If you’re loading 4 or more videos it should only be 2 clicks: hit Load, then confirm in the review screen. The review modal is there because it checks which files are actually available on disk before loading (saves you from staring at black tiles if something moved). The Not Enough Videos warning only pops up if you select fewer than 4. And the Save as Playlist pop-up, you can turn that off in Settings if it bugs you.
ESC key
ESC already exits fullscreen back to the grid and closes any open modal. Pressing L opens the library from anywhere (H for shortcuts). I’ll add ESC from the grid view going back to the library in the next update too, makes sense as a universal “back” button.
Delete button
Yeah I hear you on this one. The reason it’s read-only right now is that the app works with folders, not just individual files, so if I add delete functionality without being really careful about it, there’s a scenario where someone wipes an entire folder by accident. That’s the kind of thing you can’t undo. Your idea of an opt in toggle in settings is the right approach though. Keep it off by default, let people who want it turn it on knowingly. I’ve got it marked down, won’t be in the very next release but it’s on the list. Appreciate the suggestion.
Stash integration
This actually already works. Once you’ve done the initial sync the app auto-syncs from Stash every time you open the app and also watches your Stash database in real-time. So if you run a scan in Stash, it picks up the new metadata automatically without you doing anything. Full control of Stash from within the app (triggering scans/identify/autotag) is on the roadmap but that’s a bigger project for later.
Thats three not two, make it one click. ONE. Stop nagging. The user intention is crystal clear. Let him do modifications later and optionally.
You need to solve the missing file in a different way, or yes show black tiles, just dont nag. You can quickly check the file in in the background when selecting it, no user interaction needed. Grey it out if not available. Or check all visible in the background, user can only select visible right? I understand checking 4000 files takes too long but you should be faster than the user can click for a few files. You have a beauty of an interface really but you nag. Stop it.
Yeah always show what will happen and get a user confirmation. Selecting the files is our resposabilty, showing the right files that will get deleted is yours. Ask user to have a backup.
Nice, as much as you get on my nerves with too much clicks, your app has a clear focus (fast/grid/stash) and it is a beauty.
Let me get you back to an unsolved problem you could solve easily and why I got Vidvana in the first place. Could be or maybe should be an app of its own. Vidvana Manager or so.
The problem everyone knows:
500 files of a pack in a folder or sub folders of which you will keep 20. So that files need to be scraped to be kept or not
different filetypes mkv avi mp4
different codecs, I want AV01 as it takes almost half of the room at invisible quality loss.
named in a format I dont like
Sorting this is a time killer almost like scripting. You need to open them one by one, scroll into them at several places, close the player and delete. Repeat. Why Vidvana? It can show a grid and its fast, it could play a few seconds each x minutes, it could remove a file by a single click until only the wanted movies are in the grid and you can handle ffmepg to convert videos. Even if you dont want to put on the reencode and rename shoes. At least deleting unwanted would be awesome. You get my point right? Ill gladly wait for Vidvana to set up to work on a folder if the sorting out process would be really fast.
The optimal would be load a folder with its subfolders into a grid already playing with one single click, delete by clicking the playing movie, new visble movie starts playing invisible stops. In setting you should be able to set the number of tiles 4 or 8 as default, set the amount of seconds played and the time amount to continuously jump which is quite individual.
I think I understand what you’re after, correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m going to add a setting to skip the review screen and go straight into the grid. The check will still run in the background, and if something’s unavailable it’ll just show as a blank tile or get skipped. Fair point.
The sorting workflow you described, most of that already works. Load a folder and it starts playing in the grid. Each tile has a next button, so you can click through videos right there until you find one you like. Pin it and it stays put while the other tiles keep cycling. The swap timer slider controls how many seconds each video plays before it auto-swaps to the next one. If you want to get rid of something, you can delete it from the library and it’s gone from the app. The original file stays on disk, but the app tracks what you removed so whatever’s left in your library is your “keep” pile. You can also use Remove from the top menu to pull out individual clips or whole folders, or press L to open the library and manage everything from the Now Playing tab.
The grid starts at 2x2 on purpose. If you’re playing off a NAS or a slower machine, throwing 16 videos at it right away would stall everything. Starting small lets you scale up. And you can change it instantly, just press 2, 3, 4, or 5 on the keyboard while the grid is running. No settings menu needed.
On formats, the app already plays MKV files as long as the codec inside is something modern (H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1 all work). AVI is the tricky one because those usually contain older codecs like DivX or Xvid that browsers just can’t decode. The app runs on Chromium under the hood, so it uses hardware-accelerated decoding for everything. That’s what lets you play 8 or 16 videos at once without the machine catching fire. Transcoding on the fly isn’t an option since you’d need a separate FFmpeg process per tile, so any format conversion would need to happen before loading.
Oh got it, not on the fly but converting the actual files. That’s technically doable since FFmpeg is already bundled, but it’s a big feature to build properly (queue, progress, presets, error handling). AV1 encoding is also really slow even on good hardware so it would need to run as a background job. It’s something I could look at down the road but it’s not going to make it into the near-term updates. One thing at a time.
For this you need an evil clown. @CertainlyWicked is a real Pro in conversion he knows the ffmpeg commands you need. Goal is to convert everything over 4000 mbit to 60% AV1. Under 4000mbit its has to be 100% AV1 so there is no quality loss. Some older files will have to be converted to mpeg first. This spares about 50% of drive size and people will love Vidvana for it. But first stop nagging me with unnecessary clicks.
That’s useful, thanks for pulling @CertainlyWicked into it. I’ll keep that in mind when I get to the conversion feature. Right now I’m heads down on the next update, fixing the bugs you and others have reported plus the MFP integration with @Yoooi. Once that’s out the door I’ll circle back on this. I can only ship one thing at a time but I’m keeping track of everything.
And I hear you on the clicks, that’s in the next release.
At least this evil clown doesn’t support this forum in any way anymore, this contains help of any sort, too, not for any projects happen here or whatever else unless things gonna change, don’t count me in.