I just tested new version with a lot of success There are two issues: MESSAGE: please give a possibility to close the popup from remote completely! Maybe easiest way could be just to send an empty MESSAGE. Overwriting the existing popup works as designed. Even with an empty message: the popup shows nothing but is still open. POWERSTATE: not working at all. It looks like the device interpreting POWERSTATE as POWER and results in switching on/ off instead of returning the state. Maybe renaming POWERSTATE to STATE could solve the problem?   And one more question: what is the meaning of answer to MINFO command? (state - mp - ms)

POWERSTATE changed to STATE
MESSAGE:

Any old message that is displayed will be removed when you send a new message popup.
Any current popup that is displayed can be closed with OK or other command (LEFT/EXIT etc.) as the routine is waiting for any key press..

So, now you need to know if a popup is displayed in order to remove it with OK..
MINFO will give: state=21 when a popup is on the display (no matter if it was a popup from the MESSAGE command or a popup from the internal program).
So, MINFO gives numbers based on what the program is doing...

Uh, yes.. thats how it is coded at the moment.
When you send a message the popup blocks other tasks..
In could change that, but would that not be useless?

I mean, if your HA system puts a popup on the radio, then the user has to push OK to confirm he saw it.
If your HA system is also removing the popup after x time, then it can not be sure that the user saw the popup..

Very strange results from remote commands...

<cut>

And there is another bug inside the firmware:

I started the device via power on and selected Settings -> Info to see the version info. I did this BEFORE the WLAN connection and connection to LL was established. Exactly from the moment, when WLAN connection was established, the device left the "Info" screen and all buttons - except power button - were dead. I had to poweroff the device to get the buttons working again.

(Penbex: I cut some test results as they are already outdated. you have a new test version now..)

Hi Brammie, I will have a fixed version for you too.

Something was wrong and the replies did not go through correctly.
I also changed the entire routine. Now you get OK on the known remote control commands. (UP/DOWN etc.)

The "MESSAGE xxxx" command will answer OK and generate a popup with xxxx as contents.

You get a reply on MENUINFO, LISTINFO, METAINFO, VERSION, POWERSTATE and VOLUME.

Anything else will get you a UNK message to indicate the command was unknown.

The problem with communications stopping seems to be related to socket errors.
This would break the routine and abort. The only way to fix it would be to restaret the entire device or to manually stop and start the network remote under settings as this would restart the thread processing things.
I have changed this behaviour. Socket errors are now catched and the whole thing is freshly restarted.

Because we dont want the network remote thread to endlessly eat up resources when there are socket problems, I have for now set an error count on that so that the restart happens max 100 times.
We have to see if this is needed or not...

~W.

Hi, Happy new year to you too.

The 1.50 release files were created and supposed to be released before Christmas.
There were a number of issues with it and I did not have the time to get it all sorted out in time so the release could not take place.
After doing the fixes I decided to move away from the plagued 1.50 version

So thats why you now see 1.51 being mentioned..
I released this initially only to beta testers to make sure everything was sorted out with the intention to do a public release shortly after.
However, some small issues remained (mostly fixed now). I will again skip 1.51 as a public release as that would cause too much confusion.
So we are headed for 1.52 now.

There are no plans to release future versions only to beta testers.
On the other hand, there were some pretty big changes compared to 1.49 so it was not a bad choice to let the beta testers have a go with it.

Although the main reason to call it a beta version is that it might contain some bugs.
You have access to the beta versions, but you might not be willing to test it out in that case just wait for the public release..

Oh, and regarding the Albrecht, of course the public versions will be made available for all models..

~W.

Hi William, Hi everyone,

happy new year and much fun with the devices! 

One question as I am a little bit surprised: I´m missing a version 1.50 which is dedicated for "normal" users. 

As I am still waiting fore months now for the possibility to use the buttons of my Albrecht device again and for a few other things I hope that the further development is not only for beta testers. Is it possible or reasonable to start now with 1.51 because I´m afraid that it might go on with a 1.52 beta version while we are still using 1.49 ...

Yeah, you are right.
POWERSTATE added, two possible answers..:
STATE=NIGHT (nightstand mode)
STATE=ON  (normal operation

Sure

Hmm. the following I have added to the code..

VERSION will reply VER=xxxx  (string eg. 1.51, 1.52b, 1.52 ..)
VOLUME will reply VOL=99  (integer range 0-255, 0=muted) I figure thats even better as you not only know if muted but also know the actual volume level which at the same time can be used to confirm the VOLp and VOLm commands. 

POWERSTATE is pretty useless as "OFF" would never be transmitted because the device is not able to send things when its powered down.
So that leaves the only value that can be send as "ON" which is pretty obvious if the device can answer any of the other commands, like VERSION..
So perhaps you just send the VERSION command to see if the device will answer the current version (POWERSTATE=ON) or not answer (POWERSTATE=OFF)

~W.

Here:
MENUINFO  > supposed to report info about the menu position
LISTINFO > supposed to report the display list data
METAINFO > supposed to report data displayed in the player (like track name etc)
MESSAGE xxxx > supposed to display xxx in a popup

~William

For searching access points:
The listenlive firmware is using wpa_supplicant to search. This is the exact same software and exact same commands as in the original firmware.

I checked station 35948, it was only giving "numbers" as playlist data. This was displayed correctly within the listenlive player as well as on my PC with VLC. The stream does not work anymore here though.
If you have any others that are not working correctly just report them and I will try to fix them.

~William

If you report a bug or some issue, then include information about your model (eg. a device with 3.5inch, 4.3 or 7inch screen..)
In the changelog below, any entry that does not mention a specific screen size means that it is for all hardware versions!

Firmware version 1.52 Bugfixes:
- Fixed: In some cases coverart was displayed incorrectly in the favorites app
- Fixed: Favorites app would sometimes loose favorite station list
- Added: 'VOLUME' 'STATE' and 'VERSION' commands to the network remote interface
- Fixed: Twitter was not working due to some missing file.
- Fixed: Cyrillic character issues
- Fixed: UTF8/ISO8859-1 detection issues
- Fixed: TuneIn playing of streams under favorites in some cases failed when many stream URL's were obtained. Now a proper playlist is created.
- Fixed: Network remote control routines were not working properly. Changed behaviour.
- Fixed: When you went to the about screen while the device was still doing its startup routines the device would hang.
- Changed: network remote command MENUINFO is now MINFO.
- Changed: network remote command MESSAGE will now remove existing popups and display the new popup.
- Fixed, more apps, 5th row of apps was initialized incorrectly.
- Fixed: iMovies and Classic Movies where not available within China.
- Changed: USAToday app replaced with NRJ app.
- Changed: The firmware update option under settings now automatically forwards to the loader app. No reboot or prepared SD is required anymore.
- Changed: The loader will be updated to version 3.2 with this firmware. The loader can also update from internal flash memory (v3.1 already had this feature for 3.5inch devices)

There were some issues with the new tag routine so this will most likely be added to the 1.53 version.
- Added: Support for metadata and cover art from APE files.
- Added: Support for metadata and cover art from FLAC files.
- Fixed: improved ID3 tag support.

Firmware version 1.51- dated: 10 January 2014
- Fixed: 4.3 inch SD model: Device buttons now function properly.
- Added: 4.3 and 7 inch: Now displays a warning message before switching to HDMI 720p output. Make sure a proper display is attached
- Fixed: 7 inch: FM Radio volume would not go completely silent when volume was set to zero.
- Fixed: 7 inch: Mediaplayer skip to next track was not skipping correctly.
- Fixed: 7 inch: long press to power off was not working correctly.
- Changed: 7 inch: left/right on the device are reversed to feel more natural.
- Fixed: In some cases UTF16 metadata tags were not handled properly.
- Fixed: recording on 3.5 inch devices was not functioning properly in 1.49 due to the new mplayer. Note that the HD (4.3 and 7 inch) devices use the SD as read-only and thus can not record to it.
- Fixed: recording was displaying an icon too much, removed.
- Removed: displaying the playing time on live radio streams was useless.
- Fixed: When browsing podcasts the selection bar would sometimes not start at the top of the list which is usually the most recent entry.
- Added: Factory reset now also removes TuneIn and Live365 account details
- Fixed: Alarm: number of snooze repeats and time between snoozes now survives reboots
- Added: When music is playing and we are in clock mode up/down on the remote now also control the volume.
- Added: Line-in app up/down now also control the volume.
- Added: Apps that need a network connection will now test if the connection is working otherwise a long time out could happen.
- Changed: minor cosmetic change to the analog clock.
- Changed: poweron with auto play of FM radio will not display the antenna cable message even when it is set to display
- Fixed: 7 inch: screen would sometimes go dark when it should show video, pageup will then show video. Now should not go dark anymore
- Fixed: HD models, SamLivecast video codec crashed. Using alternative codec works fine in HD. Code changed to support this.
- Fixed: HD models: blubrry and some other apps, video codec crashed. Using alternative codec works fine in HD. Code changed to support this.
- Added: while watching video, left/right will increase/decrease an audio delay so you can manually adjust audio/video synchronization
- Added: while listening to live audio streams the repeat button can toggle between stereo and mono (useful as some streams have only one channel, then mono will at least use both speakers)
- Fixed: Cyrillic UTF8 issue
- Fixed: In some cases two instances of MPlayer could run at the same time.
- Fixed: When a podcast was played from MyFavorites it was not recognized properly as podcast and missing some features.
- Added: Improved support for images/cover art on podcast
- Fixed: Mute would in some cases conflict with the alarm. Can not happen anymore
- Fixed: QingTing app: needed to be updated due to server side changes. All is working again.
- Fixed: Anyradio app: data reload failed due to server side bugs. Added a workaround.
- Changed: Improved gzip internet traffic compression handling, internet traffic timeouts and redirections.
- Added: Podcast app did not play embedded asx streams.
- Fixed: Favorites app podcasts: did not support all possible audio formats.
- Removed: firmware update through settings only will test if a new version is available online. Updates need to be done through the loader.
- Added mpg support to vodcast app.
- Fixed: Weather app: radar images are working again.
- Fixed: Twitter is working again.
- Fixed: Live365, showed some incorrect text characters.
- Fixed: TuneIn, showed some incorrect text characters.
- Changed: Icecast lists are no longer cached as the files were too large and filling up the small storage space that we have available for it.
- Fixed: bad data from Tuner causing some incorrect text characters, now gets fixed on the fly.
- Added: Homeradio: stations from China and Switzerland.
- Fixed: due to changes at Rad.io some stations refused to start playing.
- Fixed: aborting keyword search on Rad.io would still search the network.
- Fixed: aborting keyword search on Tuner would still search the network.
- Fixed: aborting keyword search on TuneIn would still search the network.
- Added: account searching on SoundCloud.
- Added: additional network remote commands. Now also feedback is given on the menu and contents and a message can be displayed.
- Fixed: Wifi driver reports a working connection while it is not really working. Added detection for this which can be enabled/disabled via settings.
- Weather app blocked use of up/down to change the volume. Now it works when the up/down are not used for other tasks.
- Fixed: typo, lowest volume setting did not work.
- Added: "Extra stereo" feature for music playback.
- Changed: Shoutcast app has been rewritten. Now matching the shoutcast website with Top500 and search options.
- Changed: 7 inch: clock displayed slightly larger.
- Fixed: it was not always stopping the UPnP engine properly.