In this version, I took the entire rendering pipeline apart, re-wrote most of it, and put it all back together. I’m quite pleased with the results. Different post types are easier to customize now and are less tangled together, the different players are more modular, and everything is just cleaner.
1.4.30 is not finished, but it’s finally not in a million pieces scattered all over the place. Progress! That said, it is on the home stretch. There’s a weird bug I’m also trying to squash, so I’ll probably take a few days to test drive and see if that’s fixed or not. Probably about a week out before this is ready, give or take a few days.
Aside from bugfixes, what’s new?
Lots of UI Polish
The post/media renderers were all re-written and cleaned up significantly.
Limited SSR for Metadata Lookups
There is now server-side rendering when non-browsers do metadata fetches for posts against a Tesseract URL. So if you post a link to another post that points to Tesseract (e.g. https://tess.instance.xyz/post/instance.xyz/12345), it will no longer just return the generic Tesseract manifest data; instead, it will return the details for the post, comment, user, community, or instance.
Tidal Support
Tidal album, track, and playlist links are now supported and show as embeds. You can also click a supported Tidal link anywhere in the app, and it will embed in the link preview modal (same as how YouTube and other media will preview the video embed in the modals).
Post Form Now Allows Supplying Custom Thumbnail
If connected to an instance 0.19.4 or higher, you can now supply a custom thumbnail image when creating a post. Disabled if you’re uploading an image or there is no URL supplied.
New Audio Player
The default HTML5 audio player was kind of boring, so I wrote a custom control interface around it and fancied it up. Has touch-friendly controls, will use the custom_thumbnail if available, and looks so much better. It also remembers the loop and volume level and uses that on other audio elements and videos.
With Custom Thumbnail Available
No Custom Thumbnail / Default Placeholder Image
Inline Player in Comment Section
Here, the comment used the media embed syntax (which does work in Lemmy-UI, surprisingly):
Now, the alt text is used as the title for the audio player:
The alt text, in a post or in the markdown syntax will be used as the title in the audio player. Additionally, in markdown, you can specify a thumbnail image for the audio by using the title portion of the markdown image format. For images, this is used to denote a custom emoji, but for audio, if it’s a link to an image, it’ll be used as the player image.
e.g. 
Confirmed this is backwards compatible with Lemmy-UI (it ignores that on audio).
Oh so that’s why the long silence. Good job, mate!
Lol, yep. I’ve needed to clean those up for a while now, and finally decided to pay off some of the technical debt.
![1.4.30 is finally coming together [Development Update]](https://dubvee.org/pictrs/image/734c5ec3-29ae-4356-a36f-98e466eed90d.webp){kind=link}