Suggestion for album art display

[AnonymouX47]

I thought this would fit better in "Discussions" but it seems to be disabled.

I just recently came across this project and going through, I noticed the limited support for album art display e.g the range of supported terminal emulators and image aspect ratio, amongst other things.

I'm the maintainer of term-image. Without much ado, I believe it has quite a lot to offer for the purpose at hand. It's still in active development and there's a lot more features on the way.

NOTE: It's still on version zero, meaning the API isn't stable yet and might change across minor versions, so it would be advisable to pin the dependency to a specific minor version if you decide to go ahead with it.

Finally, I'll appreciate your suggestions/contributions towards improving the project.

Thank you 🙇

[GuardKenzie]

Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. I took a look at your library and it looks very promising!

I have been experimenting with getting w3m to work and also been trying to get chafa working properly.

Does your library integrate well with cursed? I have been running into trouble with the way curses keeps track of the cursor position. I haven't (yet) found a way to draw an image using sixels (or ansi characters) without the cursor position getting messed up. I hope to find a solution to this soon.

[AnonymouX47]

Thanks for the kind words 🙇.

Does your library integrate well with curses?

Oh damn! For whatever reason, my brain must've skipped the fact that the project uses curses 🤦. Sorry about that.

No, it doesn't... for multiple reasons, one of which is cursor position but the main problem is emitting escape sequences, curses just doesn't allow that (at least from my experience with Python's bindings and my research).

I encountered the same issue in the past when I was about to start developing the TUI in my project and I might have a few tips about it.

Trying to hack one's way through will not work for any method of displaying images where the image can be overwritten by text, that includes all the methods you mentioned above.

In the end, I researched about other options for TUI libraries/frameworks and found two options: Textual and Urwid.

At the time, Textual was in its very early stages and didn't seem like an option.

Urwid on the other hand was stable and had been around for a long time. So I tried it out and after some tinkering, I got images (ANSI text) to display just fine. Later on when I added support for terminal graphics protocols, with some tweaking, everything worked just fine.
All in all, I realized urwid was a better alternative to curses (for my use case, at least) anyways. Also, I didn't get to lose anything since Python's curses is also only available on Unix-like platforms.

By the way, talking about Textual, I intend to implement an implement an image widget soon enough (already got it working partially). So, in case you would prefer to use Textual (it's way more modern than any other option), you could wait for that.

[AnonymouX47]

I went through the code and realized your approach is to draw the image after refreshing the curses screen.
I knew theoretically, that should work even for text based images. So, i decided to check it out.

After trying to print some images, I saw what you meant and realized "cbreak" mode was the culprit. The way out is to reset the TTY attributes and set them back after drawing the image.

Below are the changes I made and with these, term-image works just fine on multiple terminal emulators. This should also work for chafa.

@@ -11,6 +11,11 @@ from colorthief import ColorThief
 import math
 from pathlib import Path
 
+from termios import tcgetattr, tcsetattr, TCSAFLUSH
+from term_image import AutoCellRatio, set_cell_ratio
+from term_image.exceptions import TermImageError
+from term_image.image import from_file
 
 # Get config directory
 config_dir = Path(
@@ -1346,6 +1351,18 @@ class Player:
                 .thumbnail(self.image_width_px)
                 .show(x=(self.art_window_width - self.image_width)//2, y=self.image_y_pos)
             )
+        elif IMAGEMETHOD == "term-image":
+            image = from_file(self.album_art_loc)
+            image.set_size(maxsize=(self.art_window_width, self.art_window_height - 5))
+
+            curses_tty_attr = tcgetattr(0)
+            try:
+                tcsetattr(0, TCSAFLUSH, original_tty_attr)
+                print("\033[0;0H", end="")
+                image.draw(pad_width=self.art_window_width, pad_height=self.art_window_height - 5)
+                print("\033[9999B", end="", flush=True)
+            finally:
+                tcsetattr(0, TCSAFLUSH, curses_tty_attr)
 
 
     def centerText(self, y: int, string: str):
@@ -1488,6 +1505,11 @@ class Player:
         """
         The main program loop
         """
+        # term-image
+        try:
+            set_cell_ratio(AutoCellRatio.DYNAMIC)
+        except TermImageError:
+            pass
 
         if self.art_placement is None and IMAGEMETHOD == "ueberzug":
             # Create album art placement if we are using ueberzug
@@ -1556,6 +1578,7 @@ class Player:
                 print(self.error)
 
 
+original_tty_attr = tcgetattr(0)
 try:
     player = Player()
     player.loop()

I also changed my image_method config option to "term-image".

NB: This was just a quick implementation. If you decide you want to use term-image, I would be willing to open a PR with a proper implementation.

[AnonymouX47]

Hello, @GuardKenzie!

Stumbled upon this and upon reading through, the aura of self-promotion hit me hard. 🤦

I don't recall whether or not I knew about chafa.py at the time but even if I didn't, that still doesn't justify my actions.

I'm really sorry if this made a bad first impression (I believe this was our first interaction). Please, forgive my naïveté at the time. 🙏

Thank you very much. 😃

[GuardKenzie]

Hey! Absolutely no need to apologize for anything! I don't remember if I had settled on making chafa.py at this time either and this was a really good solution to a problem with this project after ueberzug.

I think I tried to make this work but honestly I don't really have much reason to work on this project anymore. I personally have moved away from using MPD for my music and this project wasn't too popular anyways. It was always meant to be a bit of a hacky widget I made for myself (hence the awful spaghetti code).

[AnonymouX47]

Okay. 😃

Thank you. 🙏