The rc3 release failed on a correctly-built archive. `unzip -v` ends with a
TOTALS row whose first field is also numeric, so "numeric $1" matched it and the
check read the byte count as a compression method — reporting a fully stored
archive as compressed.
The same noise appeared in my local negative control as a phantom third entry and
I read past it, which is why this reached CI. The method column must look like a
method for the row to be an entry at all.
Verified in both directions: a stored archive passes, a deflated one flags every
member and nothing else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
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 rc2 workflow built autorun.zip and then published a release without it: the
edit that was supposed to add it to the gh release create asset list never
applied, and nothing asserted that it had. Built artifacts that quietly fail to
ship are worse than ones that fail loudly — the release looked green.
Attached to rc2 by hand; from rc3 the workflow does it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Four loose files that must all land intact, in the right place, is a poor way to
hand someone a player. autorun.zip is one file: drop it on the root of a
player's storage, power-cycle, and autozip.brs unpacks it in place and reboots
into the player. A half-copied set of loose files boots into something broken; a
half-copied zip simply fails to extract and leaves the player as it was.
Two rules the format imposes, both of which fail SILENTLY when broken, so the
build script asserts them instead of trusting them:
- the archive must expand to files at its root, with no wrapper directory. A
player extracts to the storage root, so a nested folder puts autorun.brs
somewhere the player never looks and the card appears to do nothing.
- autorun.brs must not sit next to autorun.zip on the storage root; its
presence stops the zip being processed at all.
autozip.brs renames the archive to autorun.zip.done after a successful extract,
which is what makes it idempotent — without that the player extracts, reboots,
extracts, reboots, a loop indistinguishable from a hardware fault. A FAILED
extract deliberately does not rename, so a truncated copy gets retried once
someone replaces it rather than being skipped forever.
It is volume-aware for the same reason autorun.brs is: a player may be booting
from internal flash because its card interface is dead, and extracting to "SD:/"
on such a unit writes to a volume that does not exist.
--server rewrites screentinker.json in the staging copy so a batch can be imaged
for a specific instance without hand-editing anything.
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
The player loads /player/st-bridge.js and /player/st-sync.js, both served from
../brightsign so the copy the player runs can never drift from the copy sitting
on the player's own storage. That runtime path only exists if the directory is
in the image, and the Dockerfile never copied it — so both routes 404 on alpha
while working perfectly from a dev checkout.
Caught by deploying 1.9.29-rc1 to alpha, which is the whole point of alpha.
Worth noting how this fails when the route is absent entirely, as on prod today:
the SPA fallback answers 200 with text/html, so the browser gets a page where it
expected JavaScript, window.ScreenTinkerBS is never defined, and the player
silently falls back to browser behaviour. A missing asset that returns 200 is
considerably harder to notice than one that 404s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
A BrightSign runs the same web player, so client_type is 'player' and the device
detail view fell through to a hardcoded "Web Player" — indistinguishable from a
browser tab on someone's desk, for a dedicated signage appliance.
Keyed on the platform the player now reports ('brightsign', from the
?platform=brightsign the host puts on the URL), with a user-agent fallback for
panels paired before that existed — those registered as "Chrome 120" with a
BrightSign user agent.
Only en carries the new string; other locales fall back to en, which reads
correctly since the label is a brand name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
An XT245 with liquid-corroded microSD lines could not read any card, in any
format, with known-good code — the kernel log shows the mmc1 host probing at
400kHz and no card ever answering, while mmc0 (eMMC) is healthy. That unit
turned out to be fully deployable anyway: the player boots FLASH:/autorun.brs
straight from internal storage.
Loading 'FLASH:/autorun.brs'
BSPLAY: https://screentinker.com/player?platform=brightsign&model=XT245
So the card is not the only path, and a dead slot is not the end of a player.
Files go to /storage/flash over SFTP and the player runs them on the next boot.
The first attempt failed because the script hard-coded SD: for its own assets:
it loaded from flash and then could not find index.html. StorageRoot() now
probes for FLASH:/autorun.brs and falls back to SD:, and every path that reads a
sibling file — screentinker.json, offline.html, the crash-dump directory — goes
through it.
selftest/ is the bisect that settled the hardware fault: the dev-cookbook's own
html-starter pattern, so the script is not a variable. When known-good code
failed identically, the medium was proven at fault rather than our port.
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
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 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
A display whose periodic update checker stops firing never pulls an APK on its
own, and a beta-channel opt-in alone doesn't reach it. The dashboard's force
button is the only lever that does, because the client's "update" handler calls
checkForUpdate(forced = true), which ignores both the backoff cap and the MDM
stand-down and hands the attempt budget back.
That command only exists over the /dashboard socket.io namespace, so there was
no way to send it from the server. socket.io-client isn't a dependency here, so
this speaks engine.io v4 directly over ws (reached out of server/node_modules,
same convention as reset-admin.js).
Owner-only by construction like mint-billing-token.js: no network endpoint, the
access control is shell access to the host. Resolves a display by id or unique
prefix, mints a short-lived platform_admin token, and reports whether the
command was delivered or queued for an offline display. --dry-run stops after
the namespace handshake so a rehearsal never puts an install dialog on a live
screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
The Permissions entry showed a ✓/✗ read-out and then handed off to Android's App Info page. The
screen we actually built for this — a row per permission with its live state and a Manage button
that stays visible once granted — was only reachable during first-run setup, so an installer who
wanted to review or revoke something on a running panel had to re-pair to see it.
Manage Permissions is now the primary action and opens SetupActivity in review mode. Android's App
Info page stays as the secondary, because notification access and some OEM toggles are only
reachable there.
Review mode exists because three things in SetupActivity assume first-run, and every one of them
had to be exempted or this silently did nothing:
- proceedToNext() goes unconditionally to ProvisioningActivity. Without the exemption the button
an installer was told to press would send a paired, playing screen to the pairing page.
- onCreate returns early when setup_complete is set — and every device that can reach this menu
has it set, so the screen closed before it drew and the menu entry looked broken.
- updateStatuses() re-labels the continue button on every refresh, silently overwriting the label
set in onCreate. The label had to move to where it actually sticks.
Review mode also hides the first-run skip hint, does not re-stamp setup_complete, and returns to
playback rather than continuing anywhere.
Verified on an Android 12 emulator, both directions:
in service BACK x2 -> PIN -> Settings -> Permissions -> MANAGE PERMISSIONS -> our screen with
every row and its state -> DONE -> back to playback, no ProvisioningActivity launch,
widget rendering resumed
first run full uninstall + fresh install -> SetupActivity, button reads CONTINUE ANYWAY, skip
hint present, no DONE label, continue lands on ProvisioningActivity, pairing completes
and playback starts
That second run is the one that mattered: both early-exit guards are inverted conditions, and a
mistake in either would have broken onboarding for every new install.
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
Each of these views carries its own copy of a fetch helper ending in `.then(r => r.json())`. A 403,
404 or 500 body resolves as an ordinary value, so the surrounding try/catch is unreachable and every
handler treats the failure as success. The shared client in api.js has always thrown on !res.ok;
these local copies never did.
Two concrete consequences, both of which tell the operator something untrue:
- The layout editor renders a Delete button on built-in templates for everyone. The server returns
403. The handler shows "Layout deleted" and re-renders the list with the template still sitting
there.
- A rejected platform-role change in Admin shows "Role updated", and the revert that would put the
dropdown back lives only in the dead catch — so the UI keeps displaying a value the server
refused. The same control in Settings uses the throwing client, so the two pages disagree about
whether the change happened.
All eight now match the shared contract: reject on !ok with the server's own message, and treat 401
as session expiry the way api.js does.
This makes previously-silent failures visible, which is the point — some of them will surface
refusals that were always happening. The layout template Delete button, for instance, is now
honestly reported as refused rather than falsely confirmed; whether that button should be shown at
all is a separate question.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
ScheduleEval uses java.time — Instant, LocalDate, ZoneId — which is API 26. minSdk is 24, and core
library desugaring was never enabled, so on Android 7.0/7.1 the first evaluation threw
NoClassDefFoundError. Those API levels are still common on cheap signage sticks and older TV boxes.
The damage was much worse than a failed check, because NoClassDefFoundError is an Error, not an
Exception. The evaluator's deliberate fail-open guard — written so that "a blank screen is worse
than an over-running promo" — did not catch it. The Error propagated out of scheduleAllows, through
firstActiveIndex and updatePlaylist, past another catch(Exception), and was only swallowed at the
service boundary. Because updatePlaylist aborted before the download block, no content was fetched
either; and on a cold start from cache the same Error reached a handler that clears the playlist
cache. So the moment anyone used dayparting or expiry, those panels sat on "waiting for content"
with nothing downloaded and nothing cached, and a reboot did not help. The stated contract was
inverted on exactly the hardware it was meant to protect.
Two changes. Desugaring is the real fix: java.time now exists on API 24/25, so the code runs as
written. The guard is widened to Throwable as well, so this class of failure can never again slip
past a catch that was written to be total — that is belt and braces, not the fix.
Release build assembles cleanly with desugaring on; 134 Android JVM tests green. Still to confirm on
a real API 24/25 image before release — the unit tests run on the JVM, where java.time always
exists, which is precisely why this was invisible to them.
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
Opening Edit on a YouTube item and pressing Save Changes — with nothing else touched — turned it
into an MP4.
The type dropdown offers six fixed options and is rendered unconditionally. For video/youtube no
option matched, so the browser selected the first one, video/mp4. The save handler then reads the
select's value and sends it because it differs from the stored type:
const mimeType = overlay.querySelector('#editMimeType').value; // 'video/mp4'
if (mimeType !== contentItem.mime_type) updateData.mime_type = mimeType;
and the server stores what it is sent. mime_type is the renderer selector in every player, so the
item became an "MP4" whose source is a YouTube embed page: a dead slide on every screen in the
playlist. It could not be undone from the dialog either, because there is no video/youtube option to
set it back, and the YouTube-specific controls disappear once the type has changed.
The same applies to uploads the sniffer accepts but the list omits — the sniffer allows fifteen
types, the dropdown covers six — so .mov, .svg, .heic, .avif and .bmp were all rewritten the same
way.
The dialog now includes the item's actual type as a selected option whenever the fixed six cannot
express it, so opening and saving is a no-op and the type is never silently changed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
