screentinker/docs/player-parity.md

Player parity matrix

What each player can actually do, verified against the code rather than assumed. This is the document that says where the remaining work is, so a wrong "yes" here is worse than a missing row: it puts a control on the dashboard that cannot work.

Capability names come from server/lib/player-capabilities.js. Players declare their own set at registration; a player that declares nothing falls back to the per-platform baseline in that file.

Legend — ✅ verified in source · ⚠️ partial/conditional (reason given) · ❌ not supported (reason given) · 💀 dead: the capability is declared or baselined but the control cannot work · ❓ unverifiable from source — needs hardware, and is marked as such rather than asserted.

BrightSign runs the same server/player/index.html as the browser, so it differs only where the autorun.brs host bridge adds something the browser cannot reach. The bridge has two halves: the JS (brightsign/st-bridge.js, served by us at /player/st-bridge.js, always current) and the on-device BrightScript that must create the widget with nodejs_enabled:true. BS.hasHost() is false unless BOTH are present, and everything host-backed hangs off it.

Verified at 2237eda. Where a row cites "the fielded build" it means v1.9.28 — the last release before any player declared anything, and therefore the build every baseline is describing.

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🔴 Read this first: three dead controls found by this audit

These are not gaps in coverage. They are controls a customer can press today that do nothing.

1. The volume slider works on Android only

frontend/js/views/device-detail.js sends set_volume as { level: 0..1 }:

el?.addEventListener('change', () => sendCommand(device.id, cmd, { level: parseInt(el.value, 10) / 100 }));

player	what the handler reads	result
Android	payload.optDouble("level", -1.0)	✅ works
web	payload.level (fraction), value still read as a percentage	✅ fixed in 1.9.31
Tizen	payload.level (fraction)	✅ fixed in 1.9.31 — but see the note below on when the baseline may move
BrightSign	(the web player)	✅ as web

Three of the four players had a complete, working volume implementation that could not be driven, because nobody checked the payload key against the sender. Fixed in 1.9.31: the fraction is now canonical everywhere, and the scale is chosen by WHICH KEY arrived rather than by the magnitude of the number (1 is legal under both conventions, so guessing from the value is wrong for somebody).

audio.volume is back in the web and brightsign baselines as of 1.9.31, and not in the tizen one. That asymmetry is the model, not an oversight — see When a baseline may move.

2. Every #161 Tier-2 command was refused for the entire fleet — FIXED here

lock_now, power_menu, status_bar, block_uninstall and unblock_uninstall were gated on system.device_owner. No player declares that name — not PlayerCapabilities.kt, not tizen/js/capabilities.js, not declaredCapabilities(), not st-bridge.js — and no baseline granted it. So supports() returned false for every device on every platform and all five commands were refused, including on the device-owner panels the whole feature was built for. The dashboard still drew the buttons, because device-detail.js gates that block on device.tier === 2 || too, so an operator on a real owner panel pressed "Lock now" and got a silent server-side refusal.

Fixed in player-capabilities.js: those five now accept system.device_owner or system.kiosk. That is an exact stand-in, not a loose one — PlayerCapabilities.kt declares system.kiosk under if (isOwner) and nothing else, which is precisely when STPolicy's owned() actions do anything, and no non-Android player declares it.

Follow-up owned by Android: PlayerCapabilities.kt should declare system.device_owner under if (isOwner), at which point the stand-in becomes redundant.

3. The capture bootstrap required the capability it creates — half FIXED here

enable_system_capture raises Android's MediaProjection consent dialog: it is how a panel gains full-screen capture. It was gated on remote.screenshot, so the only panel that needs it — no accessibility, no projection grant, therefore no declared remote.screenshot — was the one panel that could not be sent it. The command is now ungated.

Still broken, and it is a frontend change: device-detail.js renders the button behind can('remote.screenshot'), so it is still hidden on exactly those panels.

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Playback

No command routes to any playback.* capability and no dashboard control is gated on one, so these describe content rendering. They are informational, and shown to the operator in the Info tab.

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
playback.video	✅ ExoPlayer (MediaPlayerManager)	✅ <video>	✅ AVPlay	✅ hardware plane
playback.image	✅ ImageLoader	✅	✅	✅
playback.widget	✅ WebView	✅ iframe	✅ iframe	✅ iframe
playback.youtube	✅ WebView embed	✅ IFrame API	✅ iframe embed	✅ IFrame API
playback.zones	✅ ZoneManager	✅	✅	✅
playback.transitions	✅ TransitionCompositor	⚠️ declared only when the bundle loads (transitionRuntimeReady()) — a failed load hard-cuts rather than breaking playback	✅ transitions.js	⚠️ composites DOM over video; with hwz it may be invisible over video and degrade to a hard cut
playback.pip	✅ PipOverlay	✅ #pipContainer	✅ pip-overlay.js	⚠️ same hwz caveat as transitions

Audio

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
audio.mute	✅ device:mute-changed → setVideoMuted, incl. YouTube via the IFrame bridge	✅	✅ incl. YouTube via postMessage	✅ as web
audio.volume	✅ set_volume reads payload.level	✅ reads payload.level (1.9.31)	✅ applyVolume reads payload.level (1.9.31, incl. tizen.tvaudiocontrol)	✅ as web

Display

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
display.rotation	✅ native rootView.rotation — the ExoPlayer surface rotates with it	✅ CSS transform	✅ CSS + AVPlay setDisplayRotation for video	⚠️ CSS cannot turn the hardware video plane; the host would have to (roVideoMode), and the page never calls BS.setVideoMode
display.power	⚠️ conditional. screen_off needs owner / device-admin FORCE_LOCK / accessibility; screen_on is a wake lock, which works anywhere — but only since 812e89f. On the fielded build screen_on is a logged no-op, which is why the Android baseline no longer claims this	❌ a browser tab cannot power a panel — the overlay only paints black	✅ both halves on every build, no signing needed: showScreenOff() / clearScreenOff(), plus the real panel API where STDeviceControl finds one	⚠️ needs hasHost(). Media teardown always blanks; ❓ CEC is unverified — our XT245 resolves @brightsign/cec while the kernel logs failed to get cec clock and the display never responds
display.resolution	❌ needs system/root	❌ not addressable from a browser	❌ no web-accessible mode setting on the TV profile	⚠️ declared but unreachable — st-bridge.js exposes setVideoMode, the page never calls it, and no command maps to this capability
display.brightness (per-window dim, Tier 0)	✅ set_brightness → setWindowBrightness, no privilege needed	❌	❌	❌

⚠️ PlayerCapabilities.kt does not declare display.brightness, though MainActivity handles set_brightness unconditionally. So an updated Android panel loses the per-window dim slider that an un-updated one keeps via the baseline. See gap 2.

Remote view and control

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
remote.screenshot	⚠️ captureView always (a real frame of the player's own view); full-screen only with accessibility or MediaProjection. Declared only for the full-screen path	⚠️ canvas only — same-origin content, and the alpha probe rejects frames where no pixels arrived	⚠️ captureAndSend captures images only; video and YouTube get an honest status card reading "Live preview unavailable for video / YouTube on Tizen"	⚠️ st-bridge.js gates host framebuffer capture on primary storage; without a disk it falls back to canvas, which cannot read the video plane
remote.stream	✅	✅ 1fps	✅ 1s interval over captureAndSend, so the same image-only limit	⚠️ as web
remote.input	✅ TouchInjector — plain dispatchTouchEvent, no privilege	✅	✅ elementFromPoint().click() + D-pad/volume keys	✅ synthesised DOM events, needs no host

Lifecycle

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
system.restart_player	✅ launch / refresh	✅ location.reload()	✅ location.reload() via STDeviceControl	⚠️ needs hasHost() so the host rebuilds the widget. A page-initiated reload does not reliably bring an roHtmlWidget back — that darkened a customer's panel on 2026-07-28, which is why neither st-bridge.js nor the baseline offers this without a host
system.reboot	⚠️ device owner only (STPolicy.reboot()). Off-owner it degrades to an accessibility power dialog, which needs someone at the screen	❌ a browser tab cannot reboot its host	⚠️ only on a partner-signed panel where STDeviceControl.capabilities().reboot is true	⚠️ RebootSystem() via the host
system.self_update	✅ APK OTA (UpdateChecker), and update forces a check	❌ the server deploys the player; there is nothing for it to update	❌ a .wgt is installed by the panel, not the app	💀 for the dashboard button. The host really does self-update — autorun.brs polls CheckPackageUpdate every PKG_CHECK_MS — but that is a host-side poll on a socket it is not listening to. The page declares system.self_update behind hasHost(), the dashboard renders "Force update", and index.html has no update branch at all. See gap 3

Device management

Android device-owner territory. Everything here is ❌ elsewhere for the same reason — no equivalent privilege model exists on those platforms — so the column is collapsed. Tizen and BrightSign both decline these explicitly and in writing in their own capability modules.

capability	Android	Web / Tizen / BrightSign
system.kiosk	⚠️ owner-only. Off-owner startLockTask() is screen pinning, which prompts — unusable on a panel with no input	❌ no device-owner concept
system.brightness	⚠️ WRITE_SETTINGS or owner (setSystemSetting)	❌
system.screen_timeout	⚠️ same gate as above	❌
system.install_apk	⚠️ owner or a foreign DPC that delegated the install scope	❌ not an APK platform
system.shell	✅ declared unconditionally — it is an app-UID sh -c, not root, so it works at any tier. Handled in WebSocketService	❌
system.time	⚠️ owner-only	❌
system.device_owner	💀 declared by nobody. See the red section above	❌

Synchronisation and resilience

capability	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
sync.clock	✅ GroupScheduleController	✅	✅ syncedNow() + schedule-eval.js	✅ as web
sync.native	❌ no native protocol	❌	❌	⚠️ st-sync.js / SyncManager, gated on module presence and BOS 8.2.10+ (below the floor the module can resolve and silently do nothing, which on a wall means every panel reports healthy while drifting). ❓ unverified on hardware
offline.cache	✅ ContentCache + DownloadCoordinator, resumable (Range/If-Range), revision-keyed	✅ service worker, resumable chunked prefetch, revision-keyed; declared only when a worker is genuinely controlling the page	⚠️ js/media-cache.js caches media to wgt-private — new at HEAD, absent from the fielded build, and declared at runtime only where the platform grants storage	❓ unverified. See gap 4

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Where the four declaration sites disagree with each other

	Android	Web	Tizen	BrightSign
declaration site	telemetry/PlayerCapabilities.kt	declaredCapabilities() in index.html	js/capabilities.js	index.html again

⚠️ brightsign/st-bridge.js computeCapabilities() IS DEAD CODE. It is exported as BS.capabilities, and nothing calls it: grep -n "BS\.[a-zA-Z]*(" server/player/index.html lists 23 bridge calls and capabilities is not among them. The BrightSign declaration actually comes from the web player's declaredCapabilities(), and the two disagree substantially:

capability	st-bridge.js says	index.html actually declares	which is right
offline.cache	navigator.serviceWorker exists	a worker is controlling the page	index.html. The bridge's version is the exact lie that shipped on the XT245
remote.screenshot	needs probe.storage_present	any 2d canvas	the bridge. A canvas cannot read the video plane
remote.stream	needs probe.storage_present	unconditional	the bridge
system.self_update	needs probe.storage_present	needs hasHost()	the bridge — staging autorun.zip needs a volume
display.rotation	needs a host (roVideoMode)	unconditional (CSS)	the bridge, for video
display.power	needs CecClass	needs hasHost()	roughly equivalent
display.resolution	host or VideoOutputClass	needs hasHost()	the bridge
system.restart_player	needs a host	unconditional	the bridge — see the 2026-07-28 incident
sync.native	module and OS ≥ 8.2.10	ScreenTinkerBSSync.available(), which is module presence only	the bridge. index.html skips the firmware floor

server/test/brightsign-capabilities.test.js is 199 lines of thorough tests for this dead function. Every one passes, and none of them constrains what a BrightSign actually declares. That is worse than no coverage: it reads as proof.

The fix is small and belongs to whoever owns those files — have declaredCapabilities() return BS.capabilities() when BS.isBrightSign(), and the storage/firmware gating that was already written and tested starts being true.

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Real gaps worth closing

Prioritised by how visible the failure is to an operator.

Gaps 1, 2 and 5 are closed (gap 1 shipped in 1.9.31; 2 and 5 are on fix/player-parity-small-gaps and unreleased). ⚠️ The baselines below have deliberately NOT been moved — per the rule in this document a baseline entry moves when the fix reaches displays, which is the release AFTER the one carrying it. Moving them together would grant a capability to every panel still running the old build.

⚠️ Gaps 3 and 4 were implemented, audited, and REVERTED. Both are still open, and both are now known to be considerably more expensive than "small". Their rows record what the audit found, so the next attempt starts from the traps rather than rediscovering them.

#	gap	difficulty	why it matters
1	✅ set_volume payload mismatch (server/player/index.html, tizen/js/app.js) — accept level (0..1) alongside value (0..100).	trivial — one line each	The volume slider is dead on 3 of 4 players. Highest visibility, lowest cost in the list. Fixed and released in 1.9.31 (volumeLevelFromCommand()).
2	✅ PlayerCapabilities.kt under-declares. Add display.brightness (Tier 0, setWindowBrightness, always available) and system.device_owner under if (isOwner).	trivial	Updating an Android panel currently loses it the per-window dim slider, and keeps the Tier-2 stand-in in player-capabilities.js necessary. Fixed — both declared; the system.kiosk stand-in can retire one release after this ships. The gap was wider than written: remote.screenshot and remote.stream were gated on the accessibility service while captureScreen() falls through to ScreenshotCapture.captureView, a plain view draw with no permission check — so a Tier-0 panel lost live view and screenshots by updating, and a granted MediaProjection never became a capability at all (nothing re-declares on consent, so the operator granted it, capture started, and the server went on refusing). Both are now unconditional, matching the baseline's own reasoning. display.power remains conditional on purpose — see the DELIBERATE list in player-parity-baselines.test.js.
3	❌ REVERTED — BrightSign "Force update" is a dead button. index.html has no update branch; the host self-updates on its own poll.	NOT small — needs host work first	Wiring the button to CheckPackageUpdate was tried and withdrawn. The update path is synchronous and unbounded (no SetTimeout on either transfer), so a slow failing download blocks the message loop past WATCHDOG_MS (120s), fabricating a crash event and rebuilding the widget. Worse, MAX_ATTEMPTS_PER_VERSION is 3 and the counter carries no version binding, so three presses on a bad link refuse that panel every future version until someone clears the registry by hand. cfg.self_update is not in the probe payload either, so an opted-out fleet shows a button guaranteed to do nothing while the dashboard toasts success — and update is allowed as a group broadcast, so one click can start N synchronous downloads. Prerequisites: a transfer timeout under the watchdog, a version-bound (or manual-exempt) attempt counter, a result message so the toast can tell the truth, and self_update in the probe. Until then, withdrawing the claim is the cheaper honest fix.
4	❌ REVERTED — declaredCapabilities() should defer to BS.capabilities() on BrightSign.	NOT small — the bridge's list is not a superset	Deferring wholesale was tried and withdrawn: the two lists disagree in both directions. The bridge gates remote.screenshot/remote.stream on storage_present alongside system.self_update, but that reasoning is stale — the player captures via @brightsign/screenshot into RAM (/tmp) and falls back to canvas, so both work with no disk and deferring removes working controls. Only system.self_update is genuinely storage-gated. The bridge also declares playback.transitions unconditionally, where the page checks transitionRuntimeReady() — an over-declare on the one platform where the UMD/nodejs_enabled collision silently kills transitions. And offline.cache gets looser, not stricter: the bridge omits the page's swRegistrationFailed check. Compounding all of it, probeHost's 3s timeout sets answered = true, so a late probe-result is discarded for the page's lifetime — and autorun.brs runs a blocking update check before entering the message loop, making a >3s answer plausible. A correct fix is a per-capability MERGE, not a wholesale hand-off, plus fixing the probe timeout.
5	✅ The capture-bootstrap button is hidden where it is needed (device-detail.js, can('remote.screenshot')).	small	Server-side gating is fixed; the UI half is not. Fixed via isAndroidDevice(), mirroring platformFamily() in server/lib/player-capabilities.js — all four signals in the same order, since a Tizen TV registers android_version: 'Tizen 6.5' and an Android-test-only helper classifies every Samsung panel as Android. ⚠️ The gate is Android-and-nothing-else, not "Android that lacks remote.screenshot": /api/devices/:id ships capabilitiesFor(), which flattens declared and baseline into one array, and the android baseline contains remote.screenshot — so that condition hides the button from all ~440 undeclared panels. The dashboard cannot currently distinguish "declared" from "baseline-filled" at all; if a future gate needs that, the API must expose the raw declaration.
6	Tizen remote.screenshot is images-only. Video and YouTube return a status card. AVPlay has no readable surface for a canvas.	hard, possibly impossible	Honest today, but an operator checking a video panel gets a card instead of a picture.
7	BrightSign transitions/PiP over video. DOM composited over a hwz hardware plane may be invisible. The likely fix is roVideoMode.SetGraphicsZOrder("front"), deliberately not applied blind.	medium, ❓ needs hardware	Changing z-order blind risks hiding video entirely on a player that currently works.
8	BrightSign offline caching is unproven either way. See below.	❓ needs hardware

The BrightSign offline.cache question, stated honestly

A real XT245 on alpha exposes navigator.serviceWorker, and then never even fetches sw.js: registration is refused, so there is no worker, no content cache and no offline playback. That unit runs BSN Supervisor (autorun.createdby = Supervisor 2.1.18.3) rather than our brightsign/autorun.brs, and Supervisor's widget has no storage_path — the setting our own host script does set (storage_path: "/cache", storage_quota: "1073741824") and the precondition for a widget having persistent storage at all.

So this is very likely a widget CONFIG issue rather than a platform limit. It is unverified: no one has yet watched a player running our package register a worker. Until someone has, this document does not claim it, the brightsign baseline does not grant it, and the player declares it only when a worker is genuinely in control — a refused registration reports app_error/sw_unavailable to the server rather than a console.warn on a display nobody has a console for.

Correctly impossible — do not "fix" these

• system.reboot on web. No API exists. A browser tab rebooting its host would be a browser vulnerability.
• display.power on web. The overlay is the honest maximum; the panel stays lit.
• Device management off Android. No equivalent privilege model exists on Tizen or BrightSign, and a web player has no device to manage.
• system.self_update on web. The player is the deployment; there is nothing to update.
• sync.native off BrightSign. It is BrightSign's own protocol, and the clock-derived one is the cross-platform answer that already works everywhere.
• display.resolution off BrightSign. No other platform exposes mode setting to an app.

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Baselines: what an un-updated display is assumed to be able to do

~446 fielded displays declare nothing and fall back to BASELINE in server/lib/player-capabilities.js. Because v1.9.29 is the first build in which any player declares anything, every display reading a baseline is running v1.9.28 or older by construction — so each entry below is justified against git show v1.9.28:<player source>, not against HEAD.

server/test/player-parity-baselines.test.js pins these to the player sources.

Corrections made in this pass

baseline	change	evidence
android	removed display.power	v1.9.28 MainActivity: "screen_on" -> Log.w("no privileged wake path on a non-rooted panel — no-op"). The ON half is dead on 100% of fielded panels, and one capability renders both buttons.
android	removed system.reboot	STPolicy.reboot() requires device owner; off-owner v1.9.28 shows the accessibility power dialog — which on the accessibility-enabled panels common in this fleet paints that dialog over the signage. Owner provisioning is unreleased (#161 / PR #168 still open), so "device owner AND pre-1.9.29" is effectively an empty set.
tizen	added display.power	v1.9.28 app.js implements both halves with no signing and no panel API: showScreenOff() / clearScreenOff() + keepAwake(). Unlike Android, neither half is privilege-gated. Withholding it hid a working control on every Tizen panel.
web	removed audio.volume, then RESTORED it in 1.9.31	Removed when v1.9.28 index.html contained the string set_volume zero times. Restored once the handler landed — this player is served by the server, so there is no fielded build to lag behind.
brightsign	removed display.power, system.reboot, system.restart_player, offline.cache (and audio.volume, restored in 1.9.31 with web)	All five need a host bridge (hasHost()) or a service worker that a Supervisor-built widget refuses. system.restart_player is the 2026-07-28 panel-blackout path. offline.cache is the documented lie this whole model exists to stop.

When a baseline may move

A baseline describes what an un-updated display can do, so the question "has this shipped?" has two different answers depending on how the player reaches the screen.

Served by the server — web, brightsign. The player is a document this server hands out. A display running against this build is running this build's player; there is no such thing as a browser panel stuck on last release's. So the baseline moves the moment the server ships the fix, and holding it back hides a control that already works. test/player-parity-baselines.test.js judges these two against the working tree, in both directions.

Shipped as a device artifact — android, tizen. The player is an APK or a .wgt sitting on the panel. Cutting a release puts nothing on any screen; a panel updates when somebody updates it, and this repo cannot know how many are still back on which build. These are judged against the previous release, and only in the over-claim direction: "the baseline claims it, so the shipped player had better implement it" is always worth failing on, while "HEAD gained the handler, so add it to the baseline" is a guess about the fleet, not a fact about it. A panel that HAS updated declares its own capabilities and never reads the baseline at all.

The cost of the one-directional rule is that a stale entry can sit here after the artifact really has reached the fleet. That is a judgement call about panels, so a person makes it in server/lib/player-capabilities.js and records why — which is what the Tizen audio.volume note there is doing right now.

This distinction was learned the hard way. The test used to read "shipped" as the newest tag, which is HEAD on a release commit — so tagging 1.9.31 flipped every biconditional at once and demanded a baseline change for displays that could not possibly have the fix yet. The build went red naming a baseline, with nothing in the diff to explain it.

Consequence, deliberately accepted

server/services/scheduler.js gates the nightly scheduled reboot on system.reboot. Removing it from the Android baseline means scheduled reboots now no-op for undeclared Android panels instead of logging scheduled reboot fired for a panel that never rebooted. That log line is the stated reason the gate exists; skipping is the honest answer, and an owner panel on v1.9.29+ declares system.reboot for itself and is unaffected.

The resulting baselines

capability	android	tizen	brightsign	web
playback.* (all 7)	✅	✅	✅	✅
audio.mute	✅	✅	✅	✅
audio.volume	✅	❌ the fielded .wgt has no handler	✅ since 1.9.31 (runs the served player)	✅ since 1.9.31
display.rotation	✅	✅	⚠️ graphics only	✅
display.power	❌ screen_on is a no-op	✅	❌ needs host	❌
display.brightness	✅ Tier 0, since v1.9.10	❌	❌	❌
remote.screenshot / remote.stream	✅ view capture	✅ images only	❌ no video plane	✅
remote.input	✅	✅	✅	✅
system.restart_player	✅	✅	❌ widget may not return	✅
system.self_update	✅	❌	❌ needs host	❌
system.reboot	❌ owner-only	❌	❌ needs host	❌
sync.clock	✅	✅	✅	✅
offline.cache	✅	❌ playlist JSON only	❌ ❓ unverified	✅

Everything conditional at runtime on every platform that has it at all — system.kiosk, system.brightness, system.screen_timeout, system.install_apk, system.shell, system.time, system.device_owner, sync.native, display.resolution — is absent from every baseline, and a test enforces that.

What is tested, and what cannot be

server/test/player-parity-baselines.test.js reads the player sources and fails when they and the claims disagree:

• every baseline and command-map name is in the vocabulary, and no baseline has duplicates;
• the dead-button rule — every gated command has a branch in some player;
• the unreachable-capability rule — every gating capability is either declared by some player's source or granted by some baseline. This is the test that would have caught the system.device_owner bug;
• a device-owner Android panel can actually be sent all five Tier-2 commands, and an ordinary one is still refused them by name;
• audio.volume and offline.cache are biconditional against the player sources, so a fix in a player fails the test until the baseline is updated;
• no baseline claims a conditional capability, and the BrightSign baseline claims nothing behind hasHost();
• every capability-shaped string quoted in any player is one the server knows — the server's parser drops unknown names, so a typo silently removes a control rather than raising anything.

Not testable from source, and asserted nowhere: whether CEC reaches a real display; whether a widget built by our own autorun.brs is permitted to register a service worker; whether SyncManager genuinely holds a wall in frame lock; whether transitions and PiP are visible over a hwz video plane. Each is marked ❓ above and needs hardware.