# ScreenTinker on BrightSign The player is the ordinary web player (`server/player/index.html`) running in an `roHtmlWidget`. It already runs unmodified on real hardware — a Series 5 (HD1026, BOS 9.1, Chromium 120) played 4,723 items over 12.4h averaging 9.4s against a 10s slot. So the port is not "can it run". It is the four things a page cannot do for itself. ``` autorun.brs the host: owns the widget, identity, outputs, recovery | @brightsign/messageport (bidirectional) st-bridge.js the page's half of the same contract | server/player/index.html the unmodified player ``` ## Files | file | role | |---|---| | `autorun.brs` | BrightScript host. Builds the widget, supervises it, persists identity, drives a second output, executes what the page cannot. | | `st-bridge.js` | Loaded by the player on this platform. Registry identity, restart-instead-of-reload, heartbeat, sync-backend reporting. Degrades to no-ops everywhere else, so it is safe to load unconditionally. | | `st-sync.js` | Native SyncManager adapter. Inert without the platform module, so the player falls back to its own group sync. | | `probe.html` | The original capability probe. Still useful on a new model/OS build. | | `offline.html` | Local fallback page — names the server, keeps probing it, and asks the host to restart the player the moment it answers. | ## The four things the host exists for **1. It owns the widget lifecycle.** A page-initiated `location.reload()` does not reliably bring an `roHtmlWidget` back. On 2026-07-28 a ScreenTinker deploy reloaded every connected player; the BrightSign was the only one that never returned, and a browser on the same deploy reloaded and was heartbeating minutes later. So the page never reloads itself here — it posts `{type:"restart"}` and the host tears the widget down and builds a new one. Without this, every deploy silently darkens every BrightSign panel until someone power-cycles it. **2. It recovers.** `load-error` retries with backoff (5s → 15s → 30s → 60s) and after three failures falls back to a local page, so a dead server shows something truthful instead of white. On top of that, a watchdog: the page beats every 30s and three missed beats rebuild the widget. That covers the case `load-error` never reports — a page that loaded fine and then wedged on a dead socket, a JS exception, or a stalled decoder. **3. Identity lives in the registry.** `localStorage` is tied to the page's origin and quota; the registry survives reboots, content updates and origin changes. The hardware serial is the stable id, so two panels imaged from the same card never collide — which is exactly how the web player's hardware-only fingerprint once merged two identical panels into a single device row. **4. It reaches BrightScript-only capabilities** — video mode, a second output, and native BrightWall sync — on the page's behalf, over `@brightsign/messageport`. ## Where the files go — card OR internal flash ``` autorun.brs the host offline.html local fallback, used after three failed loads screentinker.json optional — server URL, sync backend, output mode ``` **A player will boot `autorun.brs` from internal flash, not just from a card.** Confirmed on real hardware (XT245, BOS 9.0.189) whose microSD interface is physically dead: ``` Loading 'FLASH:/autorun.brs' BSPLAY: https://screentinker.com/player?platform=brightsign&serial=…&model=XT245 ``` That matters far beyond one broken unit — it means a player with no card, or a failed card slot, is still fully deployable. Push the files over SFTP to `/storage/flash` (user `brightsign`, blank password, once SSH is enabled) and reboot. `StorageRoot()` in `autorun.brs` therefore refuses to assume: it probes for `FLASH:/autorun.brs` and falls back to `SD:`. Hard-coding `SD:` is exactly the bug that made the first flash boot fail — the script loaded and then could not find its own `index.html`. **`st-bridge.js` and `st-sync.js` do NOT go on the card.** The player pulls them from the server (`/player/st-bridge.js`, `/player/st-sync.js`) so they can never skew from the player that uses them. A stale copy on a card is precisely the version skew that would leave a panel unable to restart itself. ## autorun.zip — one file instead of four `scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh` packages the host, the fallback page and the config into a single `autorun.zip`, attached to every GitHub release: ```bash scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh --server https://your-server ``` Drop it on the root of a player's storage and power-cycle. `autozip.brs` unpacks it in place, renames it `autorun.zip.done` so it never re-extracts, and reboots into the player. Two rules the format imposes, both of which fail silently if broken: - **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. The build script zips from *inside* the staging directory and then asserts the layout rather than trusting it. - **`autorun.brs` must NOT sit next to `autorun.zip`** on the storage root; its presence stops the zip being processed at all. It belongs inside the archive. The rename is what makes it idempotent. Without it the player extracts, reboots, extracts, reboots — a loop that looks exactly like a hardware fault. An extraction *failure* deliberately does not rename, so a truncated copy is retried after someone replaces it rather than skipped forever. Requires BrightSignOS 7.0.60+ (`roUnzip`). ## Provisioning Config resolves `screentinker.json` on the card **>** registry **>** built-in default. The JSON file is how a batch gets imaged without touching each box: ```json { "server_url": "https://screentinker.com", "sync_backend": "auto", "output_mode": "single" } ``` ## Dual output `output_mode` is `single` | `dual` | `clone`. - **dual** — a second widget loads the same player with `&screen=2`, so the server can hand it its own playlist. Two independent displays from one player. - **clone** — the second widget loads `&screen=1`: the same content on both outputs. Confirmed multi-output: **XC2055** (dual HDMI) and **XC4055** (quad). ⚠️ **Do not trust the series-level spec blurb.** It credits the whole XT5 family — XT245, XT1145, XT2145 — with "dual HDMI outputs", but an **XT245 in hand is single-output**; that phrase appears to cover HDMI *in* plus *out*. Verify the individual model before enabling `dual`. Every other model is single-output, so the second widget is only ever created when the config asks for it — an unsupported model keeps working as a normal single-screen player rather than failing to start. ## Synchronisation — ours or theirs Both, chosen per group. `server/lib/sync-backend.js` decides and `resolveSyncBackend()` is pure, so the decision is tested without a fleet (`server/test/sync-backend.test.js`). | backend | reach | accuracy | |---|---|---| | `screentinker` | Android, web, Tizen, BrightSign — any mix | to the second; clock-derived, no leader, survives a server outage | | `brightsign` | BrightSign only | frame-accurate (BrightWall) | `auto` picks native sync when **every** member is a BrightSign and ours otherwise. Explicit settings are honoured, with one refusal: native sync selected for a group containing a non-BrightSign display **downgrades and reports why**. A group that half-syncs is worse than one that syncs to the second everywhere — and the failure would be invisible from the dashboard, because the BrightSigns would look perfectly synchronised while the odd panel drifted alone. A player paired before this port is still recognised, by its BrightSign user agent. ### How the choice reaches a screen `device_groups.sync_backend` (`auto` | `screentinker` | `brightsign`) is the operator's **request**. The server resolves it per push through `resolveSyncBackend()` and sends the answer — plus the reason and a `downgraded` flag — in the `group_sync` payload, so the players, the dashboard and the stored setting can never disagree about which protocol is running. Three things force a fallback to our protocol, and each is reported rather than applied silently: | condition | why native sync cannot run | |---|---| | any non-BrightSign member | BrightWall cannot include a foreign screen | | members on different subnets | it is multicast; it does not cross networks | | the elected leader is offline | it is leader/follower — nobody would broadcast | That last one has no equivalent in our protocol, which is leaderless and carries on regardless. Leadership uses the existing election (`resolveGroupLeader`): the pinned leader if it is an online member on the shared playlist, else the first online member, else the first member by id. **Item selection stays clock-derived under both backends.** Native sync only replaces the seek/nudge drift correction, because `setSyncParams` has the video element hold its own alignment — and correcting it ourselves would fight the platform. That also keeps images and widgets, which have no `setSyncParams`, advancing with the videos instead of drifting off on their own. ## Command parity The web player handles four of the ~20 fleet commands — `launch`, `refresh`, `screen_on`, `screen_off` — because a browser tab genuinely cannot do more. A BrightSign can, through the host and the platform APIs: | command | web player | BrightSign | |---|---|---| | `screen_on` / `screen_off` | black overlay; panel stays lit | **CEC** Image View On / Standby — the display actually sleeps | | `reboot` | ignored | **real reboot** via `RebootSystem` in the host | | `set_volume` | — | applied to current and future media | | `refresh` | `location.reload()` | widget rebuilt by the host (reload is unreliable here) | ### ⚠️ Nothing in the DOM can cover video With `hwz_default: "on"` the widget decodes video onto a **hardware plane**, and the graphics plane — everything in the DOM — sits behind it. Blanking the screen took three attempts on real hardware, and each failure taught the same lesson from a different angle: 1. **Black overlay** → the video played straight *through* it. A `z-index: 9999` div cannot cover a hardware plane. 2. **Pause + hide the element** → playback stopped, but the **last decoded frame stayed on screen**. Hiding a DOM element does nothing to the plane; the plane is not part of the DOM. 3. **Pause + `removeAttribute('src')` + `load()`** → releases the plane. Black at last. Coming back out 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 too, caught on the `play` event in the capture phase — otherwise the next video lights the panel back up. Any feature that assumes an overlay can hide video needs rethinking here: screen blanking, masking, fades over video. `displayPower()` (CEC) is best effort and deliberately **not** load-bearing — it returns false when CEC is unavailable and the media teardown does the real work. Our XT245 reports `failed to get cec clock` in the kernel log and does not respond to CEC at all, which is exactly why blanking must not depend on it. Plenty of displays ignore broadcast CEC or need direct addressing. Volume is re-applied on every `play` event in the capture phase, because media elements are created per item across several code paths and setting it once would otherwise last only until the playlist advanced. Still Android-only, and correctly inert here: the Tier-2 device-owner commands (`kiosk_lock`, `install_apk`, `shell`, `block_uninstall`, …) and `set_brightness` / `set_screen_timeout`, which have no BrightSign equivalent — a signage player has no per-window brightness or screen timeout. ## Offline playback Content bytes are cached by the service worker (`server/player/sw.js`) into a dedicated `rd-content-v1` cache, so a player that loses its server keeps playing its playlist. This used to be left to the browser's HTTP cache — the server sends `Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000, immutable`. That is fine on a desktop and is **not a documented-persistent store here**: BrightSign guarantees survival across reloads, app restarts and 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. The reason content was skipped originally is real, and `server/lib/player-cache-policy.js` is what makes intercepting it safe. Video elements issue **range requests** when they seek, and naive caching breaks playback in two ways that are worse than not caching at all: - storing a `206` as if it were the whole file — every later full request gets a fragment, and it stays broken until eviction - answering a range request with a `200` — some media stacks treat the mismatch as fatal and the video never starts So only complete `200`s are ever stored, and a range request is served by slicing the stored body into a correct `206`. The content cache is deliberately **not** dropped when the shell is re-versioned, or every deploy would re-download the whole playlist over a link that may be exactly what is broken. ## Self-update The player can replace its own host package. This is the most dangerous thing it does: a truncated or half-applied `autorun.brs` is a dark panel and a site visit, because there is no app underneath. The safety is the **ordering**, and every step earns its place: 1. Download to `autorun.zip.part` — never straight to `autorun.zip`. A file still downloading must never be a candidate for extraction. 2. Verify **sha256 and size** before promoting. A captive portal answering with a login page produces a perfectly well-formed small file; the size floor catches that, the hash catches the rest. sha256 specifically, because that is what BrightScript's `roMessageDigest` can compute — a checksum the player cannot verify is an unverifiable package. 3. Promote: delete the `.done` marker **first**, then rename `.part` → `autorun.zip`, then reboot. Marker first is not stylistic — leaving it makes the next boot skip the new archive and the update silently never happens. 4. A failed extract renames the archive to `.bad` rather than retrying. A zip that cannot be unpacked will not unpack on the tenth attempt, and retrying every boot is a loop that looks exactly like a hardware fault. **The decision is the server's**, in `server/lib/brightsign-update.js` — unit-tested, and the same place the prerelease rule lives. The host only executes what it is told; re-implementing the version comparison in BrightScript would put the prerelease trap somewhere it cannot be tested. **The version is baked into `autorun.brs`**, stamped at build time by both `scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh` and `server/lib/brightsign-package.js`, anchored on the `ST_PACKAGE_VERSION` marker. A version record that can disagree with the code actually running is the OTA-loop condition by the back door: apply, still report the old version, get offered the same package forever. **The manifest and the download come from one buffer**, hashed once. Advertising a version whose checksum does not match the bytes served is the same loop from the front door. Config: `self_update` (default **on** — a fleet that cannot be updated remotely needs a van) and `allow_prerelease` (default off, mirroring the Android beta channel; an opted-in player also *holds* a prerelease of its own core rather than being pulled back to the release). ## Rotation Rotate the OUTPUT, never the DOM. The web player rotates with a CSS transform — correct in a browser, wrong here: with `hwz` enabled the video decodes onto a hardware plane the DOM cannot transform, so a CSS rotation turns the images and widgets and leaves the video sideways on a portrait panel. `roVideoMode` takes a transform (`normal` / `90` / `180` / `270`) and rotating the screen rotates **every layer**, video included, because it happens below the compositor. The player asks the host first; when the host succeeds it clears its own CSS transform, or the graphics would rotate twice. If the host cannot, the CSS path stands — rotating most of the content beats rotating none. Tizen reached the same conclusion independently and routes portrait video through AVPlay, with the comment that a CSS-rotated `