Paid expansion videos download location

[vicker]

Hi,

It's great to be able to choose the cache location of the video, so that I can move those 4K videos out of my machine's storage to an external drive. Though it seems that this only applies to the default videos. For those downloaded through paid expansions, they are still going to the /Users/Shared/Aerial/Sources folder. Any chance that could be moved as well?

Cheers

[glouel]

@vicker absolutely, I did think about it but looks like I completely forgot.

How pressing is it of an issue right now ? I'm working on a native wallpaper extension for V4.1, which will be in beta soon. I could add it there but probably a week away ?

[vicker]

@glouel
No urgency at all. Please take your time. It's already awesome enough to have the current v4 that looks modern and works swiftly. Thank you.

[glouel]

@vicker just so you know, I haven't forgotten you, having a few issues right now with external folders in 4.1 in general, but the feature should be in next beta if I can fix it. Will keep you posted !

Edit : It's not looking good in general for external folders right now, that might explain some of the "WTF" moments where Aerial 4.1 actually runs after a macOS update/reboot on the login screen before you input your password on what is supposed to be a crypted drive. Still working on it, I do have a ugly mitigation plan if it comes to it.

[vicker]

Awesome. Thanks, @glouel

[brian163]

So I came here looking to report the same. But with the Aerial 4.1.0beta16 release notes stating "Likely last beta before release", while noting that external caching is broken, I'm wondering where the fix for this (as well) may fall?

It is honestly a little more pressing for me as my expansions are now currently taking 31.48 GB on my boot disk that is now down to around 81GB "free" (sans macOS background activities). I'll uninstall them if I have to but a general update/timeline would be appreciated.

[glouel]

@brian163 yeah sorry, I've been fixing other issues first and seem to have pushed aside that one. I saw yesterday while doing the release note that I need to fix that too first.

Long story short, I've been hitting a macOS restriction where the extension isn't allowed to touch external drives, in the weirdest ways. It's likely part of some security policy for wallpapers.

I do have an idea for the workaround (piggybacking on the app, just like we do to play HLS/HTTPS streams today), I'll try to work on this this week end and keep you guys posted.

[brian163]

Thank you!

[glouel]

Still testing but I have a decent workaround using a disk image that I then mount into the Aerial folder. Which makes things a lot easier than the workaround I had in mind.

Will keep testing and push a beta tomorrow if that works.

[brian163]

I'll keep an eye out and will be glad to test.

[glouel]

Ok so it's out in https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/Aerial/releases/tag/v4.1.0beta17

Please test and let me know.

[glouel]

To explain how it works, when you pick your location on your external drive, Aerial will create a sparsebundle file that it will then mount in your shared folder so it can be accessed. When you click expansions it will ask you if you want it to move them for you (I highly suggest you let Aerial do it).

If you use a slow USB drive, give it time. I tested on purpose on a USB stick and that works fine, providing you let it do it's thing ;)

In finder it looks like this.

If your drive is not available, Aerial will try to play from what's in the shared folder, or revert to the fallback color animation. When your drive is reconnected it should remoount your bundle and fix itself.

Edit : One quick bug I noticed is that the cache size display no longer separate cache and expansions as it should, looking at it but I think it's purely visual but will double check :)

[glouel]

Expansion size is now reported on a separate line, and added a trim cache button too while at it, this will be in next build.

[brian163]

The initial transfer worked perfectly for me. Going from 4.0.16 to 4.1.0beta17 it picked up on the existing (previously set) external cache location. Then I checked the button to move the Expansions and it did. Some expansions moved to /Cache instead of /Cache/Expansions but these were the same expansions that used the /Cache directory before. (I assume some expansions have something in their configuration that cause this.)

Me and my boot drive are very happy. (I was already getting complaints from my BOINC distributed computing client about the lack of free disk space so this saves me a lot of effort of shuffling things around.)

I'll continue to monitor for any issues but so far so good to start! Thanks again.