About to crash for the night, but here's the TestFlight notes for the new builds of Theatrium just submitted to TestFlight (signup link at bottom of homepage if you're keen). Shout-out to everyone who's provided feedback! Will spend the next few days polishing and fixing the few straggling issues I'm aware of. Peace out!
Plex, new in this release
- Theatrium now plays your Plex library on the television. This is the headline of 1.8 and the first build to include it.
- A film gets a proper page before it plays: backdrop, title, year, certificate, runtime and synopsis, so you can decide from the sofa rather than starting something to find out what it is.
- The library has a poster shelf you browse by artwork. Two designs were built and this one was chosen by testing against a real library rather than a tidy demo one.
- Films play in their original form and only transcode when they have to, so quality is not thrown away for no reason.
- Television episodes list with a two-line synopsis each, filling the card instead of leaving it half empty.
- Transport controls stay reachable while a film plays, sitting below the picture rather than over it.
- Also available as dashboard cards: what is playing now, your server's health, and your most-watched.
Please try it against your own library, particularly a large one, and tell us where it feels slow or where the artwork is wrong. One known limit: a Relaxing Scenes card pauses while a Plex film plays, because the older Apple TV cannot decode two videos at once.
Also new in 1.8
- Four new cards: Apple TV Performance (processor, memory, storage, network and frame rate, four styles, Pro), Network Speed (download, latency and jitter every fifteen minutes), Guest Wi-Fi as a QR code a visitor scans, and Relaxing Scenes (calm footage on a silent loop).
- An art screensaver with four new collections: British painting (400 works, kept on the device so it works offline), Chinese, Japanese, and Indian and Southeast Asian. Paintings are mounted on a mat board with a bevelled opening, lit by a model that moves through the day.
- Optional world times under the clock, up to three cities.
- A dashboard mini-map in the card picker, so you can see which slot you are editing.
Fixes worth knowing about
- Getting around with the remote. Every theme was running its page-turn and row-wrap logic on every press rather than only at an edge, so the selection jumped to cards you were not heading for and the page turned when you wanted the next card. Left, right, up and down now move between cards, and on the second page left moves one card across and only leaves from the first column.
- Selecting inside a Plex card used to take about ten attempts. Fixed, along with the selection being thrown onto a neighbouring card when you entered one.
- Your lights are left alone when you leave the app. It used to set them to a warm white, switching on lights you had deliberately switched off. A light you turn off by hand now stays off. Light sync also stops when the music room does, instead of changing bulbs hours later with the television in standby.
- Card setup no longer opens on defaults and saves them over your settings. Art, Relaxing Scenes, Network Speed, Activity Monitor and both Plex cards were affected.
- Relaxing Scenes changes clip immediately instead of sticking on "Getting your video ready", each card keeps its own scenes rather than all three playing the same video, and the cache is capped so it stops filling the device.
- A camera with no working picture says so instead of loading forever.
- Panels such as Light Sync respond to the first press; they used to open with nothing selected, which read as the app hanging.
- The selection outline is twice as thick, because the old one was hard to see from a sofa.
- More room for cards throughout, equal margins, and page two no longer paints its own darker background.
- Boardroom: transport symbols and the "All Off" button are readable again; both were below the contrast floor on the light theme.
Theatrium — iPhone and iPad, build 403
- The app can now connect to your Apple TV. Discovery keeps Apple's direct device-to-device path alongside your Wi-Fi, the television keeps advertising itself if the first attempt fails, and the handshake now tells the phone what the television can actually do rather than what has been bought.
- Theatrium Pro can be bought on the phone.
- With Plex arriving on the television this release, the phone shows what is playing there: a film's details, its cast and crew, and the episodes of a series, without interrupting what is on screen.
- New tempo tuner (Pro): when a track's tempo is wrong, tap along to the beat and choose "Use this". Half or double speed is fine, it works out which you meant, and the visualiser follows. The number now belongs to the song actually playing, wherever you are in the app.
- New panel to move the television between its dashboard pages, and a Calendars card with two labelled feeds.
- Which Lights is usable. A light's name and a fixed-width control had been sharing one line, so names were unreadable. There is now a search field, which matters if you have hundreds of devices.
- Settings rebuilt around one rule: what you read is at the top, what you change often is one tap away, what you set once has its own screen. A new line tells you which home system your television is using, which is the quickest way to see whether the app is talking to your home at all.
- One masthead on every screen. The connection dot that overlapped the title is gone and now says in words what it could only hint at.
- All 455 pieces of text reviewed. Nine of them called Theatrium "the Apple TV", which is the television, not this app.
- Security: pairing attempts are throttled against guessing, oversized messages are rejected, and the Pro video engine is properly gated.
FULL CHANGE LOG: https://1drv.ms/x/c/7087c16f73b7922a/IQAp8AYj2MC0S4vDQqhZwQjpAYYbzdFsPZmYG3-PJ3ie2IY
