[Redesign] Videos in playlists don't play

[Danar435]

Type:

• Bug

What version of Finamp are you using?

• Beta/Redesign: 0.9.16

Affected Device/Platform

• Android
• Linux

Description & Steps to Reproduce

When you have videos added to playlists (I have featurettes), they won't play. If a playlist has a mix of normal songs and videos, it'll only play the songs. If it's full of videos, it won't play or will freeze.

Logs

Lots of FormatException: Unsupported itemType finamp-logs.txt

Further information

Videos used to work but broke between versions 0.9.7 and 0.9.8

[Chaphasilor]

I can take a look at what caused this, but Finamp has no actual ambitions to support video playback (or rather the audio tracks of videos). If we can throw it in, sure, but if it affects regular audio playback we'll have to ditch it.

Also, what exactly are "featurettes"? Maybe there's an alterntive way to support it?

[Chaphasilor]

Okay, seems to just be a matter of manually adding a new supported type, and handling it in some way. Seems doable at first glance.

[lukaslindnermusic]

Also, what exactly are "featurettes"?

I think they mean special features for films, etc.. Featurettes are a type of special features for films, where its like a 2-20min clip about a specific thing, for example a deep dive about a character in that movie, or a specific look at how the visual effects for scene xy are done. Sometimes there are music videos for the theme song of a movie (which I think is the most obvious reason for why you would want them to be in a music player). But it sometimes is blurry and maybe behind the scenes and making of stuff is generally also called featurette. In Jellyfin, on a filesystem level you would just add a subfolder into the movies folder, called "featurettes", or "deleted scenes", "behind the scenes", etc. I don't know how they are treated on a database/server level... maybe just separate BaseItemDtos of type Movie as well? and then there might be some field which holds special features of an item or something?

Anyway: I personally also think, that Finamp should focus on actual music libraries... It's just much cleaner and a clear purpose, and extracting the audio from a music video and adding it to your music library should be fairly easy. I however see why one would want them to show up in a playlist if there are videos in it.

[Danar435]

So looked around the source code and seems like adding "Video" as a supported type and handling it as a track fixed it. Not sure if that may cause any issues, but it seems to be working pretty well. The image shows a video actually playing. Should I make a PR?

[Chaphasilor]

@Danar435 in theory that's the correct workaround, we just need to be careful with downloading. We don't want to download the original file for videos.
We could either enforce videos to be transcoded to just an audio stream, or could block them from being downloaded entirely.

Could you also monitor the data traffic to check if Finamp will load the entire video or just the audio please?

[Danar435]

@Chaphasilor yeah... It seems like when playing or downloading videos without transcoding, it's streaming the full video. Transcoding works as it should though!

For me personally it works fine. Shouldn't we instead make another issues that specifically tackles what you're saying? I'm not a maintainer, but this has been bugging me for a while...

[Chaphasilor]

If we add support for playing videos, we need to do it properly, otherwise it will just lead to major issues.
Enforcing transcoding for streaming videos is a single line change, and for downloading it might be just as easy :)

[Handrail9]

Hi, would this issue cover wanting to have FinAmp play Music Videos as audio/songs? I was thinking about opening an issue but if this issue covers the feature request of being able to play music videos (or in my specific usecase, a tubearchivest backup of a mashup I like) then I'll just follow this and wait for new info. Thanks!! :)

[BobbyWibowo]

Pretty much yeah, just the audio stream of the music videos. As the original issue mentioned, it actually used to work a few months ago, but whatever used to slip by that allowed that to happen ended up getting fixed in later updates, haha (so downgrading is technically an option as you wait for official implementation)

Your reply reminds me that it's been a few months since the last activity in this issue though