Hello there,
It’s April, and the F1 world was quiet… It wasn’t all too quiet for Nitrous, though.
F1 TV Integration Proof-of-Concept
While Formula 1 was quiet, we were busy working on a proof-of-concept for integrating F1TV video playback into Nitrous. We wanted to see if it was possible to play back F1TV videos in Nitrous and control the windows for saveable layouts.
What do we want to achive?
With an F1TV account provided, we want to be able to play back selected video streams of a previous race/sessions, as well as be able to control the videos where the F1TV video plays so we can later save the position of these windows in so-called “layouts” So users can create, save, and load their layouts without needing to rearrange all their windows and streams every time they want to enjoy a Formula 1 race with nitrous.
Current state
With a lot of reverse engineering, we were able to get a working proof-of-concept for F1TV video playback. Currently we can successfully play previous sessions from the F1TV archive or the current season.
This works on every platform we are planning to support, meaning macOS, Linux, and Windows. Also, users can have up to as many streams running at the same time as their system and subscription allows.
We also were able to fully integrate video playback in iced, so we have full control of the windows, enabling us to implement the layouts feature later on.
What’s still open?
So with all of this done, can we already put it in nitrous and ship it with v1.0? Sadly not, but it looks promising that it will come sooner rather than later. Before we can have video playback fully integrated into Nitrous, we also need to test with the F1TV live streams. Which we weren’t able to because there was no Formula 1 race lately.
To meet our goal of having a performant and stable desktop application There’s a need for some performance and user experience optimizations before releasing the video playback feature.
But as already said, a promising glimpse into the future of nitrous, and we are excited to share more updates about this topic in the future.
Expanding to Other Racing Series
With April being a quiet month for Formula 1, we also thought about expanding our support to other racing series. Namely WEC and WRC, as these are also series I am personally interested in. That’s why we will be adding these racing series to our roadmap soon.
 Credits to Xavier Praillet |  Credits to Maxime Agnelli |
Session State
Of course we also did some work on nitrous itself. For example we added the lap count, session time and track status to our redesined header bar of the dashboard.
Deciding where to add new information always needs a bit of thought where best to put it, so design changes are currently still inevitable, but we are happy with where its going at this moment but we’l also listen to user feedback and adjust the design if needed after the release.
Multiwindow support
We also added support for multiple windows in nitrous, which is a feature we are really excited about as it opens up a lot of possibilities for different kinds of visialisation, screens and layouts.
Currently we have the following implemented:
- race control
- trackmap
With the following planned and kept in mind:
- lap by lap
- head to head
- track status
Conclusion
The f1tv Integration Proof-of-Concept wen’t icredibly well and the future looks promising. Multiwindow support was also simple to add and opens up a lot of possibilities for different kinds of visualisation and layouts.
The design is still evolving but is slowly taking a good shape.
And as alwazs these are the open points regarding MVP release. (which already includes more futures than planned :p)
- Simple homepage with the current race weekend
- Simple archive search to select which session to replay
- Settings page
- Weather Info
That’s it for April, looking forward to May and the Miami GP and more testing on the f1tv integration.
Best regards,
- slowlydev