This is not a ground-breaking release, but a maintenance one. However it paves the way for some possible changes that will happen in the future. The long-awaited arrival of VLC 4. Also a possible wxWidgets 3.4 release.
This release was mainly intended for adding support for VLC 4. Some Linux distros as Gentoo are considering the idea of promoting VLC 4 already. The current VLC 3.x does still exist for the sole purpose of supporting LTS Linux releases. It is based on an ancient FFMPEG, but it's the one they're shipping, for example, with Ubuntu 22.04. Ubuntu 22.04 benefitted by regular support till April 2027, but it will be in extended support (ESM) till 2032.
Apart from this, the new TV-Lite release has a number of improvements and fixes.
Adding code to support VLC 4, as well as VLC 3, lead to some fairly complex changes, but, at the same time, some improvements. When using VLC 4, stopping the player will not wait for the actual stream to respond. Unfortunately, as the current release is still using VLC 3, the player will still seem to freeze when stopped if the connection is unresponsive. But, if built with VLC 4, this should not happen.
TV-Lite still remains an Xorg based app. It runs smoothly under Wayland, however, by making use of XWayland, so, there should not be any issues. VLC 4 aims to offer real Wayland support, but I am still not aware of its status, so, currently we're still only making use of the Xorg support.
Also I've succesfully built the app using wxWidgets 3.3.1, enabling the Windows Dark Theme support, as I stated in a previous article.
Some GUI improvements were also achieved. I added informative tooltips on the buttons, and streamlined the cluttered "TV-Lite" menu. Some messages will pop-up where necessary - sometimes clicking on a button did nothing. Now the user is informed about some action that's needed before pressing that button - like selecting something first.
Using TV-Lite without Acestream should be even more permissive now.
Finally I fixed a bug introduced by the 0.8.1 release. If a stream could not be played from the first attempt, pressing "Play" again, or double-clicking again the stream name in the list, did nothing. Playing the same stream was not possible any more, without pressing the "Stop" button first. This was really annoying.
You can get this release following the information on the "download" page. Hopefully, I will be able to restore the Ubuntu PPA as well.
Enjoy!