LaunchBox for Android - 1.17 Beta Thread

[Vader]

@faeran

I just download version 1.17 beta of Launchbox for Android and for me it's nothing but a hot mess.  There are so many issues that for me it's in no way usable.

First, I have it installed on a Galaxy fold 3, 512mg phone and after I installed it, i ran into the following issues;

1. Search - search function does not work. Whenever I try to search for a game, the artwork and box art change, but the there is no functionality within any game list. It does not change to show games that I am searching for

2.  I download platform videos, they don't work or play

3. Unified light vertical wheel view has uneven artwork. screenshot is huge, while boxart is very small (horizontal view)

4. streaming gameplay videos from youtube don't work. I get the "video downloading" prompt but no video

As is, there is no way for me to use this app. Please fix

[faeran]

17 hours ago, Vader said:

@faeran

I just download version 1.17 beta of Launchbox for Android and for me it's nothing but a hot mess.  There are so many issues that for me it's in no way usable.

First, I have it installed on a Galaxy fold 3, 512mg phone and after I installed it, i ran into the following issues;

1. Search - search function does not work. Whenever I try to search for a game, the artwork and box art change, but the there is no functionality within any game list. It does not change to show games that I am searching for

2.  I download platform videos, they don't work or play

3. Unified light vertical wheel view has uneven artwork. screenshot is huge, while boxart is very small (horizontal view)

4. streaming gameplay videos from youtube don't work. I get the "video downloading" prompt but no video

As is, there is no way for me to use this app. Please fix

Thanks for your beta report.

1. Thanks for letting us know, we will see what we can do for the next beta.

2. I'm seeing platform videos working in most situations here. if you can be more specific about the view you are using and whether you use platform categories, primary and secondary filter sections, and what they are, that could help. I am seeing in specific combinations of these settings that sometimes a platform video doesn't play, so we'll look into that, but I want to make sure I'm seeing what you are seeing.

3. Make sure you upgrade this theme to the latest version (I think it's 1.21), many changes to all themes took place after the move to MAUI (which happened in version 1.16).

4. This is an unfortunate known issue. Not with this update, but with YouTube changing their systems to stop streaming like this from happening. Basically means it broke the streaming feature for all versions of LaunchBox, not just this beta. We've spent considerable time looking for solutions, but there's nothing as good as what we used to use. At best, we found a solution that could download the video and audio streams and then piece them together, which may possibly work for downloading the video locally but no streaming options yet, but we will keep investigating but is unfortunately out of our hands here.

 

[cult]

So at what point is Vita3k support coming? Daijisho and Es-de seemed to have figured this out several months ago, which since their code is freely available hopefully there's enough out there to point development in the right direction. I look forward to using emulators for mobile hardware to be in used in a mobile form on an OS that is primarily used by mobile users.

Edited Monday at 12:22 AM by cult

[Vader]

On 2/7/2025 at 12:11 PM, faeran said:

Thanks for your beta report.

1. Thanks for letting us know, we will see what we can do for the next beta.

2. I'm seeing platform videos working in most situations here. if you can be more specific about the view you are using and whether you use platform categories, primary and secondary filter sections, and what they are, that could help. I am seeing in specific combinations of these settings that sometimes a platform video doesn't play, so we'll look into that, but I want to make sure I'm seeing what you are seeing.

3. Make sure you upgrade this theme to the latest version (I think it's 1.21), many changes to all themes took place after the move to MAUI (which happened in version 1.16).

4. This is an unfortunate known issue. Not with this update, but with YouTube changing their systems to stop streaming like this from happening. Basically means it broke the streaming feature for all versions of LaunchBox, not just this beta. We've spent considerable time looking for solutions, but there's nothing as good as what we used to use. At best, we found a solution that could download the video and audio streams and then piece them together, which may possibly work for downloading the video locally but no streaming options yet, but we will keep investigating but is unfortunately out of our hands here.

 

update: I was able to get platform videos working. Though I noticed that there is an issue that when you go from platform to the options menu and back the platform videos sometimes don't automatically play. You have to move to another platform away from the current, then the videos start playing again. 

hopefully you can find a fix to the search issue, asap. 

attached is a screenshot of what unified light looks like on phone. This is with the theme updated to 1.3

Thanks

 

Edited Tuesday at 04:13 AM by Vader

[faeran]

On 2/9/2025 at 7:04 PM, cult said:

So at what point is Vita3k support coming? Daijisho and Es-de seemed to have figured this out several months ago, which since their code is freely available hopefully there's enough out there to point development in the right direction. I look forward to using emulators for mobile hardware to be in used in a mobile form on an OS that is primarily used by mobile users.

We need one more foundational building block in place before we can look into it, but once that is done, the goal is to make this emulator as seamless as we possibly can. I wouldn't want to make users go through some hassles of setting up dummy files and such if I can help it, so stay tuned.

13 hours ago, Vader said:

update: I was able to get platform videos working. Though I noticed that there is an issue that when you go from platform to the options menu and back the platform videos sometimes don't automatically play. You have to move to another platform away from the current, then the videos start playing again. 

hopefully you can find a fix to the search issue, asap. 

attached is a screenshot of what unified light looks like on phone. This is with the theme updated to 1.3

Thanks

 

Good deal. Platform videos have already been fixed and tested internally, so they should be good to go. Everything else I mentioned in my response is also fixed or shored up and is ready internally.

Unified was definitely not made for a 1:1 screen aspect ratio like that, which is why you are seeing it like that. However, since I'm the one who coded that theme, I could look into what it would take for it to work in that aspect ratio.