Amazon has freshly certified V4 of MediaServer which is now live (no need to update anything on your end - you automatically use the newest version always).
There are 2 new commands (to play/stream a random playlist from your library), but the most noticeable change is that the skill now heavily uses *Alexa Presentation Language* (APL) to provide visual feedback for most commands. Obviously, your Echo will need to have a display for this to work :rolleyes: In the past, the 'Stream' commands always displayed an image (which recently also became cover-art) on Echo's with screens, but that was done via a separate Amazon feature especially for the AudioPlayer interface. This new APL stuff is something I have specifically/custom designed using Amazon's JSON-based markup language. In this first release with APL, I've defined 4 templates to best match the nature of a command. A now-playing type screen shows large Cover Artwork of the track together with several categories of metadata from your tags: 34576 When it is appropriate to display more than one cover, a sideways *scrollable list* is shown with smaller images and less metadata (for example, when you ask "what's up next?" or to "list albums by Snow Patrol"): 34577 If a list containing cover art would be very long and take forever to display, a *vertically-scrollable* text list is shown instead: 34578 For certain categories like "List my players" a single, larger, line of text is displayed in the middle of the screen: 34579 A point worth remembering is this. Material or iPeng have the luxury of retrieving artwork via your LAN (usually Gb/s or at worst 100's Mb/s) which always feels 'snappy'. Amazon is retrieving artwork via the -upload- speed of your ISP and this is much more likely to be in the 10's Mb/s range -at best-. The good news is that Amazon actually fetches it -after- the skill has responded so any slowness does not cause timeout issues. Also, the Echo displays APL for approx. 30 sec after a skill session or one-shot closes so there's time to 'paint' if needed. With decent broadband the overall experience is very fluid, but with rural internet YMMV. For this reason, you can use a new *Inhibit* command to "disable artwork display" if your internet is not up to it. It's all in the docs. Note that if your Echo does not have a display the artwork is never retrieved wastefully. Also, while APL is being displayed after a *one-shot* command, the session is held open but with the Echo's microphone closed. This means that for your next one-shot you can drop the "... ask MediaServer to ..." but you _will_ have to put an "Alexa, ..." in front of it to open the mic. Example: "Alexa, ask MediaServer what's playing?" [one-shot] --> spoken response, with APL on screen "Alexa, what's coming up?" [partial one-shot] rather than "Alexa, ask MediaServer what's coming up?" Sessions are *not* affected by this new behavior and continue to work as they always did (the docs explain in detail what is meant by one-shots and sessions, but in a nutshell a session results from the open/launch command and allows back-to-back commands). By the way, I can trap what item (cover/metadata) you click on when you scroll a list on the screen so this could actually be used to play/select items in LMS. That would mean that MediaServer becomes a hybrid voice/touch controller. I'd be interested in hearing comments on the desirability of that. Enjoy! +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: discovery.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=34579| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ philchillbill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=68920 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=111016 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
