A BrightSign consultant ran our v1.9.29-rc2 autorun.zip through BSN.cloud's
automated deployment. The archive reached the player and then could not be
opened — reported as invalid. Two causes, both ours.
1. COMPRESSION. We built with default deflate. The player bootstrap extracts
autozip.brs by itself before any script runs, and roBrightPackage supports a
specific set of methods, of which "no compression" is the universally safe
one. Both builders now store: scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh passes -0, and the
server-side package builder used archiver level 9 — maximum deflate — so
EVERY self-update package it produced would have failed the same way, silently
and in the field.
2. THE UNPACK API. We used roUnzip; BrightSign's own tooling uses
roBrightPackage. Converted in autozip.brs and in the self-update path.
This is the failure mode worth naming: a compressed package uploads, downloads
and deploys perfectly, then fails to open on the player. It reads as a broken
deployment rather than a broken zip, so it gets debugged everywhere except where
the bug is. Both builders now ASSERT the property rather than trusting the flag —
the build script walks `unzip -v` and refuses a compressed member, and a test
walks the local file headers of the server-built package checking method 0.
Verified by negative control: re-enabling compression fails the test.
Also adopted the shipped volume-discovery pattern in autozip.brs — probe
USB1:/SD:/SSD:/FLASH: for the archive instead of guessing two volumes. The unit
that drove this port boots from FLASH because its card interface is dead, and
extracting to a volume that does not exist fails silently.
1056 pass.
Reported by giyokun, who was right about both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Muting was implemented three times and agreed nowhere. A YouTube item is a
cross-origin iframe, so `el.muted` reaches nothing; only the IFrame API can
touch it. Both browser-family players got this wrong, in opposite directions:
web playerVars.mute was `userHasInteracted ? 0 : 1` — autoplay policy and
NOTHING else. An item an operator muted in the admin console played
WITH SOUND, a wall follower blared alongside its leader, and the
real-time device:mute-changed toggle only ever touched `<video>`.
onReady then unmuted unconditionally, and the click-to-unmute overlay
appeared on deliberately-muted items and undid the operator's setting.
tizen the embed URL hardcoded `mute=1`, so YouTube there was PERMANENTLY
silent: the per-item flag was never read and nothing could unmute it.
device:mute-changed did nothing at all, because it dereferenced a
<video> that is null for a YouTube item.
Android was already correct and is unchanged — it is the reference here.
The rule now lives once, in server/lib/media-mute.js, served to the web player
from its single source the same way schedule-eval.js is, and mirrored in Tizen
(which ships inside the .wgt and cannot import it). The ORDER is the substance:
a wall follower is always silent (one wall, one audio source) > autoplay policy,
which is a hard constraint rather than a preference because unmuted playback
without a gesture is refused outright and costs the VIDEO > a live operator
toggle, who is looking at the screen > the item's stored flag.
shouldOfferUnmute() exists so the prompt only appears when a gesture is the ONLY
thing in the way. Prompting on a muted item trains viewers to click a button
that undoes an operator's decision.
Tizen gains enablejsapi + a postMessage bridge so a live toggle flips the embed
without reloading it — reloading would restart the video from zero every time
someone touched the control.
11 new tests pinning each precedence step separately; 1055 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
isBrightSignDevice() fell back to device.user_agent to catch panels paired
before this port existed, which registered as "Chrome 120" with a BrightSign
user agent. `devices` has no user_agent column, so the field is always undefined
on a row read from the database. The branch was unreachable in production and
passed only in a test that fabricated the field — which is precisely how dead
code survives review.
Two agents flagged it independently while working on unrelated areas, and the
schema confirms it: zero matches for user_agent in the devices table.
Those pre-port panels are recognised the moment they re-register on a build
carrying the host, which every one of them gets on its next update. Identifying
them sooner would mean persisting the user agent, and a column added solely to
track a population that disappears on its own is not worth carrying.
The test now asserts the honest behaviour: a fabricated user_agent does NOT
create a match, and a group containing such a panel reads as mixed until it
re-registers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Two gaps that both end the same way — a panel nobody can fix without a van.
OFFLINE. Content bytes were never persistently cached. The service worker
skipped /uploads/content/ and leaned on the browser's HTTP cache, which is
reasonable on a desktop and is not a documented-persistent store here:
BrightSign guarantees survival across reboots for IndexedDB, localStorage and
SQLite, and their own answer for offline video is to cache the bytes explicitly.
A panel could come back from a power cut with its playlist intact — that lives in
localStorage — and no media to play it with.
The reason content was skipped is real, and player-cache-policy.js is what makes
intercepting it safe. Seeking video issues range requests, and naive caching is
worse than none: storing a 206 as the whole file means every later full request
gets a fragment, and answering a range request with a 200 makes some media stacks
fail outright. So only complete 200s are stored, and ranges are served by slicing
the stored body into a correct 206. The content cache survives shell
re-versioning, or every deploy would re-download the playlist over a link that may
be exactly what is broken.
SELF-UPDATE. The package can replace autorun.brs, so a truncated file is a dark
panel with no app underneath. The safety is the ordering: download to .part,
verify sha256 AND size, then delete the .done marker, rename, reboot. Marker
first is not stylistic — leaving it makes the next boot skip the archive and the
update silently never happens. A failed extract parks the zip as .bad instead of
retrying every boot, which would be a loop indistinguishable from a hardware
fault. sha256 because that is what roMessageDigest can compute; a checksum the
player cannot verify is an unverifiable package.
The decision lives on the server and is unit-tested, and the host only executes
it — re-implementing the version comparison in BrightScript would put the
prerelease trap somewhere untestable. That trap is honoured directly: a player on
1.9.29-rc1 is running something semver-OLDER than 1.9.29, so an opted-in player
HOLDS a prerelease of its own core rather than being pulled off the build it was
given to test. Narrowly — a newer core still lands, so opting in never means
never updating again.
Both loop conditions are closed by construction. The manifest and the download
come from one buffer hashed once, so a checksum cannot describe bytes we are not
serving. And the version is stamped into autorun.brs at build time by both
builders, so the script reports the version it actually is — otherwise the player
applies the update, still reports the old version, and is offered the same
package forever.
Failure always degrades to "keep running the old version": an unreachable
manifest, a missing checksum, a failed verification, a full attempt counter and
an unbuildable package all resolve to skip.
998 tests pass (was 954).
st-sync.js wrapped SyncManager but nothing drove it. The player now does: the
leader opens a new sync session on each advance, and every member — the leader
included — binds the video with attachVideo() on a NEW id only.
The leader binds from its own broadcast rather than at announce() time on
purpose. Starting when it announces would put it ahead of its followers by the
width of the network, which is the one desync nobody would think to look for
because the leader always looks correct.
Item selection stays clock-derived under both backends. Native sync replaces
only the seek/nudge drift correction, because setSyncParams has the element hold
its own alignment and correcting it ourselves would fight the platform — every
frame we moved is one it then has to undo. Keeping selection on the shared clock
is also what keeps images and widgets, which have no setSyncParams, advancing
with the videos instead of drifting off alone.
LEADER RULE: reuse the existing election (resolveGroupLeader) rather than adding
a column. It already resolves pinned-if-online, else first online member on the
shared playlist, else first by id — deterministic, stable, and already what the
group-sync payload reports. A second mechanism could only disagree with it.
Added on top: a group whose elected leader is OFFLINE falls back to our
protocol. Ours is leaderless and carries on; native sync has exactly one
broadcaster, so those members would sit waiting for an announcement that never
comes, with the dashboard showing a healthy group throughout.
device_groups.sync_backend ('auto'|'screentinker'|'brightsign') is the operator's
REQUEST; the answer comes from the existing pure resolveSyncBackend() so the
players, the dashboard and the stored setting cannot disagree. The resolved
backend, reason and downgraded flag ride in the group_sync payload and in the
group API, and the dashboard shows the refusal reason instead of a setting that
quietly isn't in force. An unrecognised value is rejected rather than stored,
because the resolver reads anything unknown as 'auto' — a typo would otherwise
return 200 and run a different protocol than the UI displayed.
FIXED WHILE HERE: the player re-entered group sync only when the group ID
changed, with a comment noting the clock protocol has no leader role. Native
sync has one, and neither a protocol switch nor leadership moving alters the
group id — so a player promoted to leader kept behaving as a follower, nobody
announced, and the group sat unsynchronised. The re-enter key now includes the
backend and the leader flag.
971 pass (+17).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The web player sent battery/storage/RAM/CPU as nulls and 'Web Player' in the
wifi_ssid column, and the bs_model / bs_os_version / bs_serial / bs_screen fields
the player already reported at registration were consumed by nothing. A browser
tab genuinely has none of that. A BrightSign has some of it, and was reporting
none.
Telemetry comes from a CACHE the heartbeat reads synchronously. The beat builds
its payload every 15s without awaiting, but the one real sensor here —
deviceInfo.getTemperature() — returns a promise; awaiting inside the beat would
either block it or serialise a pending Promise into the payload, which is exactly
how device_id once became "[object Promise]". The cache starts EMPTY rather than
null-filled and is spread last, so off-platform nothing changes and a null here
can never clobber a value another player family legitimately supplied.
wifi_ssid was actively false on a PoE Ethernet appliance — an operator reading
that column was told an SSID that does not exist. It is null there now, and the
device view shows a real hardware block instead. Android's WiFi display is
untouched.
Hardware identity is a SEPARATE writer from applyDeviceInfo, deliberately. That
function is a blind full-row overwrite, and an empty device_info once nulled
seventeen columns every five minutes because {} is truthy. These fields arrive
only on a full register, so the same shape would wipe them on every lightweight
refresh in between; COALESCE makes "no news" mean "unchanged".
The OS build gets its own column rather than reusing android_version, which is
load-bearing as a TYPE discriminator: device-detail chooses between the Android
and browser layouts with android_version.startsWith('Web/'), so writing
"BrightSign OS 9.0.189" there would have rendered a BrightSign with battery and
WiFi cards — and applyDeviceInfo would have clobbered it on the next refresh.
Storage is labelled "Player Storage", not "Storage": on this family the number is
the widget's cache quota, not the device filesystem, and it lands in the same
column as Android's real disk figures.
Schema: device_telemetry.temperature_c REAL; devices.hardware_model,
hardware_serial, hardware_os_version, output_index. All nullable, all idempotent
in the existing migration array.
973 pass (+19). The temperature tests drive a real socket into a real server,
because changing the arity of the telemetry INSERT would break every player's
heartbeat, not just BrightSign's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
A BrightSign emitted BLANK screenshots and logged "Screenshot sent". With hwz
enabled the video decodes onto a hardware plane outside the browser compositor
— BrightSign's docs say the HTML/JS layer "doesn't see the pixels" — so
drawImage(video) produces a fully TRANSPARENT image and throws nothing.
Chromium 87, which this XT245 reports, fails the same way.
Both capture paths set captured/drawn = true purely because drawMediaFit() had
not thrown. So the dashboard showed a dead screen while the panel played
perfectly, and the zone path painted a black rectangle in place of the labelled
placeholder drawZonePlaceholder() exists to guarantee ("never a transparent
hole"). Success reported, nothing done.
isMediaReadable() does not catch this. It answers "am I ALLOWED to read this"
(same-origin / CORS), which is a different question from "did any pixels
arrive".
videoFrameIsCapturable() probes a 16x16 scratch canvas before committing to a
full-size draw. ALPHA is the discriminator, not colour: a scratch canvas starts
transparent and a real decoded frame writes alpha=255 even when the frame is
pure black, so a legitimate fade-to-black still reads as captured while
"nothing arrived" does not. A tainted canvas counts as captured, because
tainting only happens once cross-origin pixels have actually been drawn.
Probing BEFORE the draw matters twice: it avoids a wasted full-size drawImage on
every frame of a 1fps stream, and in the zone path it stops a black rectangle
being painted underneath the placeholder.
When a video is on screen but unreadable the status card now says so, because
that card is also what shows for "no content" — without the line an operator
would reasonably conclude the screen was blank.
Not gated on BrightSign: the same silent failure exists for any stalled decoder
or engine that declines to hand back frames.
10 tests, 964 pass.
Blanking the screen took three attempts on real hardware, and each failure was
the same lesson from a different angle:
1. black overlay -> the video played straight THROUGH it. With hwz
enabled the widget decodes onto a hardware plane and
the graphics plane sits behind it; z-index is
irrelevant across planes.
2. pause + hide element -> playback stopped and the LAST DECODED FRAME stayed
on screen. Hiding a DOM element does nothing to the
plane, which is not part of the DOM.
3. pause + remove src -> releases the plane. Black.
+ load()
Coming back re-mounts through nextItem(), because a torn-down element cannot be
resurrected. The playlist keeps advancing while the screen is off, so each newly
started item is torn down as well — caught on 'play' in the capture phase, or the
next video lights the panel back up a few seconds later.
CEC is now explicitly not load-bearing. Our XT245 logs "failed to get cec clock"
and does not respond to it at all, which is precisely why blanking cannot depend
on a cooperative display: plenty ignore broadcast CEC or need direct addressing.
displayPower() stays as opportunistic best-effort alongside the teardown.
Verified on hardware: not black, then frozen frame, then black.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The web player handles four of the ~20 fleet commands, because a browser tab
genuinely cannot do more. A BrightSign can, and was inheriting the browser's
limits for no reason.
screen_on/screen_off now send CEC Image View On (0x0D) / Standby (0x36) so the
display actually sleeps. The overlay only painted the screen black: the panel
stayed lit, drawing power and at risk of burn-in. Best effort by design — some
displays ignore broadcast CEC and need direct addressing — so displayPower()
returns false when unavailable and the overlay is applied either way, meaning
something visible always happens.
reboot was silently ignored: the dashboard button did nothing on a web player.
It now goes through the host to RebootSystem, and still logs a clear "not
supported" off-platform rather than failing quietly.
set_volume applies to whatever is playing AND is re-applied on every subsequent
'play' event, caught in the capture phase because media events do not bubble.
Media elements are created per item across fullscreen, zone and preload paths,
so setting volume once would otherwise last only until the playlist advanced.
Wall followers stay silent throughout — that is deliberate, not an oversight.
A dual-output player addresses HDMI-N for the screen it actually paints, so
output 2 sleeps its own display rather than output 1's.
954 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The bridge stored device_id in the registry and the display still came back as a
NEW device on the next boot. The id is not an identity on its own: the server
authenticates a claim to an existing display with the token, so an id presented
without one reads as a brand-new player and gets a fresh row.
device_token now sits alongside device_id in the registry, getConfig adopts both,
and clearIdentity forgets both — a stale token must not outlive the identity it
belongs to.
Found on an XT245, not in a test, which is why the three new cases name the
symptom rather than the mechanism. 951 pass.
Also worth recording from the same session: the duplicate rows had a second
cause. The widget's storage_path was pointing nowhere useful, so localStorage
had no persistent home and the per-install fingerprint salt was regenerated on
every boot. With storage_path set correctly the cache directory now exists on
the player and the fingerprint is stable, which is what stopped the churn; the
registry identity is the belt to that pair of braces.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
st-sync.js wraps SyncManager, the native protocol. Three properties drove the
shape of it. It repeats the sync broadcast at 1Hz so a player powered on late
still joins, which means acting on every repeat would reload the video once a
second forever — on screen that reads as a stutter, not as a sync fault, so the
id dedupe is mandatory rather than an optimisation. The leader starts from its
OWN broadcast rather than at announce() time, or it runs ahead of the group by
the width of the network. And attachVideo refuses an element with no
setSyncParams instead of half-syncing it.
offline.html is the local fallback the host falls back to after three failed
loads. It names the server, keeps probing with capped backoff so a site full of
panels cannot storm a server that is coming back, and asks the HOST to restart
the player when it answers — never navigating itself, for the same reason the
player never reloads itself here.
The resolver now models multicast reach. All-BrightSign groups spread across
subnets no longer get native sync: each subnet would sync neatly within itself
while drifting from the others, and the dashboard would show a healthy group
throughout. The IP comparison is a heuristic so it is used in one direction
only — differing networks are evidence against, matching ones are never proof
for, and unknown addresses block nothing.
st-sync.js is served from its single source like the bridge, and the SD card
deliberately carries neither: the player pulls both from the server so a stale
copy on a card can never skew from the player using it.
948 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Reviewed autorun.brs and st-bridge.js line-by-line against the real examples
instead of the prose docs. Five defects, three of which would have been silent.
The registry API is asynchronous and section-oriented: read(section, key)
returns a Promise and writes take an object, write(section, {k: v}). The bridge
treated both as synchronous, so deviceId() returned a Promise object — truthy
and non-empty — and a panel would have registered as "[object Promise]" while
its real row sat unclaimed. It now prefetches into a cache behind onReady(), and
connect() waits for that before registering.
brightsign_js_objects_enabled: true is required alongside nodejs_enabled for
require("@brightsign/*"). Without it the bridge degrades to no-ops and the
player loses identity and restart delegation — which would have read as
"BrightSign doesn't work" rather than as one missing flag.
storage_path is a directory name, not a volume, and storage_quota is a string;
the local fallback URL needs its volume (file:/SD:/offline.html). Added
security_params and hwz_default to match the examples.
SyncManager does not work unless networking/ptp_domain is "0", which needs a
reboot to apply. Done only when this player is configured for native sync, and
read-before-write so it reboots once rather than on every boot.
Confirmed correct as written: messageport, the roHtmlWidgetEvent loop, and
RebootSystem(). The notes also state a widget URL may be an externally hosted
page with the same JS API access — the favourable answer to the question the
original probe was built to ask.
Bridge tests now model the async section-oriented registry, so a synchronous
stand-in can never hide this class of bug again. 931 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The bridge and the host existed but nothing loaded them. Now the player does.
restartPlayer() replaces every location.reload() call site. On BrightSign a
page-initiated reload does not reliably bring the roHtmlWidget back, so the page
asks the host to rebuild it and only falls back to reload() when no host is
there to take the request. That covers the deploy path, the operator refresh,
the service-worker activation and the manual reset.
Identity now round-trips through the registry, which outlives localStorage on
this platform: getConfig() adopts a registry identity when local storage comes
back empty, instead of re-pairing and spawning a second row for a panel that is
already provisioned. The operator reset clears the registry too — otherwise it
would clear localStorage, get the same identity straight back on the next boot,
and reset nothing.
Registration reports platform 'brightsign' rather than "Chrome 120", which is
what sync-backend.js resolves native-vs-ours from, plus model, OS, serial and
which output this widget paints.
Dual output needed a collision fix: autorun.brs gives the second HDMI output its
own widget, and both widgets share an origin, a registry and one SD
storage_path. Un-namespaced, output 2 would read output 1's config, install salt
and device id and the two would collapse into a single device row. Storage keys
and registry keys are now suffixed per output; screen 1 keeps the bare names so
nothing existing moves.
The bridge is served from its single source so the copy the player loads can
never skew from the one on the SD card next to autorun.brs, and it is served to
every player rather than gated on a user agent — a panel reporting an unexpected
UA would otherwise silently lose restart-instead-of-reload.
Two test harnesses extract player functions and run them in an isolated scope,
so they now supply SCREEN_SUFFIX; one gained a case proving two outputs of one
player get distinct identities. 927 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The player is the unmodified web player in an roHtmlWidget — that already runs
on real hardware. What was missing is everything a page cannot do for itself.
autorun.brs becomes a host rather than a URL wrapper. It owns the widget
lifecycle, because a page-initiated location.reload() does not reliably bring an
roHtmlWidget back: a deploy on 2026-07-28 reloaded every connected player and
the BrightSign was the only one that never returned. The page now posts
{type:"restart"} and the host rebuilds the widget. It also retries load-error
with backoff, falls back to a local page, and runs a heartbeat watchdog that
catches the case load-error never reports — a page that loaded fine and then
wedged on a dead socket or a stalled decoder.
st-bridge.js is the page's half over @brightsign/messageport: registry-backed
identity (localStorage is origin- and quota-bound, the registry is not),
restart-instead-of-reload, heartbeat, and sync-backend reporting. Every method
degrades to a no-op off-platform, so it is safe to load unconditionally.
sync-backend.js decides whose synchronisation a group runs. Ours is
clock-derived and spans any mix of Android, web, Tizen and BrightSign; BrightWall
is frame-accurate and BrightSign-only. auto picks native when every member is a
BrightSign. The refusal that matters: native sync selected for a mixed group
downgrades and says why, because a half-synced group would look perfectly
synchronised on the dashboard while one panel drifted alone.
Dual output via output_mode single|dual|clone — a second widget loads the same
player with &screen=2 so the server can give it its own playlist.
Written against the BrightDeveloper docs; not yet run on hardware. The README
lists what is unimplemented, including the BrightWall runtime API, which that
doc set does not cover.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
device:playback-state was the only relay that forwarded the client's payload verbatim. The workspace
lookup correctly used currentDeviceId — the socket's authenticated device — but the object passed on
to the dashboard was whatever the player sent, including any device_id it chose to put there. So one
device could report playback progress attributed to a different screen in the same workspace, and
the dashboard had no reason to doubt it.
Every other relay in this file stamps the authenticated id. This one now matches.
882 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
"Default Content" is persisted by the device route, snapshotted and restored by the settings layer,
offered in the device form in five languages — and read by nothing. Grep the whole tree and it
appears only in those places, the schema, and this checklist. It is absent from assemblePayload,
from every socket payload, and from all four players.
Counting it as "content assigned" therefore told the operator their screen was set up while the
screen itself went on showing "waiting for content" — the checklist confirming the one thing it
exists to confirm, incorrectly. It now counts only a playlist or a layout, both of which really do
put something on a display.
An existing test asserted the opposite ("any of the three ways of assigning counts"). It encoded the
same false premise, so it is replaced by one that pins the corrected behaviour along with the
evidence for it. The column and the form field are left alone — whether to implement or remove the
feature is a product decision, and this change only stops the checklist making a claim on its
behalf.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Give every item on a sync-group playlist a daypart — "menu boards 06:00-22:00" — and at 22:00 the
whole group kept displaying, or looping, whatever had been in-window last. An identical ungrouped
screen showed "Nothing scheduled right now" correctly.
The group schedule tick filters items by the same scheduleAllows check as solo playback. With
everything filtered out the period is zero, so the target is null and the tick simply returned.
Nothing else was watching: group members are schedule-driven, so renderContent arms no advanceTimer,
and a group-rendered video is created with loop = !!groupSync. Solo playback routes this exact
condition into the idle card; group playback had no equivalent, on either player.
Both ticks now tear down and show the idle card when the schedule has nothing live, and pick up
again when the daypart re-opens.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Taking a display out of a sync group, or deleting the wall it belonged to, froze it on whatever was
playing. The clip looped forever and every later refresh took the "unchanged" branch, because the
element was attached, playing and un-errored — healthy by every check the player makes. Only a
reboot cleared it.
On the web player, reconcileAdvanceTimerForMode re-arms a solo timer for widgets and images but
skips video and YouTube, on the grounds that they "self-advance via their own end handlers". The
handler that is live at that moment, though, was built for the mode being left: a group-rendered
video was created with `loop = !!groupSync`, a wall-follower video with `isFollower` true, and both
are captured in the closure at render time. A looping element never fires `ended`, and a follower's
handler declines to advance — so nothing self-advances and nothing re-renders. It now re-renders
whenever the element on screen is still looping, rather than guessing which media types can look
after themselves.
Tizen had the same freeze by a different route. GroupSyncController.exit and WallController.exit
both call player.invalidate() for exactly this purpose, but invalidate only cleared the change
signature — and load() returns at the continuity check ("current item survives, just retarget the
index") before reaching any render, so the invalidate was a no-op. It now forces the next load to
re-render, which is what those call sites always intended. On Tizen this froze every item type, not
just video, because `single` skips the timer in all of the renderers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The schedule dialog offers "Content (single item, optional)". The value was cross-tenancy validated
and stored faithfully, and then read by nothing. services/scheduler.js acts on exactly two columns,
layout_id and playlist_id; content_id is consulted nowhere in the codebase. So picking a file and
saving produced a schedule that fired and changed nothing — while the calendar drew a block labelled
with that filename, as confirmation that it would.
Rather than thread a third override type through the engine and every player, the schedule now gets
a playlist containing that one item. That is the shape the entire pipeline already understands:
publish, assign, push, snapshot, offline cache and all four players work on it unchanged.
It is published through the shared publishPlaylist path rather than by hand-rolling the snapshot,
because players read denormalized fields out of published_snapshot (filename, mime_type, filepath,
remote_url, per-item schedules) and a second copy of that shape here would rot the first time it
changed.
An explicit playlist override still wins and no throwaway playlist is created; a schedule with
neither content nor playlist is untouched.
5 tests covering all of those, including that the generated playlist lands in the right workspace and
that its snapshot carries the fields the players need rather than just the id.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
A recurring schedule ran forever. The engine compared weekday and HH:MM and dropped the date
component entirely, so recurrence_end was never read: a campaign set to finish on the 1st was still
switching screens weeks later. The same omission made a recurring schedule live before its start
date.
The calendar does read recurrence_end, so it drew the campaign as finished while the screens kept
obeying it — the two views disagreeing is what made this hard to see from the dashboard. The end
date is offered on the form, so it has to mean something.
The date window is inclusive at both ends: an end date of the 5th means the 5th runs to its normal
end time, which is what someone choosing that date means. An open-ended recurring schedule is
untouched and still runs indefinitely.
NOTE, because this one really does change live screens: any recurring schedule that has been running
past its end date will now stop. That is the intended behaviour and was confirmed before making the
change, but it is the difference between this commit and the calendar fix alongside it, which
changes only what is drawn.
6 tests: stops after the end date, the final day still runs in full, does not run before the start
date, unchanged inside the window, open-ended schedules unaffected, one-offs unaffected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The calendar is the operator's only view of what is scheduled, and it disagreed with the engine in
both directions for the two most-used repeat presets.
The expansion stepped by the recurrence unit from the schedule's original start:
- WEEKLY advanced a whole week at a time, so dayOfWeek never changed and a
FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH,FR rule could only ever match its start day. Created on a Monday
it drew one event a week; created on a Saturday it drew nothing at all.
- The walk began at the original start under a 366-iteration cap, so a schedule begun more than a
year ago never reached the current week and drew nothing.
The engine evaluates day-of-week directly, so those schedules were running Mon-Fri the whole time.
Screens switched content the calendar said was not scheduled.
The expansion now walks the visible range day by day and applies the same rule the engine does, so
the drawing follows what actually happens. Cost is bounded by the window being displayed rather than
by how long ago the schedule was created, and the loop re-anchors the time of day on each step so a
DST boundary does not drift the instances.
Overlap is left to resolve as it already does: a shorter, higher-priority schedule takes over while
it is active and the recurring one resumes underneath when it ends. Nothing here changes what fires
— only what is shown — so this cannot alter live screens.
8 tests: five events for a Mon-Fri rule whichever day it was created on, a two-year-old daily
schedule drawing again, WEEKLY-without-byDay still meaning the start's weekday, INTERVAL honoured,
recurrence_end stopping the drawing, one-offs unaffected, and durations preserved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Creating a schedule validates every reference it carries against the caller's workspace — content,
widget, layout, playlist all go through checkRefInWorkspace. zone_id was the one polymorphic
reference left out of that list, so a schedule could be pointed at a zone belonging to another
workspace's layout.
It needed its own check rather than a sixth entry in the table: layout_zones has no workspace_id
column of its own. A zone belongs to a layout, and the layout carries the workspace, so the
ownership question has to be answered through that join. A zone on a platform-template layout
(workspace_id IS NULL) is allowed, matching how the other references treat templates.
882 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
devices.playlist_id is ON DELETE SET NULL, so the database detached correctly — but the handler
emitted nothing, so a screen kept displaying the deleted playlist until it happened to reconnect or
was restarted. You delete a playlist to take content off the wall; the wall carried on showing it.
Every sibling mutation in this file already pushes (publish, assign), and DELETE
/devices/:id/playlist was given a push for precisely this reason: "so the screen stops, rather than
leaving the old content up until something else happens to update it".
The affected devices are read before the delete, since the association is gone the moment it runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Replacing the single item of a one-item playlist did nothing. The old promo, board or clip kept
playing while the dashboard showed the new playlist published and the device perfectly healthy —
only a reboot or a manual refresh cleared it.
#157 defers a rotation so a live item is not yanked mid-play, and applies it "on the next natural
advance". For a one-item playlist there is no such thing, by design: single-item rendering
deliberately never advances. A video gets `loop = (playlist.length === 1)` and so never fires
`ended`; a YouTube embed loops for the same reason and skips its safety net; a solo widget is "held"
on a self-re-arming refresh that never calls nextItem, because reloading it would reset a directory
board's scroll. Tizen is worse still — `single` makes every renderer skip its timer, so images
freeze too.
Two guards, the same pair already applied to the Android controller:
- A one-item playlist is never deferred. There is nothing to protect from being cut off, since
nothing was going to advance anyway.
- Any deferral that does happen gets a 60-second deadline. The deferral is a bet that an advance is
coming; if the bet loses, the change must still land rather than strand the screen on content the
operator has already replaced.
Verified in headless Chrome: a one-item playlist holding a solo widget (the "held" case that never
advances), its only item replaced with a different widget — the screen followed, with no reload and
no restart. Before the change it stayed on the replaced item indefinitely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
In a multi-zone layout a zone's video advanced only on `ended`. On the web there was no error
handler and — alone among the zone branches, which all arm a timer — no timer either. On Android the
zone player listened for STATE_ENDED with no error listener and no fallback.
A playback error lands in STATE_IDLE, never STATE_ENDED, so nothing advanced. A 404, an unreachable
remote_url, a clip the device cannot decode, or content not yet cached while the device is offline
(the zone then falls back to the server URL, which fails with no network) all had the same result:
that region of the screen went black and stayed black for days, while every other zone kept rotating
normally. It reads as a rendering bug rather than a bad file, and nothing self-heals — the layout has
to change or the app has to restart.
Both fixes already existed elsewhere and were simply not carried across. MediaPlayerManager treats a
playback error as a completion for exactly this reason ("Root-2: a corrupt/undecodable video used to
freeze the playlist forever"), the fullscreen web path has both an onerror and a timer, and Tizen's
ZoneRenderer has an onerror plus a duration+5s safety net. The multi-zone paths were the gap.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Every web and BrightSign player nulled seventeen of its own device columns every five minutes.
The browser player's refresh-register sends `device_info: {}` on a 300-second timer — it has nothing
new to report, it just wants a fresh playlist. But `{}` is truthy, and applyDeviceInfo is a blind
full-row overwrite with no per-field presence check, so it bound undefined for every column.
better-sqlite3 stores undefined as NULL rather than throwing, so the write succeeded and the row was
quietly emptied: android_version, app_version, screen_width/height, render_*, ota_status and
attempts, tier, the four capability flags and the four volume/brightness columns.
Android never hit it, because it always sends the full object. So this degraded exactly the client
family that cannot be inspected any other way — a browser player has no adb, and the dashboard row
is all there is. Fleet view, resolution diagnostics and any version-based logic read blank for them,
which also makes evaluating a browser-based platform look worse than it is.
The surrounding code already anticipates the refresh shape: recordReconnect and persistIdentity are
both gated behind `if (!isPlaylistRefresh)`. This call was the one that was not.
5 tests, including one pinning the driver behaviour the bug depended on — undefined binds as NULL
rather than throwing, which is why this was a silent five-minutely wipe instead of a loud error.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The suspended branch replaces the whole status overlay with its own markup, and that markup does not
contain #statusText. showStatus then did:
document.getElementById('statusText').textContent = msg;
so every later call threw a TypeError for the life of the page. The consequences got worse the
further down they went:
- Each refresh beat re-emits device:paired, whose handler calls showStatus('Waiting for content...')
— so the player raised an uncaught error and sent itself a "crashed" exit beacon every few minutes
while suspended. This is very likely the "Cannot set properties of null (setting 'textContent')"
the comment near the exit-signal contract says could never be traced.
- showNothingScheduled() calls showStatus BEFORE arming its 30-second re-check. So once the account
was restored, a playlist whose dayparts had all closed left the screen on the stale orange
"Account Suspended / Please upgrade your plan" card with no retry timer at all — it never
re-checked the schedule and never recovered without a reload.
showStatus now rebuilds the element if it is missing rather than bailing, so the message the caller
asked for is actually displayed and the recovery path continues.
Verified in headless Chrome against the real player: destroy the overlay exactly as the suspended
branch does, then call showStatus — no throw, no uncaught page error, and "Waiting for content..."
on screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Editing a layout did nothing on a web screen that was already showing one. Add a zone, move an item
between zones, resize a zone, switch layouts, clear the layout — all silent, for as long as the item
list itself stayed the same.
Two reasons, and both had to be fixed:
- The change fingerprint covered item identity, order, revision, schedules and transition, but not
zone_id — so moving an item from one zone to another produced a byte-identical fingerprint
(published_snapshot is ordered by sort_order, so the order did not move either).
- The layout is not part of the item list at all, so a change to it could never appear in an
item-derived fingerprint. `layout` was assigned and then the function returned "Playlist
unchanged", and in multi-zone mode nothing else re-renders: each zone runs its own timers and
renderContent is never called again. The no-change health check does not help either, because the
old zone divs still hold media so the surface looks attached.
zone_id now sits in the item fingerprint, and the layout gets its own signature covering the layout
id and every zone's geometry, stacking, type and fit. Tizen's ZoneRenderer has always compared a
zone signature — this is the web equivalent, and it is the same defect that was fixed on Android
this week.
Verified in headless Chrome against the real player: a third zone added IN PLACE (same layout id,
same item list, no reload, no restart) re-rendered the screen to three zones. Before the change that
update was discarded as unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Per-device settings are saved against the hardware fingerprint so a panel that is deleted and paired
again comes back configured — name, orientation, playlist, blocked flag — without anyone visiting
it. That is deliberate and worth keeping.
A fingerprint is hardware-derived, so the same physical panel presents the same one whoever pairs
it. applyToDevice looked the snapshot up on fingerprint alone with no workspace comparison, and its
per-field guards only check that the referenced row still EXISTS, never who it belongs to:
if (s.playlist_id && db.prepare('SELECT 1 FROM playlists WHERE id = ?').get(s.playlist_id))
So a screen removed from one workspace and paired into another inherited the first workspace's
playlist and displayed its content, and `blocked` crossed the same way — a device arriving blocked
with nothing the new owner could see to explain it. The manual restore route already compares
workspaces before calling this, so the automatic re-pair path was the only place the check was
missing.
A mismatch is a quiet no-op rather than an error: re-pairing a second-hand panel into a different
workspace is a legitimate thing to do, it just must not carry the previous configuration along. A
snapshot with no workspace recorded still applies, so rows predating the column keep working.
5 tests: neither playlist nor block crosses, a mismatch does not throw, restore still works in full
inside the owning workspace (including a genuine block surviving a re-pair), and legacy rows are
unaffected. 882 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Deleting a device group converts its group schedules into per-device ones so the screens keep their
programming. That INSERT omitted workspace_id, which is nullable with no default, so every converted
row landed with workspace_id = NULL.
A null workspace does not merely look untidy — it makes the row unreachable in three directions at
once, and they compound into the worst possible combination:
invisible the schedule list and the all-screens calendar both filter on workspace_id
undeletable PUT and DELETE refuse a row with no workspace (403)
still live services/scheduler.js has no workspace filter, so it keeps firing every 60 seconds
"I deleted the group but the screens still switch content at 9am, and there is nothing in the
calendar to remove." The only way out was direct database access.
The conversion now carries the workspace, preferring the schedule's own and falling back to the
group's so a legacy group schedule that itself predates workspace_id still converts into a reachable
row. A boot migration repairs rows already orphaned in the field by recovering the workspace from
the device each one targets; anything still unresolvable is left alone rather than guessed at.
4 tests: the converted row keeps its workspace, is visible to the query the list and calendar use,
preserves the actual programming rather than just the ownership, and the repair recovers a row
orphaned before this fix existed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Nudging one zone in the layout editor and pressing Save destroyed unrelated tenant data across the
whole workspace, and returned 200.
The handler deleted every zone and re-inserted the same ids. Its comment claimed that was safe —
"Reuse each zone's id when supplied so device->zone assignments survive an edit (a fresh uuid per
save would orphan them)" — but reusing the id does not help, because SQLite runs the referential
actions on the DELETE and re-inserting the same primary key afterwards resurrects nothing. Two
things point at those rows:
playlist_items.zone_id ON DELETE SET NULL -> every multi-zone playlist item un-assigned, so
those playlists silently fell back to fullscreen
schedules.zone_id ON DELETE CASCADE -> every zone-bound schedule permanently deleted
No warning, no undo, and nothing in the UI to suggest a geometry tweak had touched schedules at all.
Zones are now updated in place, inserted when new, and deleted only when the editor actually removed
them. An update touches no foreign key, so nothing pointing at a surviving zone is affected. The
cascades are left exactly as they are: on a genuinely removed zone they are the correct behaviour,
and the tests pin that too.
4 tests: a moved zone keeps item assignments and zone-bound schedules, the geometry change is really
applied, adding a zone disturbs nothing, and removing a zone still un-assigns its items and removes
its schedules.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
A PiP overlay renders across a live screen — an arbitrary web page, at full resolution, for as long
as the operator wants. That is a fleet-affecting write, but the three routes that perform it carried
only requireScope('full'), which gates API tokens and is a deliberate pass-through for dashboard
sessions. The file's own comment says so ("No-op for JWT sessions"), on the assumption that
something else covered that case. Nothing did.
Every sibling route pairs the two checks — device-groups.js gates POST /:id/command with
`requireScope('full'), requireGroupWrite`. These had only the half that does nothing for a logged-in
user, so a member who is refused on every other device mutation was accepted here.
requireFleetWrite restores the pairing on POST /, POST /clear and DELETE /, resolving the caller's
context against the workspace the same way the rest of the codebase does.
5 tests pin both directions: refused for a read-only member on all three routes and for an
unauthenticated caller, still allowed for a workspace_editor and for an org owner acting into the
workspace (actingAs, whose workspaceRole is null and must not read as a viewer).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
A person typing font-size:16px into the Text/HTML widget got 0.15vw — 2.8px on a 1080p screen,
1.9px at 1280 wide, smaller again on anything narrower. Not clipped, not hidden: rendered at a size
nobody can read, in the one widget whose entire purpose is hand-written HTML.
renderText converted every px font size to vw (px/108). That conversion exists to rescue LEGACY
Content Designer output, which used to publish absolute sizes as fontSize*10.8 px — dividing by 108
recovers the author's intended size and lets those widgets scale to any screen. Today's designer
emits cqw and no px at all (frontend/js/views/designer.js), so the conversion only ever needed to
apply to that legacy output. It was applied to everything.
Now it runs only on designer-authored markup, identified by its absolutely-positioned elements —
the same signal the dashboard already uses to decide whether a text widget can be reopened in the
designer. Hand-written markup keeps its px exactly as typed, and legacy designer widgets are
unchanged.
Found by looking at the screen. The rendered HTML and the widget URL both looked correct in every
check I ran; only a screenshot showed the text was microscopic.
5 tests covering both directions, including that a hand-written absolutely-positioned element
without the designer's left-first shape keeps its px. Verified on an Android screen: a 60px heading
and 24px body now render at their authored sizes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The signature fix was necessary but not sufficient, and only a browser showed it. The update arrived
and was applied — the console logged "Playlist changed, updating" and playlist[0].widget_rev held the
NEW revision — but the iframe on screen still carried the old one.
Two guards were swallowing it. Continuity keeps a surviving item playing and deliberately does not
re-render ("Just retarget the index pointer - no re-render, no interrupt"), and identity is
content/widget ID, which does not change when a widget is EDITED. So the edited widget counted as
surviving. And the fallback that would eventually notice does not apply either: a solo widget is
deliberately never re-rendered on a timer, because that would reset a directory board's scroll.
Between them the new revision sat in the playlist, unused, indefinitely.
Now a surviving WIDGET whose rev changed is re-rendered through the buffered swap — which builds the
new iframe hidden and reveals it on load, so it is flash-free by design and this costs nothing
visually. Non-widget items and unedited widgets are untouched, so the continuity behaviour that
guard exists for is intact.
Verified in headless Chrome driving the real player: paired, widget assigned, then edited with no
page reload and no restart. rev 1785460578 -> 1785460589 on the live iframe.
Also caught here: my first attempt called renderItem(), which does not exist — the console.log fired
and the exception ate the rest of the handler, which looked exactly like the fix not working. The
function is renderContent(item).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Same fault as Android, in both other players, and my earlier read of them was wrong: I assumed they
rebuilt the iframe each cycle so could not go stale. They do rebuild — but only after the update
survives a change check, and both change checks key on IDENTITY:
web content_id|widget_id|remote_url|filepath|filename|schedules|transition
tizen [content_id, widget_id, remote_url, mime_type, schedules, transition]
A widget's identity does not change when it is edited, so an edit produced an identical signature,
the update was discarded as "unchanged", and the old render stayed up. widget_rev now sits in both,
alongside schedules and transition, which are there for exactly this reason.
The render URL carries the rev on both players as well. In the zone path the web player was picking
up `item.widget_rev` inside a loop whose variable is `a` — that would have been undefined on every
zone; it now reads the zone assignment's own rev.
Caching, which is the reason this is worth doing properly rather than just busting the URL: a URL
carrying ?rev=<updated_at> is content-addressed, so those bytes cannot change without the URL
changing. The render endpoint now returns immutable caching for a pinned URL and keeps no-store for
a bare one, and the service worker serves pinned renders cache-first (CACHE_NAME v18).
That closes a real gap. no-store meant widgets were the ONE thing the player's offline cache could
never hold, so a display that lost its uplink lost its widgets — while its images and video kept
playing. Offline resilience is the point of that cache. Old players sending no rev are unaffected:
they still get no-store, because without a rev nothing distinguishes one render from the next.
Verified live: bare URL -> no-store; ?rev=123 -> public, max-age=31536000, immutable. 859 server
tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Editing a layout notified nothing at all — no push to the displays using it — so a zone change
waited for the next heartbeat refresh at best. Combined with the Android rebuild being keyed on the
layout ID (which does not change when you edit a layout in place), that is why adding a fourth zone
took a force-stop to appear. The player-side fix makes the rebuild happen; this makes it prompt.
Renaming: duplicating a template produces "<template> (Copy)" and there was nowhere to change it.
The server has always accepted a name on PUT /layouts/:id; no UI ever sent one. The only name field
in the editor belongs to the selected ZONE, which is easy to mistake for the layout's own — zones
could always be renamed, layouts never could. The heading is now an input and its value rides along
with the Save the user already presses.
Verified on an Android 12 emulator, app left running throughout:
3-zone layout assigned -> "Multi-zone layout with 3 zones (was=null)"
4th zone added in place -> "Multi-zone layout with 4 zones (layout=a96c39ab, was=a96c39ab)"
The ids match, so the old id-only condition would have skipped the rebuild entirely. Applied ~1s
after the PUT, with no restart and no force-stop.
Also verified the background-audio fix on the same device: 1 started audio player with the video in
the foreground, 0 once another app was brought to the front. (First attempt was invalid — HOME
re-shows this player because it is the default launcher, so it never backgrounds.)
859 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Two separate faults in the same widget, both reported on #234.
1. Text taller than the screen vanished in silence. renderText set overflow:hidden on the document
with nothing able to scroll it, so anything past the bottom edge was simply gone: "Text goes to
bottom and disappears. It dont fit."
The content now gets a wrapper and an overflow mode:
fit (default) shrink until it fits — a NO-OP when the content already fits, so it rescues
widgets that are currently losing text without changing ones that are fine
scroll pan through it on a loop with a pause at each end, for content genuinely longer than a
screen where shrinking would make it unreadable
clip the old behaviour, kept because a designer-positioned layout may deliberately run past
the edge and must not be rescaled underneath its author
Measuring runs after layout, after web fonts settle, and on resize — a rotation or a resized zone
changes the answer, and fonts arriving late is the classic cause of a fit computed against the
wrong height.
2. Editing a widget did not reach the screen until the app was restarted. The render endpoint serves
live config, but the player deliberately keeps a widget's WebView while its URL is unchanged
(re-navigating every duration is a visible flash and destroys widget state — a half-typed
directory search, scroll position). Editing changes the content, not the id, so the URL never
changed and the reuse check always hit.
The widget's updated_at now travels to the player as widget_rev and goes into the render URL, so
the URL differs exactly when the content differs — and only then, so the anti-flash reuse still
holds for untouched widgets. The rev is refreshed at send time rather than read from the
published snapshot, because a widget edit does not republish the playlist. Editing a widget also
now pushes to the displays showing it, instead of notifying nothing at all.
859 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
1.9.26's opt-in was passive: it stopped a sideloaded build being reverted, but there was still one
APK slot and latest_version was the server's own VERSION, so a beta had to be installed by hand on
every display. This makes it a real channel.
- apk-cache tracks two slots. ScreenTinker-beta.apk is optional and reaches only displays with
ota_beta = 1.
- A beta must DECLARE its version in a sidecar ScreenTinker-beta.apk.version. The server cannot
infer it — stable's version is the server's own constant because the two ship together, and
reading it from the APK means parsing binary AndroidManifest.xml on the request path. If the
sidecar is missing or unparseable the channel does not activate at all and opted-in displays keep
getting stable. Failing closed matters: advertising a version that does not match the bytes served
is the OTA-loop condition this fleet has been bitten by before.
- The check and the download resolve the channel identically and fall back to stable identically, so
apk_size always describes the bytes actually delivered. No APK change was needed — the client
already fetches whatever download_url it is handed, so displays in the field can be moved between
channels from the dashboard today.
Switching back needed care. Stable is semver-OLDER than the beta it replaces, so the ordinary
"never offer a downgrade" rule stranded the display and unticking the box would have been another
silent no-op. The first attempt returned any non-opted-in display running a pre-release — which
broke a #144 test, correctly: that would have dragged every existing pre-release tester back to
stable the moment their server upgraded, the exact harm the opt-in exists to prevent. So the return
now requires evidence we actually served that display the beta channel (devices.ota_channel_served,
written once on change, not per check). A tester ahead of the server on their own build is left
alone exactly as before.
Documented in the README, including the constraint that makes the switch-back physically possible:
beta builds must carry a versionCode no higher than the stable they branch from, because Android
refuses to install a lower one. Equal numbers install in both directions.
Verified end to end against a live server with two real signed APKs: stable serves 1.9.26, beta
serves 1.9.27-rc1, an unknown channel falls back to stable, removing the version file deactivates
the channel, and the full opt-in -> serve -> switch-back lifecycle produces offer / up-to-date /
channel-return in order. 859 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Handing someone a test build was a trap. A prerelease sorts BELOW its own release — 1.9.25-fix234d
is semver-older than 1.9.25 — so a sideloaded display asked "anything newer?", was correctly told
yes, and updated itself straight back off the build we had asked someone to test. Same versionCode,
so Android installed it without complaint. Silent, and within minutes.
That is what happened on #234: the reporter installed the fix, tested for an evening, and reported
nothing had changed. They were right. Their tablet was running the old code again by then, and I had
told them it was fixed without ever checking what the device reported.
Adds a per-display opt-in (devices.ota_beta, default 0, checkbox next to the OTA toggle). When set,
the display keeps a prerelease of the CURRENT core instead of being pulled back to its release.
Deliberately narrow in one direction and deliberately wide in the other:
- Narrow: it only holds a prerelease of the core already installed. A plain release, a -patchN
build, an upgrade to a newer core, and a display ahead of the server all behave exactly as before,
and the flag defaults off so a fleet that never sets it is unaffected.
- Wide: an opted-in display is exempted from the superseded-prerelease guard. That guard would
otherwise pin a tester on an old test build permanently — an older-core prerelease is never
offered anything, so they would have to notice and sideload their way out. Writing the test is
what surfaced that; opting in must never mean never updating again.
9 tests covering both directions, including that shipping a newer release pulls a beta display back
onto the release line. 845 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
"No playlist" was an option you could select that did nothing. The picker offered it, and the change
handler opened with `if (!newPlaylistId) return; // Don't allow deselecting for now` — so choosing it
sent no request, changed nothing, and said nothing. The guard was honest about why: there was no way
to do it. PUT /devices/:id has never read playlist_id (200, ignored), and POST /playlists/:id/assign
can only ever set one.
Reported on #234 as "I also selected No playlist ... it still showed the same video". It did, and my
first explanation blamed the playlist-swap deferral. The deferral would have stranded it too — that
is fixed separately and tested — but on this path nothing was ever sent, so the deferral never got
the chance.
DELETE /api/devices/:id/playlist, device-scoped rather than playlist-scoped because there is no
playlist to authorize against when clearing. Ownership goes through checkDeviceOwnership like every
other device mutation, so a viewer and a stranger are refused. Clearing an already-clear display is
a no-op success, since it lives in a dropdown someone can pick twice. The now-empty playlist is
pushed to the device so the screen stops, rather than leaving the old content up until something
else happens to refresh it.
Validated on an Android 12 emulator against the reporter's shape: cleared while a YouTube item was
on screen, zero plays afterwards, device row cleared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
