OpenLP 2.9.4 aka 3.0 RC1 OFFICIAL DISCUSSION

AndrewK

We have a use case where we edit the OpenLP service files on the same laptop that we run the service on. When we run the service we have a projector connected by HDMI. When we edit the service files the projector isn't connected (it's installed in the venue).

OpenLP 2.9.4 detects the missing projector and automatically changes the Screen options to show the output on the laptop screen (making it difficult to get to the OpenLP window). Then when we get to the venue on Sunday we have to reset the options to display on the projector.

Previous versions of OpenLP didn't do this, it would leave the output set to projector / 2nd monitor even if it didn't exist. This was preferable behaviour for us as it avoids having to change the output options all the time. There may be an option I have missed to enable this behaviour?

I have the same misbehaviour with 2.9.4 on macOS (various versions). I agree that previous versions of OpenLP didn't behave this way. I have now avoided opening OpenLP on my 'production' machine unless I'm at church and connected to the HDMI connected TV. It's not a great option, especially in winter!

I have assumed that the problem was that OpenLP wasn't (always) recognising the connected external display(s). In a different thread, @raoul said:

"Also, set up your displays BEFORE starting OpenLP. This ensures that OpenLP knows what's going on when it starts up."

I haven't found that it makes any difference what order I do things, but, as I have a workaround of sorts, I wasn't going to bother Raoul with this one until he and the team have got v. 3.0 out and sort of stable. But now that someone else has the same/similar problem, maybe they can have a look at it. I wouldn't object if this was fixed.

Blessings,

Andrew

congoblue

@AndrewK if you always ensure your projector/output device is plugged in before you start OpenLP then there is no problem. But I edit the service at home during the week and it is impossible for me to plug in the projector because it's installed at the school we use for church services.

I guess you could get around it by plugging in an EDID simulator which would make OpenLP think the projector is still there but it would be better if there was an option to prevent OpenLP's new behaviour of automatically updating the Display options.

This is only a minor issue but it does add an extra potential "gotcha" for our tech operators on a Sunday morning.

AndrewK

@congoblue that's exactly my problem. I create and edit the service at home on the church's laptop and then take the laptop to church on Sunday morning. Well, that's what I would like to do! But the difficulty in getting the screen settings correct when I go to church on Sunday morning makes it easier to leave putting the service together on the church laptop until I take it there, usually on a Saturday afternoon. As it is now, I prepare slides (in Keynote) at home then go to church on the Saturday afternoon to put things together and have a dummy run to make sure that everything is working.

At no stage do I start OpenLP without the HDMI TV attached. It is a pain, but the grief of trying to reset the display settings is not worth it to me.

I'd prefer it to update the display options each time. When I plug into the HDMI TV, it should adjust the settings, as it used to. When I open OpenLP using only my laptop, it should adapt the settings for that scenario, again, as I believe it used to do. Then when I go back to church and have the HDMI connected TV, it should recognise that again and set the display settings accordingly.

Jamie Hockin

AndrewK
@congoblue that's exactly my problem. I create and edit the service at home on the church's laptop and then take the laptop to church on Sunday morning. Well, that's what I would like to do! But the difficulty in getting the screen settings correct when I go to church on Sunday morning makes it easier to leave putting the service together on the church laptop until I take it there, usually on a Saturday afternoon. As it is now, I prepare slides (in Keynote) at home then go to church on the Saturday afternoon to put things together and have a dummy run to make sure that everything is working.
At no stage do I start OpenLP without the HDMI TV attached. It is a pain, but the grief of trying to reset the display settings is not worth it to me.
I'd prefer it to update the display options each time. When I plug into the HDMI TV, it should adjust the settings, as it used to. When I open OpenLP using only my laptop, it should adapt the settings for that scenario, again, as I believe it used to do. Then when I go back to church and have the HDMI connected TV, it should recognise that again and set the display settings accordingly.

Is this the case even when you uncheck the Display option to "Display if a single screen"? What I do with my home computer, where I set up services, is define a 1280x720 area of my single screen to be the Screen 1 (built in) display and check "Display if a single screen". I'm using a Mac, so I offset the origin of the screen to make sure that the menu bar at the top is visible at all times. Your church projector (display 2) settings should still be saved, as with 2.7.4. We're still running 2.7.4 at church, so I haven't tested this yet. We are going without OpenLP and streaming (OBS Studio) for the summer so I'll be able to try this in July, when I upgrade the church computer.

Brian116

I have a question, will there be the ability to add transitions to a list of image files in the finale release of 3.0? I just wanted to say thank you all for what you do in getting this program out. I know it is a lot of hard work, and when you do it in your spare time, it shows how much dedication you all have.

Cristian

Hi! I'm uisng the last version OpenLP 2.9.4 on Windows 10 and 11 and when I try to select a lot of songs (more than 100) it crashes and it closes. So I have to delete them twenty or thirty at a time. Is there another way to delete a lot of songs, that I don't know? Or is it possibile to fix this error that causes the crash and the close of the software? Thanks a lot

pedley

OK so playing around with the RC1 version on windows, when ever I play a video clip from media it plays fine but at the end it restarts and plays a second or two from the beginning again then stops.

AndrewK

Jamie Hockin
https://forums.openlp.org/discussion/comment/15145#Comment_15145
Is this the case even when you uncheck the Display option to "Display if a single screen"? What I do with my home computer, where I set up services, is define a 1280x720 area of my single screen to be the Screen 1 (built in) display and check "Display if a single screen". I'm using a Mac, so I offset the origin of the screen to make sure that the menu bar at the top is visible at all times. Your church projector (display 2) settings should still be saved, as with 2.7.4. We're still running 2.7.4 at church, so I haven't tested this yet. We are going without OpenLP and streaming (OBS Studio) for the summer so I'll be able to try this in July, when I upgrade the church computer.

@Jamie Hockin

Thanks for your post. I'm trying to work through every bit of what you've said to make sure that I haven't misunderstood anything.

That might make me sound super-dumb, and I probably am, but what I mean is that on the first couple of times reading through your post, I was trying to work out where all of these items are. For example, you asked, 'even when you uncheck the Display option to "Display if a single screen"?'. I knew that I'd seen that option somewhere, but I had to go and find it then when I needed to know if it was ticked or not. And so on with various other things you mentioned.

I'm also using a Mac (or two). I'm not sure why you want to force the menu bar to be visible. On which display are you trying to force that visibility? (And do you do that offsetting on the same preference screen as the 'Display if a single screen'?)

I've had to turn on 'Automatically hide and show the menu bar' in System Preferences to prevent the menu bar being displayed on the HDMI TV (Display 2). If I leave that option off, unticked, then I have the menu bar displayed all through the service. It is very distracting!

Anyway, I'm interested to hear more from you, if you don't mind.

Blessings,

Andrew

mhalbrook

Not sure if this has been brought up, but on the Bible search, it would be preferable to have the Version selection on the search page, not on Options. Rarely do I have one version used by my speakers, and having to jump to another tab to change translations is a big workflow slowdown.

raoul

@congoblue @AndrewK we changed how we store the screen settings in OpenLP 3, because in 2.4.x, we'd actually lose a whole bunch of information. We had a lot of people previously complaining that OpenLP would not detect new screens, so we changed the behaviour to take that into account.

By the sounds of things, we need to actually store "screen profiles" rather than just a single set of screen settings. But that's a bigger thing to implement, so we're probably not going to address it right now.

AndrewK

raoul
@congoblue @AndrewK we changed how we store the screen settings in OpenLP 3, because in 2.4.x, we'd actually lose a whole bunch of information. We had a lot of people previously complaining that OpenLP would not detect new screens, so we changed the behaviour to take that into account.
By the sounds of things, we need to actually store "screen profiles" rather than just a single set of screen settings. But that's a bigger thing to implement, so we're probably not going to address it right now.

@raoul

I'm not sure what you mean by 'actually lose a whole bunch of information.'

"We had a lot of people previously complaining" - Does that word 'previously' refer to v.2.4.x?

"OpenLP would not detect new screens" Really? I'm surprised by that. Until I began using v.2.9.x, as far as I can recall, I had never encountered a screen recognition issue.

"By the sounds of things, we need to actually store "screen profiles" rather than just a single set of screen settings. But that's a bigger thing to implement, so we're probably not going to address it right now." Yes, I think that's what I am looking for. And I can appreciate that it is a (much) bigger thing to implement. I can learn to be patient doing things in a less than convenient way whilst I suffer through winter. ???? Just because it might be easier for me to go back to using overhead transparencies shouldn't put you under any pressure!

Thanks for all your hard work. And thanks, too, to your long-suffering wife and family. Blessings.

Andrew

raoul

@Brian116

I have a question, will there be the ability to add transitions to a list of image files in the finale release of 3.0?

If they're not there in 2.9.4, they won't be there in 3.0 -- we've frozen the feature set. Having said that, there's some unexpected behaviour with theme transitions not being applied to image lists. It's been complicated to debug, and I'm not sure we'll get it fixed before releasing 3.0.

raoul

@pedley

OK so playing around with the RC1 version on windows, when ever I play a video clip from media it plays fine but at the end it restarts and plays a second or two from the beginning again then stops.

This is a known issue (it's been discussed in a few other discussions in the forums). I've not been able to reproduce this issue, so it's difficult for me to figure out what is causing it.

JamesJ

AndrewK
https://forums.openlp.org/discussion/comment/15170#Comment_15170
@Jamie Hockin
Thanks for your post. I'm trying to work through every bit of what you've said to make sure that I haven't misunderstood anything.
That might make me sound super-dumb, and I probably am, but what I mean is that on the first couple of times reading through your post, I was trying to work out where all of these items are. For example, you asked, 'even when you uncheck the Display option to "Display if a single screen"?'. I knew that I'd seen that option somewhere, but I had to go and find it then when I needed to know if it was ticked or not. And so on with various other things you mentioned.
I'm also using a Mac (or two). I'm not sure why you want to force the menu bar to be visible. On which display are you trying to force that visibility? (And do you do that offsetting on the same preference screen as the 'Display if a single screen'?)
I've had to turn on 'Automatically hide and show the menu bar' in System Preferences to prevent the menu bar being displayed on the HDMI TV (Display 2). If I leave that option off, unticked, then I have the menu bar displayed all through the service. It is very distracting!
Anyway, I'm interested to hear more from you, if you don't mind.
Blessings,
Andrew

@AndrewK

I had a similar issue when I was trying to set this up. The option he is referring to is in Settings --> Configure OpenLP --> Screens. At the bottom of that page, there is a check box for "Display if a single screen."

I use both Windows and Linux, and that option is there, and can confirm on my Linux laptop, I am able to user OpenLP without an external monitor connected and it will not bring up the display.

Other trick I found is that if that option is checked, and the Display is overlaying your planning screen, hit the "D" button. That will toggle the display and allow you to get to the settings menu to uncheck that box. Or just leave it off and work that way.

AndrewK

Thanks, @JamesJ

I'm fairly certain that I have the correct screen now.

As Raoul said, things were changed in this version; I simply wasn't thinking straight when I first encountered this problem and it is has made me very wary of experimenting with the display settings now.

I'm typing this late on Saturday and I simply have no time for experimenting now. I'll experiment some more along the lines that you and Jamie have talked about, hopefully early next week, when there's no time pressure on me.

Again, thanks for your help.

Andrew

congoblue

AndrewK
Thanks, @JamesJ
I'm fairly certain that I have the correct screen now.
As Raoul said, things were changed in this version; I simply wasn't thinking straight when I first encountered this problem and it is has made me very wary of experimenting with the display settings now.
I'm typing this late on Saturday and I simply have no time for experimenting now. I'll experiment some more along the lines that you and Jamie have talked about, hopefully early next week, when there's no time pressure on me.
Again, thanks for your help.
Andrew

I have the "Display if single screen" option unticked and I get the warning messages about change of display setup if I start OpenLP without the projector. However I have now found that if I cancel the message and do nothing else, then OpenLP does in fact remember the projector setup and starts up correctly using the projector next time.

So an easier fix for my situation would be to be able to suppress the screen change warning message. If there's a connection problem with the projector or things are started up in the wrong order then the message can make operators change the display settings when they don't really need to.

Jiyu

Thank you for such great software, I tried it today and finished the service smoothly. However there's a little bug, I already emailed to report it.

**OpenLP Bug Report**

Version: {'full': '2.9.4.277-2464d8303', 'version': '2.9.4.277-2464d8303', 'build': None}

--- Details of the Exception. ---

Click File on the top bar, such an error happens.

--- Exception Traceback ---

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/openlp/core/ui/mainwindow.py", line 1311, in update_recent_files_menu

recent_path = Path(recent_path)

File "/usr/lib/python3.10/pathlib.py", line 960, in __new__

self = cls._from_parts(args)

File "/usr/lib/python3.10/pathlib.py", line 594, in _from_parts

drv, root, parts = self._parse_args(args)

File "/usr/lib/python3.10/pathlib.py", line 578, in _parse_args

a = os.fspath(a)

TypeError: expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not NoneType

--- System information ---

Platform: Linux-5.15.48-1-MANJARO-x86_64-with-glibc2.35

Desktop: KDE SC

--- Library Versions ---

Python: 3.10.5

PyQt5: 5.15.6

SQLAlchemy: 1.4.36

Alembic: 1.7.4

BeautifulSoup: 4.10.0

lxml: 4.8.0

Chardet: 4.0.0

PyEnchant: 3.2.2

Mako: 1.1.6

VLC: OK

PyUNO: 7.3

gellert

On Ubuntu 22.04 we had to install 2.9.4 to work well with Python. It works as we expected except that we don't have UI translations. There are only one option in Settings > Languages: Autodetect, but it do nothing. The .qm files are present in /usr/share/openlp/i18n/ directory. How to fix this?

mhalbrook

Am I missing a setting so that the bible display does not break a verse over multiple slides? I don't want just a verse per slide, but I also don't want a break in the middle of a verse.

AndrewK

mhalbrook
Am I missing a setting so that the bible display does not break a verse over multiple slides? I don't want just a verse per slide, but I also don't want a break in the middle of a verse.

@mhalbrook

I don't have an answer for you, sorry. I, myself, am still experimenting with using the Bible importing feature. But I'm not finding a lot of flexibility at this stage.

I agree with you that I don't want a verse per slide. But sometimes I do want a break mid-verse!

Verses don't always line up with sentences, let alone paragraphs, and I want the text to flow where the natural breaks occur. I do not necessarily want them where the people hundreds of years ago decided to put verse markers. For a one or two verse quotation somewhere, the Bibles plugin/Library panel is probably going to be good, once I sort out my issue which I'll get to in another post.

For now, I'm having to stick with my 'old' method of creating slides in Keynote and exporting png or jpg images and then importing them to the Images Library.

The other remote possibility for me is once the formatting tags get fixed in Custom Slides, I might be able to use them. But I'm not holding much hope for that method.

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