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
The "not done yet" list still said the player does not load st-bridge.js or
honour ?platform=brightsign. Both landed in ce854ff. Replaced with what is
actually outstanding: nothing server-side consumes the bs_* fields the player
now reports.
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 README claimed the runtime sync API was undocumented. It is not in the MCP
doc set, but docs.brightsign.biz/developers/syncmanager and the dev-cookbook
syncmanager-js example document it fully, so that claim was wrong and is now
replaced with the actual contract.
The useful discovery is that it is pure JavaScript on the standard <video>
element: setSyncParams(domain, id, iso_timestamp) followed by load()/play(),
after which the element handles ongoing synchronisation itself. No BrightScript
round-trip, so it drops into the existing player.
Three constraints worth having written down before anyone implements it: it is
leader/follower where ours is leaderless, it synchronises video only so images
and widgets get item-boundary alignment at best, and it is multicast so a group
spanning sites or VLANs cannot use it — a criterion the resolver does not model.
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
Not a port — a way to answer on real hardware the questions that decide what a port
looks like, instead of guessing them from documentation.
The one that matters is persistence. ScreenTinker's device identity (deviceId,
deviceToken, paired, serverUrl) lives in localStorage, and on BrightSign that behaves
like sessionStorage: without a durable store every panel re-pairs on every boot and
spawns a new device row. The registry is the alternative, so the probe reports whether
it resolves and whether either store survives a power cycle.
It runs LOCALLY first on purpose. That establishes whether the @brightsign/* modules
resolve at all, separately from whether a remotely-served page can reach them — the
question that decides between reusing the hosted web player and building a local shim
that owns the registry and passes identity to an iframe via postMessage. Without that
split a failure is ambiguous: an origin restriction and nodejs_enabled not taking look
identical. Once local works, changing one line points it at a hosted copy and the
delta is the answer.
Also reports the web-platform features the player leans on — service workers and the
Cache API for content caching, h264 in <video>, CSS clamp() for the directory-search
keyboard — plus model, OS and Chromium version, since Series 4 is pinned to Chromium
87 and would give a misleadingly pessimistic result.
SD-card ready: FAT32, both files at the root, empty card. Remote devtools on :2999.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
