UitzendingGemist Versions Save

Uitzending Gemist is now compatible with Xcode 9 / tvOS 11.

(solves #24)

This release addresses the streaming issues that some people outside of The Netherlands were experiencing (#21, #22). Uitzending Gemist has been tested to work reliably using Unlocator.

• fixed streaming issues outside of The Netherlands (#21, #22)
• added support for Unlocator (#22)
• added closed captioning support for live channels (NPO1, NPO2 and NPO3) in addition to the closed captioning for episodes.
• added a setting to only use secure transport (enabled by default)

Note: When using Unlocator, you need to disable the newly introduced secure transport setting in the configuration view:

Improved video streams

This release brings optimisations in the video streams (#21, #22) by always prefering the adaptive streams which should work well for high- as well as low bandwidth connections. Where the episodes and the live feeds used their own video players, they have now been united in one generic video player.

Closed Captioning

A new big feature is the addition of (Dutch) closed captioning support for the death and hearing impaired. Due to technical reasons they can unfortunately not be enabled or disabled from within the video player info overlay (swipe down on your remote), but a new configuration screen allows you to change the setting globally.

Meta data

Additionally, this release now shows meta data of the content you are watching in the the video player info overlay (swipe down on your remote). The screenshot below shows you the meta data as well as the closed captioning support:

Configuration

The configuration screen allows you to change the (application wide) closed captioning setting for the death and hearing impaired

This release makes use of the adaptive streams and does not force a particular bitrate. Additionally when an episode is marked as geographically limited it will report if you are able to watch the episode based on your current location. If the episode is not available for playback in your region, the play button will be disabled and a red warning will be shown specifying the reason.

As of the 1st of March the NPO has changed (some of) the video streaming back-end services which broke the video streaming in the app (issue #19 ).

@technimad had a great idea to add a gradient to the tips images to improve the readability of the labels (pull request #20). Although his solution (adding a gradient image view above the tip image) did not make it into this release (which applies a gradient to the tip image directly to work properly with the tvOS focus engine behaviour), thanks go out to @technimad for his suggestion and efforts! 🙌🏻

When Uitzending Gemist returns from the background (when switching to another Apple TV app) the views did not properly refresh (see #17).

This release reduces the likelihood of issue #16 from occurring.

Technical details: Uitzending Gemist relies on the Realm mobile database for keeping track of favourites and watched episodes. However, as of the Realm 2.0.0 release Realm has moved its transaction log into the realm itself. As the Uitzending Gemist app was logging every second played the transaction log containing all the write operations sky rocketed to about 2GB until which point the app crashed because it was unable to allocate memory.

This release significantly reduces the write operations and only writes the number of seconds played when you actually stop watching the video. While the underlying Realm issue #4461 is not resolved, this release will make issue #16 surfacing less likely.

Note: If you encounter the issue where Uitzending Gemist crashes and favourites stop working: delete the app from Apple tv to clear out its data and then reinstall the latest version of the app.

It is now also possible to configure YouTube Playlists in the curated list of additional program resources, e.g.:

   {
     "mid": "VPWON_1260826",
     "name": "Freek in het wild",
     "youtube_playlist": "PLe5xp19huiuEt6_2KCl7KTULnPTWL8uGp"
   }

This release adds support for additional YouTube resources for programs when these programs have a dedicated YouTube channel (feature request #14). Whether or not a program will show a YouTube button is based on whether that Program exists in the curated list of additional program resources. This list is fetched and cached on a daily basis in a running app, so new YouTube buttons may appear every other day (when the list is amended).

It is now also possible to mark all episodes for a Program as watched by navigating to a Program and clicking the 'Mark all as watched' button (feature request #13).

Fixes the audio stream for Politiek 24 (issue #12).