I’ve just been noticing the latest pedalboards have had some issues in the screenshots:
-“JCM800 Party” and “Synths can make music too” have no pedals in the shot
-“in the arms of” has several pedals that didn’t seem to render
not a big deal, but it is nice to see these pedalboards and see how people are hooking things up and setting the knobs.
Thanks!
The screenshots are generated by the MOD, not the browser.
This is a little problematic since we want MOD to prioritize audio first, so if you have a cpu-heavy pedalboard the CPU has little resources left to do the screenshot.
There’s a lot of optimizations to do on the mod-ui html code, which will surely help the case.
Maybe we could stop the audio for a few seconds before sharing the pedalboard (if not recording)…
Could the screenshots not be done on the server after uploading the pedalboard?
It’s something that could be investigated.
If you find something that works for complex web pages let us know.
FYI we did try https://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ before, it had really bad results… 
EDIT: I misunderstood.
We could actually do the screenshots on the cloud… hmm…
The thing is, we have to do them on the device itself anyway since the offline experience needs to be consistent. So we won’t get rid of doing it locally anytime soon. Doing it on the cloud would be just icing in the cake in case the user is online and we can eventually take off the hit but there’s quite an effort to make this happen seamlessly and it would still require a fallback plan to execute locally.
I’d say at this point the trade-off is just not worth it.
We might review this in the future though.
I think the case here is for shared pedalboards only, which appear on the pedalboards.moddevices.com.
Sometimes a screenshot ends up a little bad…
Right. Its a SUPER cool feature that currently to someone just browsing the site looks a little buggy. It works perfectly fine, but joe guitar who just found a link doesn’t necessarily know that.
It does yes, but should be done on-demand.
If a pedalboard screenshot is broken we could let users request to re-render it.
mod-ui has a dev mode that runs without mod-host (and thus jack, etc), so it can be used to render these.
since it’s on the cloud we can increase or even drop the timeout limit for the screenshots there.
Ok maybe we can include that in a future sprint. Can you create a ticket with the details of how you think this should work?
Yes, I meant for shared pedalboards. Since the pedalboard itself is uploaded to the cloud, the screenshot can be generated there. There it can also be done consistently: same window/screen-size for all of them, it does not need the same time-constraint/abort-rendering after 5 sec like on the MOD itself, and the cloud-server is likely more powerful than the MOD ARM-CPU: taking less time to render it.