhere
Proposal : Maybe this could be something where the button switch from Pause to Play and Play to Pause...

PS: Amazing piece of software that you have created!

A mouse will also make this easier.
originally from https://discord.com/channels/626204510422827028/953137212432711760/1025922964530663454

Steps after keyboard plugged in:

1. esc
2. ctr-esc, down arrow or mouse to preferences, then raspberry pi configuration.
3. setup wi-fi country, timezone, keyboard choices, and locale
4. ctr-alt-t (terminal)
5. type comitup-cli on terminal, and enter
6. in comitup-cli you should have a list of numbers showing various lan-wifi availability
7. choose the number that matches your wi-fi then hit enter.
8. type in wi-fi password (blank entry with no cursor movement)
9. check to see it's working, it will say STATE: Connected, and Connection: Your Wifi Name Here
10. exit with q

finally do this command ifconfig wlan 0 and press enter.
it will come back and identify inet: which will have your new ip address right there.
if that ip is NOT 10.41.0.1 then note yours down, and reboot with this last command.

sudo reboot

if it is 10.41.0.1 go back to step 5 and work your way down again, make sure password/security code is correct and capslock off etc. if you have problems after a few tries, pop over to discord, and ask for help in on-topic.

After establishing googledrive to your sasifaction:

Make file /home/pi/rclone.sh

#!/bin/sh
if pidof -o %PPID -x "rclone.sh"; then 
	exit 1 
fi
	rclone sync googledrive:/DYNAFRAME /home/pi/gdrive
exit

then this to make it executable
chmod +x rclone.sh

and this for automation
crontab -e

*/1 * * * * /home/pi/rclone.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

This bug has existed since the December release and continues into the April release.

Observed behavior:
Any MOV file I try to play will cause the display to show a black screen. From the "/Dynaframe/Debugging.html" I can see that the frame is stuck on that MOV file indefinitely.

Speculation of Issue:
I believe that the app is unable to play the MOV and an error is occurring.

Short-Term Proposed Fix:
I would like Dynaframe to be more resilient at checking for an error playing a video and to recover and move on to showing the next video. Perhaps this could be a toggleable feature. "Try to Recover On Errors". This way we can test the issue and see logs. But for end users like myself we just move on with life. As I expect there will be many file formats Dyanframe can't play over the years ;)

Long-Term Proposed Fix:
I would like Dynaframe to actually support playing the MOV files as VLC player can play all of my videos. So I'm not really sure why this doesn't work in the current April release.

User Background:
My primary use of Dynaframe is showing family videos so many of the older videos will be MOV files. Currently I have them all archived in a single folder called MOV since I know they break Dynaframe and force me to have to reboot.

Current Environment:
UpTime: 0.00:51:09, Temp: 61.604 C, Memory: 169 mb, Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Database items: NYI, Drive space: /: 47.97 GB/58.24 GB, Automatic Mode: True
Build: 958d92a, Model: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1

build 94ddfd0
On the Experimental page in the field behind the button "Show Internet Image File" only accepts an url that ends with an image extention like .jpg, .png, etc. Better would be to accept any url.

I personally would need this to get automations working where Home Assistant sends via the API the url of an album image playing on Spotify. An example of such url is this one from the Home assistant media_player entity attribute called entity_picture.
http://hass.local:8123/api/media_player_proxy/media_player.unnamed_room?token=18c824911579c9bf8c5209ca0b16de81d547007ab0da6627ba244003b5cb7ed5&cache=4166e4f23b305e06

Apologies for opening issue - couldn't find specific information regarding this question.

3B+ is roughly same as the 3B, other than 200mhz cpu speed and having AC wifi. Any reason the 3B isn't listed as compatible versus the 3B+ being on the approved list?

Premise:
I accept that with every application no matter how good when it runs long enough the application will encounter problems. Thus I would like better way to troubleshoot and recover from issues without always rebooting.

Features:
1)A UI button added next to the exisiting Restart and Shutdown that allows me to restart just the Dynafram application.
2)I would like to enable various levels of logging to see different amounts of information.
3)I would like the logging to be able to write to a SMB network share instead of the SD card.

This relates to Build 821e376.

Would it be possible to add a user defined unique name to each overlay field? At present the only unique identifier appears to be the number in parenthesis appended to the control type (such as Exif(2)). This makes it difficult to remember which control is which when you have several displayed. (I use EXIF title, date, author and hope to use location as well as a couple static text fields). Some kind of user defined name associated with each control would be useful as the "Select Item" index.

Hi,
i would like to have a simple physical button to switch through all the existing playlist. When the button is pressed it should also show the playlist name via overlay.

Currently in the build 94ddfd0 from August the High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) with file extentions .HEIC is not supported.
The package heif-gdk-pixbuf can be used to display heic files on a RPI with OS version bullseye.

I'm having trouble getting a display to work which is the focus of our use case. Its native resolution is 2160 x 3840. This is a bit odd size, I know. The display works fine with Windows 11. If I switch Dynaframe from a 1080P display after boot to the target display, all I get is a semi-random jumble of exactly horizontal lines. If I reboot, I get a black screen. I get exactly the same results if I use a recent, stock Raspberry Pi OS image. This suggests a HDMI driver issue. Any ideas for a possible fix?

just stealing the top issue #1 slot while i can, we will evenetually update this with information on what's next

This relates to Build 821e376.

Would it be possible to offer format strings for the "Date/Time Original" field displayed on the overlay. The "Date/Time Original" format uses the default EXIF format of "YYYY:DD:MM HH:MM:SS". This is rather busy and unfriendly in many scenarios. Perhaps reformatting this like the available Clock options would be useful. I would like something like "15 Jan 2023" to be an option.

On the new config landing page there was no indication of which field was in focus as I tabbed through.

This relates to Build d2db213.

The management UI could be refined as follows.

1. The Overlays page currently performs two separate functions; being "overlay design" and "overlay selection". I suggest this be simplified by limiting this page to just "overlay design" and renaming the page from "Overlays" to "Overlay Design". The "overlay selection" should be moved to the "Home" page. This "Home" page could then offer a switch to enable the overlay feature, and a drop down to select the desired overlay. This makes it consistent with the Infobar controls on the home page. The infobar controls offer the infobar on/off control as well as the infobar setting. The infobar setting is similar to the "overlay selection", except the infobar setting is not user configurable (and therefore does not need an "Infobar Design" capability).

See also Issue #35 (use of a save button) for further refinement of the UI.

Add a Ken Burns style pan and zoom effect during the display of images. This could be listed as one of options under the "Image Scaling" setting on the "Slideshow Settings" configuration page.

You can read more about the Ken Burns effect in this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect.

Looking for documentation on upgrading to newest release. Thanks

Sorry forgot to mention I am running pro on docker/portainer.

Add a way to prioritize each playlist using something like a 1 to n number of playlists (or 1-10). Where each playlist can be assigned a priority ensuring its content get played more often. Playlists would default to equal priority (say 1) and the user could change priority in on the playlist page where each is enable/disabled.

Similarly, being able to tag (star) photos in the Editor as favorites or using the gesture sensor that would boost their likelihood of being shown would be cool.

This relates to Build 821e376. The usability of the Overlays screen in the web interface could be improved by the following changes.

1. Move the "Horizontal Alignment" and "Vertical Alignment" controls up the page so they appear before the various "Margin ..." settings. The Alignments are the basic location of the overlay item and the Margins are a minor tweak to the positioning so it makes sense to put the more significant control higher up the page. It may even be possible to only display the Margin settings relevant to the Alignment. For example an item laid out on the bottom left corner probably only needs the "Margin (Left)" and the "Margin (Bottom)" settings. The other do not appear to be relevant.

I have been using Dynaframe for several weeks now and I'm very pleased with both the PC/Ethernet and Phone/Wifi interface capabilities. Most of my applications will involve these communication methods. However, the keyboard interface is still a bit clunky. It would be nice to have a handheld remote type interface similar to TVs and DVD Players. Basic functions should include power on/off, previous/pause/next, volume/mute, info on/off, QR code on/off, and playlist selection. Two applications come to mind which require this type of low-tech interface.

My elderly mother is no longer able to do complicated tasks and she doesn't have a smart phone. She does get on the computer to check her mail and surf the web but that's about it. She would absolutely love to have a digital photo frame with family photos/videos and her travel scenes. But she needs a handheld remote to be able to operate the device.

I work at a government facility where cybersecurity is critical. There are no personal devices allowed on their network. I would like to have a small monitor in my office to show personnel photos. There are other areas (i.e. lobbies and conference rooms) where promotional images are enjoyed. However, there is no possibility of a Raspberry Pi computer having permission to access their network.

I'd like to get the output of the weekday from the Exif Data in a different language, like german for example.

build: 94ddfd0
I have the 3.5mm jack connected to active speakers but I don't seem to get any audio from that. I tried to switch it from hdmi to 3.5mm jack with raspi-config already and have audio enabled in the Dynaframe web gui.

I've recently joined and really like the direction Dynaframe is going. Over the years, I have grouped my photos into "Albums" and organized them within a directory structure that works for me. In Dynaframe, you use selectable "Playlists" which can include multiple subdirectories (Albums) that are hidden from view (which is fine). So my Playlist/Album directory structure might look something like this:

Family Adventures
2007 - General Jackson Cruise
\ Photo-1.jpg
\ Photo-2.jpg
\ Photo-3.jpg
2012 - Summerville Steam Special
2019 - Blue Ridge Parkway

Ancestry
1921 - Trenton Meat Market
1929 - A Sunday Visit
1965 - Easter in Dalton GA

So the point of all this is to suggest the option of showing only the Album directory name (i.e."2007 - General Jackson Cruise") in the info bar. This option makes it very easy for the user to show an image caption (pulled from the Album directory name) without having to mess with Exif data fields in each media file.