Help Improve Soia 🚀

[FengZeng]

Hi everyone 👋

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Soia!

If you’ve been using it, feel free to share:

• Your overall experience (what you like / dislike)
• Any bugs or issues you’ve encountered
• Performance observations (especially on different devices)

I’m also looking for ideas on new features. If there’s anything you wish Soia could do, let me know!

Even small feedback is super helpful 🙏

Thanks for taking the time to share!

[lionmage]

I like how clean the interface is. I'm experiencing some intermittent pops/clicks in the audio on Windows 11 on ARM (Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, Asus Zenbook A16). The videos were converted using Handbrake. Also occasional buffering pauses that seem to be random. I'll watch several episodes of The Animatrix and will see no problems for a couple episodes and then... bam... not sure what is going on.

[FengZeng]

Thanks for the feedback!
Just to clarify, are you playing local files or network streams when this happens?
If you run into the issue again, could you share the logs with me? That would help me investigate what's causing it.

[lionmage]

The audio issues went away after rebooting the machine. (I figured there was a bigger issue at play when Youtube videos were also having audio problems.) I was playing from an external drive (portable 4 TB SSD). I'll do some more testing tonight.

[FengZeng]

Thanks for your support and the update!
If you find anything new during your testing, feel free to keep me posted.

[dmsa2]

I just downloaded the portable version 2.10 to test it out.
It took me a few minutes to get the hang of this interface. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the ultra-minimalist interface.
What I liked most:

• Seeing “Dolby Vision” written next to the video duration when the video uses that codec
• Advanced subtitle menu and basic information (language, type)
• Basic information about the file’s audio tracks (language, channels, codec, Hz delay)
• Dark theme—it could be pure black (my OLEDs would appreciate it)

Here’s what I’d like to suggest:

• An option to enable HDR in Windows when opening a file and disable HDR when finished watching the file. This could be automatic or enabled only in full-screen mode.
• An option to choose a specific font for subtitles; for example, I really like Arial Rounded—I have it on my PC, but it wasn’t detected as an option. I’d also like to be able to choose the character spacing; I usually set it to -1 in MPCHC/BE.
• An option to interpolate 23.976 fps files to 30/60/120 fps using MadVR or Rife (RTX TensorRT)—it’s all free, as far as I’ve researched.
• Have an option to keep 6ch/8ch/+, because I’ve noticed that in 5.1, the volume of the surround speakers is drastically reduced and the sound coming from them sounds “flat”—I’m not sure if the audio is being passed through directly?
• Have an option to boost the audio by x%.
• Have a pure black theme with dark gray details—OLED TVs will appreciate it ^^

I’ve been testing the program for 10 minutes; now I’m going to watch some movies and TV shows with different audio and video formats.

Overall, I really liked the program, and I truly think it has great potential to become extremely popular and even surpass MPCHC/BE, and others in the same category.

[dmsa2]

It would be nice if we could edit the mpv.conf file

[FengZeng]

Thank you so much for such detailed feedback! It’s really helpful.

1. Regarding the Windows HDR option, just to make sure I understand correctly: you’d like Soia to automatically enable Windows HDR when opening an HDR video, and then restore the previous HDR state when you finish watching it? And optionally, this could be triggered only when entering fullscreen?

2. For subtitle fonts, Soia currently only includes a limited selection of fonts. I’ll improve this and make the font selection more complete in the future. Character spacing is also a good suggestion.

3. I’ve added frame interpolation to my plan. I’d like to wait until Soia is a bit more stable before working on it. If more users request this feature, I’ll move it up in priority.

4. Audio passthrough has actually already been implemented by cjohnsto-nz, and the PR feat(audio): add lossless HDMI passthrough #20 has been merged. There are still a few small bugs on macOS, but hopefully this feature will be included in the next release.

5. Regarding the pure black theme, UI/design-related changes can take quite a bit of time, but I’ll add this to my TODO list as well.

I’ll also add support for the mpv config file #12 as soon as I can.

Right now, I’m working on the casting related features. Once that’s finished, I’ll continue polishing and improving the features you mentioned.

[dmsa2]

Hi!

1. Yes, that’s exactly what you understood from the item. Usually, people who use an OLED TV as a monitor don’t leave HDR turned on. At least I only turn HDR on when I’m actually going to use the feature.
2. It would be great to have that.
3. I’m looking into free ways to apply interpolation using the 5070 Ti—it would be amazing to have that support at some point. I’ve been testing the “free” options like Avisync, Vaporsyn, Rife, and TensorRT, but they’re a bit complicated for “on-the-fly” interpolation. I’m making progress, though; I’d just need to be able to edit the MPV config.
4. I’m still monitoring the audio system and running some tests, but thanks for confirming that passthrough is already supported.
   If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.

Thanks a lot!