Background playback

[githubdebugger]

I see that you added this "Pause when in the background (fix)" in 0.2.1, can you make this configurable? So one is able to continue to playback even if the Openreader page is in the background?

[AncientMystic]

This is definitely one thing that is very important to me. Even if it is just not automatically pausing it in the background, personally there is rarely a time i would be using it on my phone where i would not also be using my phone for other things, as i like to listen while i work on random things, so i would almost never just leave it sitting with the screen on to listen to the book.

If we could also just process the entire document, save the audio file and open it in an app that fully supports background playback that would also work.

Also version 0.2.0 seems to have fixed the related background playback navigation issues where it skipped pages, so i think it is safe to at least not force it to pause in the background now.

Also fyi for op i think the dev here would have to make ios and android apps to fully support it on mobile... so that would be a task for sure. (although it would make this the best ereader app in the app store, as others are costly, profit oriented and usually want subscriptions, etc, so maybe that would be worth it.)

[githubdebugger]

For this purpose "If we could also just process the entire document, save the audio file and open it in an app that fully supports background playback that would also work." you could use this tool https://github.com/fairy-root/epub-to-audiobook, even though it says OpenAI, but you could easily replace that with kokoro-FastAPI endpoint and use it.

[githubdebugger]

Also, there is this:

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts
https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook
https://github.com/lukaszliniewicz/Pandrator

Note: I have not tested or used any of them, these were something which I just came across.

[githubdebugger]

as for this: "Also fyi for op i think the dev here would have to make ios and android apps to fully support it on mobile... so that would be a task for sure. (although it would make this the best ereader app in the app store, as others are costly, profit oriented and usually want subscriptions, etc, so maybe that would be worth it.)", you could try audiobookshelf - https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf, if audiobookshelf + features from openreader are merged, that would be an ideal app/server.

The reason I say this is, even though audiobookshelf is primarily for audiobooks, it can open text/epub/pdf's + features of openreader on top of that, you have completely tool + one of the tools (from above) to process the entire document ;) its golden.

[richardr1126]

It was not working at all, I removed it for now.

[richardr1126]

Exporting to audiobook will be added in the next version. I have it working right now. Also a header/footer setting for PDF.

[richardr1126]

You say "just save the entire audio" and play in background. I don't know how long books are for you. But you definitely can't generate 10+ hour audiobooks just "in the background" when u close ur app.

It will be an export option. It takes around 15 minutes on my GPU for a 4.5 hour audiobook of a novella (very short novel).

[richardr1126]

I am trying to work towards background playback still. And it's gonna require a lot of changes.

Specifically with the new version of Kokoro-FastAPI. You can get the output transcript with timestamps which would allow me to extract whole chapter texts and still paginate through them at the right time.

Right now I literally have to just extract what is shown on the page, so the app knows when to turn the page, once it terminates.