Hey everyone! I have been planning to release a stable "release track" alongside the beta releases for a while now, and I thought I would give another update.

stable build release update -- watch for v1.0.0 very soon!

I will most likely begin releasing "stable" versions starting next month, in October. These stable versions will initially be there to shield users from the surprise broken changes from my beta releases. Currently, I have dev branches where I do my own testing, but very rarely do I get feedback from the community about certain bugs before I create a "beta release". By starting a "stable" release channel, this helps users who don't need all the new features to safely update the stable releases, knowing all the changes have been tested by a group of users on the beta builds.

The first stable release will be a v1.0.0 based release (a rename of 0.8.x).

beta community is coming

Right now, everyone is using beta, and the experience could be better!

So, I am excited to truly have a release process for those that don't want to be surprised by somewhat broken updates (sorry if you've experienced that). Then there's going to be a ton of really awesome beta features coming that will tempt many users (see 0.9.x features) to use the beta builds. I think it will be a good time to start a beta community that you can officially join and discuss issues, features, and changes more freely (though my time is limited, so much of this will be community-driven). But I still want to give everyone the environment needed to make suggestions, talk about issues, and get help quickly if needed -- this will likely be a Discord group.

official documentation site

So, the stable release builds will come first, then shortly after, I will integrate documentation into GitHub. These will be markdown-based docs that get built and compiled into a full website automatically on releases. This will be really exciting and another big change for this repo, because:

1. Official docs will look much better than these awful wiki docs you guys have to deal with right now!
2. You'll be able to search the docs easily.
3. You will be able to contribute to the docs! I can't wait for that, because there are so many ways to use filebrowser. I would love to have a detailed example and an explanation for everything. Right now, it's mostly just looking at the generated config with comments, which helps. But it can be so much better. I can also imagine there could be some video examples as well, which I could make... but you know it's a lot to polish things up, and it just hasn't been a focus.

New features in v2.x.x

Now to the fun part! As many of you know, each minor version update gets a theme of features that gets priority. 0.8.0 has been sharing features and access control.

v2.x.x: will be jobs, media features, and hardware acceleration support.

A breakdown of some things to expect in v2.x.x:

• jobs / async task
  • persistent copy/move status with a nice ui to follow the progress.
  • downloads
  • converting videos and images.
  • compress/uncompress files in ui
  • automatic file copy/move for certain conditions
  • custom jobs: handled outside of filebrowser application via api, only orchestrated by filebrowser.
• tools -- there's a lot of powerful things that filebrowser can do with the index info! Why not?
  • "largest files" viewer similar to https://diskanalyzer.com/
  • duplicate detection
  • advanced search dedicated page
• "max media" mode: a more immersive mode curated to media such as music, movies, and tv shows similar to plex or jellyfin
  • will be very simple: show movies, media, and music in a graphical ui for a given scope.
  • A share will be able to be a "max media" mode, showing the plex-like interface instead of a file list
  • transcoding support
• introduction of SQLite database
  • Initially, this will be primarily for job status information.
  • eventually, this could enable RAM-free indexing and replace the existing simple (but very fast) database.

Final thoughts

I know FileBrowser Quantum is not for everyone - it's been my personal project for a few years now. I have generally catered it to my needs, but now there's a lot of feedback and a lot of great ideas. As long as the ideas can fit, I think there's a good chance it will get added. I think there's lots of room in the FOSS community for new ways of doing the same old things. There are so many things to do, don't feel bad if your ideas aren't immediately worked on -- maybe some might get picked up many months from now.

I really appreciate everyone's patience on this project, and I hope you like how it's progressing. As always, the best way to give feedback currently is via GitHub issues and discussions -- my inbox is always full of new comments. I try to keep my inbox read, but sometimes I miss something. Feel free to send follow-up messages for something that needs attention.

-- Graham