screentinker/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

1.9.33

A patch off 1.9.32. The headline is a boot-time crash that could brick a display permanently — a player that died on startup, every startup, and could not be recovered by rebooting it. The rest is the live debug log finally working on the web player, and the playlist-skipping bug that log found within minutes of being switched on.

Fixed — a cached playlist could brick a display across reboots

The most serious of these. On startup the player restores its cached playlist and renders the first item immediately. If that item was a video carrying a transition, it read an internal flag before that flag's declaration had run — which in JavaScript is a throw, not an empty value. The player died during boot.

The loop is what made it fatal rather than annoying: the playlist came from the display's own local cache, so it never stayed up long enough to receive a corrected one. Every boot re-read the same cache and died the same way. Rebooting the player — the one remedy an operator has — did nothing. Recovery meant changing the player the server hands out; nothing in the dashboard would have helped.

Found on a BrightSign, but nothing about it was BrightSign-specific: any browser-based display could have hit it. No customer display was in this state, and the one playlist that mixed video with a transition happened to start on an image, which was luck rather than protection.

Fixed — one broken clip could skip several playlist items

A media error scheduled a skip per error event, and each new skip orphaned the previous timer instead of cancelling it, so all of them fired. Four decode errors on one clip meant four advances. On a single-item playlist that merely replayed the same file, which is why it hid for so long; on a real playlist it silently dropped the next three items and nothing said why.

One failure now means one skip. A clip that is still playable is no longer discarded on a stray event, while anything genuinely undecodable is still skipped, so a broken file can never stall a playlist. Failures also now report the actual media error instead of an anonymous "Video error".

Added — the live debug log works on browser-based displays

The per-device Debug logging checkbox has always sent its command, but only the Android player ever answered it. The panel opened on every other display and streamed almost nothing.

It now streams what the player has always been recording internally: its own log, uncaught errors with file and line, failed downloads, and on BrightSign the host's boot report. Switching it on also replays what was buffered before you opened it, timestamped with how long ago each line really happened — so the failure you came to investigate is already on screen instead of needing to happen again.

It matters most where there is no alternative: on a signage player there is no console to open and no cable to attach, and this is the only way to see what the display thinks it is doing.

Freeze holds the view still while continuing to buffer underneath, because the moment you freeze a log is the moment the lines explaining it are still arriving. Copy puts the visible capture on the clipboard, stamped with the display and time, and works on self-hosted dashboards served over plain HTTP where the browser clipboard API is unavailable. Errors and warnings are now coloured, so the one line that explains the fault no longer sits in a wall of grey.

Changed — display controls sit above the status panels

Reboot, screen on/off, launch, force update and shutdown were flush against the status cards, which read as though they belonged to them.

1.9.32

A patch off 1.9.31. The headline is that a BrightSign can finally photograph its own screen; the rest is a thumbnail library that heals itself, a Raspberry Pi installer that asks the operator rather than the pipe, IPv6 on the dashboard, and a pairing code you can read from across a room.

Fixed — a BrightSign can now screenshot itself, video included

That platform has never managed it. Video decodes onto a hardware plane the DOM cannot read, so the player's in-page canvas composite came back with the content missing, and the panel truthfully but uselessly reported "Video is playing on the hardware plane and cannot be captured" while playing perfectly.

It now uses BrightSign's own @brightsign/screenshot API, which composites the video and graphics layers — exactly the thing a canvas cannot do. The capture is written to RAM rather than the boot flash: the remote-control view asks for one every second, and a screenshot per second written to flash wears it out for nothing, since the file is read back and deleted immediately.

Remote control gets it for free — the live view and the screenshot button share one capture path, so the live view now shows real video instead of a card explaining why it can't.

The long way round is kept as a fallback for firmware without the module, and its own bug is fixed on the way: the host asked the player's diagnostic web server on a hardcoded port 80, while that port is configurable and commonly moved (the unit this was found on serves it on 8080 with nothing on 80 at all). It now reads the port from the registry the server is configured from.

Fixed — per-item dayparting was silently dead on BrightSign

A BrightSign widget runs with Node integration, which puts module into the page's scope. Every shared module that exported with an else therefore took the CommonJS branch and never assigned its browser global — and every consumer has a silent fallback, so nothing ever complained.

The visible casualty was the transition engine, which is gated on exactly those globals and so never initialised. The costly one was schedule-eval: without it the player falls back to "always active", so scheduled content played outside its window on that platform, with nothing in any log. Modules now export to both targets.

Fixed — thumbnails that never appear, and never retry

Thumbnail generation is best-effort by contract, and three gaps made its failures invisible and permanent: ffmpeg is a system dependency nothing surfaced (and the Docker image did not install it), a row that missed generation was never retried, and a failed image thumbnail stored a path to a file that was never written — which the dashboard then requested forever as a broken image.

There is now a [MEDIA] startup diagnostic, a once-per-boot backfill that heals old rows, ffmpeg in the runtime image, and the phantom path is gone. Video probing moved off the synchronous spawn it had always used: two subprocess calls with a 15-second timeout each, run synchronously, stop the whole server for their duration — survivable for one human-initiated upload, not for a sweep walking an entire library unattended.

Fixed — Raspberry Pi 5 installer (#245)

curl … | sudo bash makes stdin the script, and bash has consumed it by the time any prompt runs — so the mode menu answered itself and Player-Only could not be reached through the documented install at all. Prompts now read the terminal.

Pi 5 on Bookworm defaults to Wayland, where xset, unclutter and xrandr are no-ops that log an error and do nothing: those Pis had no blanking suppression and no cursor hiding while appearing configured. The launcher now detects the session and branches. Chromium is told not to ask for a keyring password no kiosk can answer, and the crash-restore surface that put a white page over the player on every boot but the first is cleared properly. The login banner also spelled the product name wrong.

Added — a display's IPv6 address on the dashboard

The player only ever collected IPv4, so a v6-only panel reported no address at all and the dashboard showed a dash for a perfectly reachable screen. Both are now reported, in their own fields, because a dual-stack panel has both and either may be the one you need. Link-local addresses are excluded — every interface has one and none can be dialled without a zone index.

Fixed — the pairing code was unreadable on 4K and 8K panels

Every size on the player's setup screens was a hard-coded pixel value. A CSS pixel covers a quarter of the screen area on a 4K panel that it does on 1080p, and a sixteenth on 8K, so the code that fills a 1080p screen was a smudge on the wall it was installed on. Sizing is now proportional to the viewport: identical at 1080p, twice the size at 4K, four times at 8K.

Fixed — the screenshot button lied when it could not work

The server already answered offline or unsupported, but no dashboard sender listened, so clicking Screenshot on an offline display showed "Screenshot requested" and did nothing. The verdict now surfaces as a toast. Thanks to @a10kiloham for this and for the thumbnail work above.

Fixed — CI judged the capability baselines against the wrong source

The baselines describe what an un-updated display can do, so they are checked against the shipped source via a release tag. A shallow checkout has no tags, so the check silently fell back to the working tree — and a release commit made the newest tag HEAD, flipping every assertion at once. Both are fixed; the matrix is judged against the previous release.

1.9.31

A patch off 1.9.30 carrying the video-wall and playlist-preview work, a QA sweep that drove real browsers and real panels rather than reading code, and the fix for a loop stall our own maintenance was inflicting on a customer's fleet every morning.

Fixed — a wall of portrait panels had to be built backwards (#236)

The wall canvas was secretly framebuffer space, not the wall as you see it. That is invisible while every panel is the normal way up, and actively misleading the moment one isn't: two portrait-mounted panels standing side by side had to be stacked vertically in the editor, with a pre-rotated copy of every video, before the output came out right. It worked, but only after trial and error, and it meant a portrait wall could never reuse existing content. Each panel now carries a mounting rotation (0/90/180/270), the canvas means the physical wall, and the player works out the mapping — so side by side is drawn side by side and landscape content plays across portrait panels unmodified. Applied on the web, Tizen and Android players. Existing walls are untouched and need no migration. Every wall in the field is rotation 0, which takes the original code path verbatim — an operator who upgrades will not find a wall that was aligned yesterday has moved. Rebuilding an existing portrait wall the natural way round is an opt-in change the operator makes when they choose to. While a display is a member of a wall, its per-panel rotation replaces its own Orientation setting: the two describe the same physical fact, and honouring both turned the content twice.

Added — a wall no longer hides its own screens (#235)

Grouping displays into a wall replaced their individual cards, so one dead panel of a four-panel wall was invisible from the dashboard, and inspecting a single screen meant pulling it out of the wall (re-syncing the live wall) and putting it back. The wall screen now lists its panels with live online state and a link straight to each device's page, and the wall card on the dashboard shows a per-member status chip. A screenshot can be requested per panel without disturbing playback.

Fixed — the checkpointer was stalling the event loop for seconds at a time (#240)

Reported as loop lag that grew with uptime and reset on restart, with a distinctive signature: mean, p50, p99 and max identical to two decimal places. That signature is not a fixed cost paid on every cycle. It is what a perf_hooks histogram reports when a window recorded exactly one delay — the mean is the raw value and every percentile returns the bucket ceiling above it. Reproducible against the reported figures to the decimal (record(1329070000) gives mean 1329.07, p50/p99/max 1329.59). So the loop took one long turn that swallowed the whole sampling second, episodically.

The long turn was ours, and it is measured rather than argued. Running the real checkpointer worker against a real WAL with one reader mid-transaction: a single main-thread write blocked for 4,936 ms, and the checkpoint that blocked it reported WAL 8.8MB -> 8.8MB — it reclaimed nothing. wal_checkpoint(TRUNCATE) is the blocking form and its locks are held across connections, so moving it to a worker thread in 1.9.2-patch3 took the fsync off the loop but not the lock. It also does not throw when it cannot get those locks: it returns busy=1 after sitting on SQLite's five-second busy timeout. Five seconds of stalled loop for no benefit, reported as a success.

It was reached far too easily. The rule was "escalate if the WAL grew across three consecutive 15s runs", which any sustained 45-second write burst satisfies — a fleet powering on in the morning does it daily. Escalation now needs the WAL to be in the upper half of its budget (WAL_CHECKPOINT_STARVATION_FLOOR_MB, default 8) and to be outside a cooldown (WAL_CHECKPOINT_ESCALATE_COOLDOWN_MS, default 5 min). Both gates are needed: a size floor alone does nothing for a server whose WAL already sits above it, which was exactly the reported case.

The 16 MB high-water escalation bypasses both gates and is untouched, so the WAL still cannot grow unbounded. A checkpoint that reclaimed nothing now says so in the log instead of reading like a success.

Also softened the recovery path: when the checkpointer worker is declared unrecoverable, inline autocheckpoint is re-armed on the main connection — a state that lasts the life of the process, and therefore looks exactly like "degrades with uptime, a restart fixes it". It used to also run an unconditional blocking checkpoint on the main thread on the way in; that now happens only above the high-water mark, and the fallback state is served on /api/status rather than being inferable only from a log line that may have rolled.

Added — loop-lag telemetry that can be read correctly (#240)

The reported numbers were interpreted, reasonably, as a per-cycle cost, because nothing in them said how many samples they were made of. /api/status now carries samples alongside the percentiles (around 50 in a healthy second, 1 when a single turn swallowed it), tick_gap_ms measured on the wall clock independently of the histogram, and worst_tick_gap_ms / worst_tick_at — monotone, so five-minute polling can no longer miss an episode entirely. The debug block adds the checkpointer's worker, fallback and respawn state.

Band semantics are deliberately unchanged: a one-sample window during a real stall is the correct trigger for the shed valve, and suppressing it would blind the protection at the moment it is needed.

Fixed — device_telemetry grew forever for any display that stopped reporting

The only trim was a per-device row cap applied on that device's own heartbeat, so a decommissioned, swapped or seasonally-dark panel left its rows behind permanently. There is now a matching age sweep (TELEMETRY_RETENTION_DAYS, default 30), per-device so it rides the existing index rather than scanning, chunked and yielding like the status-log sweep. The default matches the uptime report's own default window, so it cannot remove rows that report would have shown.

Added — a playlist preview you can skip through (#239)

Reviewing item 8 of a playlist cost seven durations of waiting. The preview takes a skip/next control.

Added — a video playlist item defaults to the clip's own length (#237)

Rather than the generic default duration, which had to be corrected by hand for every video.

Fixed — the dashboard preview of a rotated display (#238)

A display rotated 90°/270° was previewed the way its framebuffer is laid out rather than the way people see it. It now matches what the wall shows.

Fixed — three controls that did nothing, and a parity matrix that said otherwise

An audit of all four players against their shipped sources found controls a customer can press today that change nothing. The volume slider worked on Android only: the dashboard sends set_volume { level: 0..1 }, while the web player read payload.value and divided by 100 and Tizen read payload.value ?? payload.volume — three complete, working volume implementations that could not be driven. Correcting only the key would have been worse than leaving it broken, since level: 0.5 would have become 0.5%: the scale is now chosen by which key arrived, not by the magnitude of the number.

Tizen's offline media cache could never have worked on a panel — its adapter used the deprecated Filesystem API in three ways the IDL rules out, so MediaCache.create() returned null on every panel in the fleet. BrightSign carried calls that compile and are documented to do something else. Every fix cites the vendor document that proves it, and the linter now fails on each next time.

Four dashboard→device socket handlers had no capability gate, and a re-register could erase a panel's recorded platform. The parity matrix and the capability baselines are now tested against the players' shipped sources in both directions, so a baseline that over-claims and a player that gains a handler without its baseline moving both fail the build.

Fixed — a fresh panel skipped the first item of its playlist

A newly paired panel always learns its playlist before the media arrives, so the 3-second content re-check is what really begins playback — and it advanced past the index already seeded for a playlist that had not started. The first pass ran 1, 2, 3, 0, and item 1 appeared only after the list wrapped. Reproduced on the emulator on every fresh pair.

Fixed — a rotated wall panel screenshotted as a black rectangle

The mounting rotation introduced with #236 is the first real rotation on an ancestor of the video surface, and the screenshot compositor pasted the frame with an axis-aligned rectangle — so on a rotated panel it landed outside the capture bitmap and the dashboard received plain black. A panel that looks dead while it is playing perfectly is the worst thing a diagnostic can say.

Fixed — the service worker claimed credit for offline widgets it never sees

sw.js said its cache-first widget branch was what kept a widget rendering with the network gone. It is not: the player mounts widgets in an iframe sandboxed without allow-same-origin, making it an opaque-origin client that a service worker does not control. Measured, not reasoned — five mounts over 25 seconds of real playback left zero widget entries in the cache.

Fixed — CI judged the capability baselines against the wrong source

The baselines describe what an un-updated display can do, so they are checked against the shipped source via the latest tag. The default shallow checkout has no tags, so the lookup found nothing and the suite silently fell back to the working tree — where a player's payload bug had just been fixed, making the build demand a baseline change for displays that cannot possibly have the fix yet. Green locally, red in CI, for a reason visible nowhere in the diff. The test job now fetches tags, and the bidirectional assertions skip rather than invert when there are none.

1.9.30

A patch off 1.9.29 carrying two fixes for faults that are live and silent. Both were found by a QA pass driving real browsers rather than by reading code, and both fail in the direction that leaves a screen dark with nothing in any log.

Fixed — a missing media file answered 200 with the dashboard, cached for a month

express.static calls next() on a miss and the only thing downstream was the SPA catch-all, so GET /uploads/content/<gone>.mp4 returned 200 OK, Content-Type: text/html, 15KB of index.html, under the public, max-age=2592000, immutable header the mount had already set on the way in.

For a player that is the worst possible answer. Every downloader in this product treats 200 as success, so a panel stores the HTML page as the video, caches it for a month, and renders a black frame. Android's cache validates the byte COUNT against Content-Length, not the content type, so a correctly-sized page passes the integrity check and is promoted as a valid asset.

It is reachable exactly when it hurts: a content replace writes a new randomly-named file and unlinks the old one, so any snapshot still pointing at the old name asks for a file that is gone. A miss now terminates in a 404 with no cache header — immutable is a promise about a file that exists.

Fixed — an empty playlist wiped a display's entire offline library

The player asks the service worker to hold its current media and to drop anything else. An empty list was honoured as "drop everything" — and assignments: [] is what the server sends for a device between playlists, for a playlist never published, and from inside the catch when a stored snapshot fails to parse. Reproduced: three cached assets, one empty payload, cache emptied.

That is only survivable while the uplink is up, which is precisely when the offline cache does not matter. A cache kept too long costs disk the quota reclaims anyway; one dropped at the wrong moment is a dark screen with no way back. An empty list is no longer a prune instruction.

1.9.29

The release candidates 1.9.29-rc1 through rc5 are folded in here; the entries below record what changed since 1.9.28 in the form it actually ships. Two of these were found only by driving real hardware and a real browser, and neither could have been caught by a test in this repo.

Fixed — the web player's offline cache was switched off at the URL everyone uses

A service worker's default scope is its own directory, so /player/sw.js could only control /player/ and below — which does not include /player itself, the URL the dashboard shows and the one panels are configured with. Registration succeeded, logged success, and then controlled nothing: no shell cache, no content cache, no offline playback, and no error to notice.

Fixed — screens went black on a bad link instead of playing cached content

The offline playback path was never the problem: the cache could never be filled. Every download began at byte 0 and the partial was discarded on any interruption, so an asset larger than one uninterrupted transfer was re-fetched forever. Downloads now resume, with If-Range and a 416 guard so a changed or over-long asset can never be spliced.

Added — every player caches media for offline playback

Tizen caches the media itself now, not just the playlist; the web player (and BrightSign) accumulate in resumable chunks driven by the playlist rather than by playback. Content carries a revision, so replacing an asset reaches displays that already hold the old bytes — previously it could not, ever.

Added — players declare what they can actually do

Each player reports its real capabilities at registration and the dashboard stops offering controls that cannot work. A display that declares nothing keeps its per-platform baseline, so nothing in the field loses controls on upgrade.

Fixed — the BrightSign host scripts were written against Roku's API reference

BrightScript is Roku's language and the two references read alike, so calls to objects that do not exist looked exactly like calls to ones that do. A string literal that stopped the script compiling, an existence check that could never return true, and a self-update path that could never mark a package applied — all corrected, and guarded by a checker, since nothing in CI can run BrightScript.

1.9.29-rc5

Fixed — the BrightSign host scripts were written against Roku's API reference

BrightScript is Roku's language, the two references read almost identically, and nothing in CI can run either — so a call to an object that does not exist looked exactly like a call to one that does. Found by auditing against BrightSign's published reference after a consultant's deployment failed, and verified on an XT245.

• A string literal stopped the whole script loading. "{""width"":" is not an escaped quote; BrightScript has no escape sequences, so it is three adjacent literals with no operator between them. The compiler rejects the entire file — ScriptLoadError: Syntax Error (compile error &h02) — which is not a broken feature but no player at all, on a display showing nothing.
• MatchFiles was called with a path as both arguments. It takes a DIRECTORY plus a pattern and returns nothing when the pattern contains a separator, so the existence check could never return true for any file on any player. That is the reported failure: no autorun.zip on any volume printed while dir SD: listed it. It also silently disabled the entire self-update path.
• Roku objects that do not exist on BrightSign, each quietly disabling a feature: roFileSystem (~20 sites — an update could never be marked applied), roMessageDigest (verification returned false unconditionally and burned the retry counter), PostFromStringWithRetry (a snapshot request raised "member function not found" from inside the event loop and took the player down).
• Unpack() deletes everything already in its target directory. Unpacking an update to the volume root would have erased the player's provisioning and its whole content pool as a side effect of a routine upgrade. It now stages to a directory of its own and never overwrites screentinker.json.
• Rotation moves to SetScreenModes() (SetMode() takes one argument) and fires only on a real change, because that call reboots the player.

server/test/brightscript-api-surface.test.js guards all of it — a deny-list of Roku APIs plus the argument shapes and literal forms that compile and then do nothing.

Fixed — a player that could not cache was telling the fleet it could

A real BrightSign exposes navigator.serviceWorker, passes an 'serviceWorker' in navigator check, and then never even fetches the worker: its runtime refuses to register one. It advertised offline.cache while unable to cache a byte. The capability is now claimed only when a worker is genuinely in control, and a refused registration reports itself to the server instead of a console.warn on a display nobody has a console for.

Fixed — storage paths assumed a card slot that may not exist

StorageRoot() knew only internal flash and SD. Fitting real storage to a flash-booting player and moving the deployment onto it resolved every derived path — the offline page, the widget's local storage, the update paths — to a slot with nothing in it. It now probes in the order the OS itself searches for an autorun script. The widget's storage_path is likewise an absolute path on the boot volume rather than a bare /cache, which carried no drive specifier and so had nowhere to persist.

1.9.29-rc4

Fixed — the web player's offline cache was switched off at the URL everyone uses

A service worker's default scope is its own directory, so /player/sw.js could only ever control /player/ and below — which does not include /player itself. The player is served at all three of /player, /player/ and /player/index.html, and /player is the one that gets used: it is what the dashboard shows and what gets typed into a panel. On that URL registration succeeded, logged "Service Worker registered", and then controlled nothing at all: no shell cache, no content cache, no offline playback, and no error to notice.

Registration now asks for scope /, and the server sends Service-Worker-Allowed to permit it. Both halves are load-bearing — without the header the registration does not narrow, it fails outright. Found by driving a real browser at the player; no unit test could have seen it, because the bug lived entirely in the relationship between a URL and a header.

Fixed — screens went black on a bad link instead of playing cached content

Reported from a one-bar 5G site. The offline playback path was never the problem: the cache could never be filled. Every download attempt started at byte 0 and the partial was deleted on any interruption, so an asset larger than one uninterrupted transfer was discarded and re-fetched forever — minutes of progress thrown away, back off, repeat. With nothing cached, the player showed its waiting state, which from across a room reads as a black screen.

Downloads now resume: an interrupted transfer keeps its partial and asks for the rest with Range. Two ways that could corrupt a cache, both closed — If-Range makes a changed asset come back as a full body (restart) rather than a spliceable tail, and a partial longer than the asset is discarded on a 416. Bytes are kept only where they can be built upon: with no validator there is no safe resume, so the partial is dropped and the attempt backs off as the failure it is.

Added — every player now caches media for offline playback

• Tizen cached nothing but the playlist, so a panel came back from a reboot knowing exactly what to show and fetched every frame of it from a server that was not there. It now caches the media itself to wgt-private, resumable, with the transfer asynchronous so a stalled chunk cannot freeze the player. offline.cache is declared at runtime rather than assumed: a build with no writable private storage still says nothing.
• The web player (and BrightSign, which runs it) stored only what a single fetch() happened to complete — nothing at all on a marginal link. It now accumulates in resumable chunks, driven by the player's playlist rather than by playback, so the prefetch does not compete with the video on screen for the same scarce bandwidth.

Fixed — replacing an asset could never reach a screen that had already cached it

PUT /api/content/:id/replace changes an asset's bytes under a stable id, and every player caches by that id — so the new bytes could not reach a panel that already held the old ones. Not "until the next refresh": never. Content now carries a revision, stamped onto each item at send time, and every player keys its cache on it. The same send-time refresh fixes a second bug: a replace writes a new randomly-named file and unlinks the old one, so the filepath baked into a published playlist snapshot pointed at a deleted file, and web panels 404'd on that item until somebody thought to republish. The route now also pushes to affected devices, which it never did.

Superseded copies are reclaimed rather than left for the quota: the player declares the complete set of media it needs and the worker drops everything else.

Added — capability declaration across all four players

Each player declares what it can actually do at registration, and the dashboard stops offering controls that cannot work on that hardware. An absent declaration falls back to a per-platform baseline, so the displays already in the field keep their controls rather than losing them the moment this ships.

1.9.29-rc3

Fixed — autorun.zip could not be opened by a player

Reported from a real automated deployment: the rc2 archive reached the player and was rejected as invalid. Two causes, both ours.

• The archive must be STORED, not compressed. 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 — and the server-side package builder had been using maximum deflate, so every self-update package it produced would have failed the same way, silently and in the field.
• roBrightPackage, not roUnzip, is the supported reader. Converted in autozip.brs and in the self-update path.

Both builders now assert the property instead of trusting the flag: the build script refuses a compressed member, and a test walks the archive's local file headers. A compressed package uploads, downloads and deploys perfectly and only then fails to open, which reads as a broken deployment rather than a broken zip.

autozip.brs also adopts the shipped volume-discovery pattern — probe USB1:/SD:/SSD:/FLASH: for the archive rather than guessing, since a player may boot from internal flash.

Fixed — muting never reached a YouTube item

A YouTube item is a cross-origin iframe, so el.muted reaches nothing. The two browser-family players failed in opposite directions: the web player consulted autoplay policy and nothing else, so an item muted in the admin console played with sound and a wall follower blared alongside its leader; Tizen hardcoded mute=1, so YouTube there was permanently silent and no toggle could change it. Android was already correct. The rule now lives once in server/lib/media-mute.js, and the unmute prompt no longer appears on an item an operator deliberately muted.

Fixed — screenshots reported success while sending blank frames

Capture marked itself successful because the draw did not throw. On a hardware plane drawImage(video) returns a fully transparent image and throws nothing, so the dashboard showed a dead screen while the panel played perfectly. Capture is now proven by an alpha probe, so a genuine fade-to-black still reads as captured.

Added

• BrightSign native synchronisation, wired end to end and chosen per group, reusing the existing leader election. A group whose leader is offline falls back to the clock protocol rather than waiting for an announcement that never comes.
• Real telemetry and hardware identity — temperature, player storage, model, OS version, serial and output index — instead of a block of nulls and a wifi_ssid of "Web Player" on a PoE appliance.
• Offline content caching with correct range-request handling, and a package self-update whose version is stamped into autorun.brs at build time — unstamped, a player applies an update, still reports the old version, and is offered it forever.
• Command parity: real reboot, real display blanking, and set_volume on BrightSign.

Removed

• The user_agent fallback in BrightSign detection. devices has no such column, so the branch was unreachable and passed only in a test that fabricated the field.

1.9.29-rc2

Fixes for three things rc1 only revealed once it was deployed and pointed at real hardware.

Fixed

• The player assets 404'd in a container. /player/st-bridge.js and /player/st-sync.js are served from ../brightsign so the copy the player loads can never drift from the copy on the player's own storage — but the Dockerfile never copied that directory into the image, so both routes worked from a dev checkout and failed in Docker. Note how this fails when the route is absent entirely: the SPA fallback answers 200 with text/html, so the browser gets a page where it expected JavaScript and the bridge silently never exists.
• A BrightSign kept re-pairing on every boot. The bridge persisted device_id but not device_token. 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 device row.
• A BrightSign was labelled "Web Player". It runs the same web player, so client_type is player and the device view fell through to a hardcoded label — indistinguishable from a browser tab, for a dedicated signage appliance.

Added

• autorun.zip — a single-file player installer, attached to every release and built by scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh. Drop it on the root of a player's storage and power-cycle.
• Booting from internal flash. A player runs FLASH:/autorun.brs with no card present at all, so a failed card slot no longer ends a player's life. Confirmed on an XT245 with a physically dead microSD interface.

1.9.29-rc1

BrightSign port. The player on BrightSign is the ordinary web player running in an roHtmlWidget — that part already worked. This release adds the host around it, which covers what a page cannot do for itself, and a per-group choice of synchronisation protocol.

Release candidate: cut for testing on alpha, not for production fleets.

Added

• brightsign/autorun.brs — a supervised host, not 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 a page which loaded fine and then wedged — the case load-error never reports.
• brightsign/st-bridge.js — the page's half of that contract, over @brightsign/messageport. Registry-backed identity (the registry outlives localStorage on this platform), restart-instead-of-reload, heartbeat, and sync-backend reporting. Every method degrades to a no-op off-platform, so it is served to every player rather than gated on a user agent.
• brightsign/st-sync.js — native SyncManager support. Frame-accurate video sync between BrightSign players via setSyncParams on the standard <video> element.
• server/lib/sync-backend.js — whose protocol a group runs. auto picks BrightSign's native sync when every member is a BrightSign and ours otherwise. Native sync selected for a mixed group, or for players on different subnets, downgrades and reports why: BrightWall is multicast and cannot cross networks, and a half-synced group looks perfectly healthy on the dashboard while one panel drifts alone.
• Boot from internal flash. A player will run FLASH:/autorun.brs with no card present at all, confirmed on an XT245 whose microSD interface is physically dead. StorageRoot() probes for it and falls back to SD:, so a failed card slot no longer ends a player's life.

Changed

• The web player restarts through a single restartPlayer() path instead of four separate location.reload() call sites. Off BrightSign the behaviour is unchanged.
• Storage keys carry a per-output suffix so a dual-output player's two widgets, which share an origin and one localStorage, cannot collapse into a single device row.

1.9.28

Platform-wide QA sweep — 25 fixes. Findings from an audit of the Android player, the browser and Tizen players, and the server and dashboard, plus the issues a customer reported on #234 while testing. Several are data-loss or isolation defects reachable by an ordinary user doing an ordinary thing.

Fixed — data loss and isolation

• Saving a layout no longer destroys zone bindings and schedules. Zones were deleted and re-inserted with the same ids, on the assumption that reusing an id preserved what pointed at them. It does not: SQLite runs referential actions on the DELETE, so every multi-zone playlist item was un-assigned (ON DELETE SET NULL) and every zone-bound schedule was permanently deleted (ON DELETE CASCADE). Nudging one zone by a pixel did this, and returned 200. Zones are now diffed; only genuinely removed zones are deleted, where those cascades are correct.
• Schedules that outlive a deleted device group keep their workspace. The conversion INSERT omitted workspace_id, so converted rows were invisible in the list and calendar, undeletable (403), and still fired every 60 seconds. A boot migration repairs rows already orphaned.
• A saved device snapshot only applies inside the workspace it was taken in. The lookup keyed on the hardware fingerprint alone, so a panel deleted from one workspace and paired into another inherited the first workspace's playlist and blocked flag.
• Overlay pushes are held to the same write check as every other fleet action. The three PiP routes carried only a token-scope check, which is a deliberate pass-through for dashboard sessions.
• A schedule's zone is checked against the caller's workspace — the one polymorphic reference missing from the existing validation.
• Relayed playback progress is stamped with the authenticated device, rather than trusting the id in the payload.

Fixed — Android

• Per-item scheduling works on Android 7. java.time is API 26 and minSdk is 24 with no core library desugaring, so dayparting threw NoClassDefFoundError — an Error, which sailed past the deliberate fail-open guard, aborted the playlist update before content downloaded and then cleared the cache. Those panels sat on "waiting for content" and a reboot did not help. Verified on a real API 24 image.
• A slow image decode can no longer strand a screen. A remote image that finished after the playlist moved on mounted itself over the current item and called exoPlayer.stop(), landing in STATE_IDLE where no advance is ever scheduled.
• The playlist and OTA checker stop when the Activity is destroyed. Both kept running on the main looper, so every relaunch left a second controller reporting playback — inflating Reports — and another OTA checker whose install receiver was never unregistered.
• A server rejection is handled once, and a transient reclaim-settle hold no longer wipes the offline cache and jumps to pairing. Two handlers were assigned to the same callback; the later silently replaced the one that surfaces the server's reason.
• Widget edits reach multi-zone layouts, and a zone whose video fails recovers instead of going black permanently.

Fixed — players

• The web player notices layout and zone changes. Editing zones or moving an item between them was judged "unchanged" and never reached the screen — the same defect fixed on Android, still live on web. Tizen already handled it.
• Replacing the only item of a one-item playlist works. The change was deferred until "the next advance", but single-item rendering deliberately never advances, so the old content played forever.
• Leaving a sync group or a video wall re-renders instead of freezing on the current clip.
• A group-synced screen shows the idle card when every daypart has closed, instead of looping the last in-window item out of hours.
• The suspended-account card no longer breaks the player. It replaced the status overlay, destroying an element every later status update wrote to — so the player reported itself crashed every few minutes and could be stranded on a stale card with no retry timer.
• A zone video that fails now recovers on web as well as Android.

Fixed — dashboard and content

• Editing a content item no longer rewrites types the dropdown cannot represent. Opening a YouTube item and pressing Save turned it into an MP4 — a dead slide on every screen, and unrecoverable from the dialog.
• Hand-written text widgets render at the size they were written. Every px font size was converted to vw to rescue legacy designer output, including markup people typed themselves: font-size:16px became 2.8px on a 1080p screen.
• Text taller than the screen is no longer silently clipped — a text widget can now shrink to fit, scroll, or clip, defaulting to shrink (a no-op when the content already fits).
• Eight dashboard views stop reporting success for refused requests. Their local fetch helpers resolved on any status, so a 403 showed a success toast and the UI kept displaying a value the server had rejected.
• Deleting a playlist tells the screens showing it, rather than leaving the content up.
• The onboarding checklist no longer counts a field no player reads, which told operators "content assigned" while the screen showed "waiting for content".
• An empty device_info no longer wipes 17 device columns. The browser player's refresh-register sends {} every five minutes, and a blind full-row overwrite nulled version, resolution, OTA state and capability flags — degrading exactly the client family that cannot be inspected any other way.

Fixed — scheduling

• The calendar draws a recurring schedule on every day it actually fires. A Mon-Fri rule drew as Mondays only, or as nothing at all if it had been created on a weekend, and a schedule started more than a year ago drew nothing — while the engine ran all of them correctly the whole time.
• A recurring schedule respects its start and end dates. The engine compared weekday and time only, so a campaign set to finish weeks ago kept running. ⚠️ This changes live behaviour: any recurring schedule past its end date will stop.
• A content-only schedule now puts that content on the screen. content_id was stored, validated and read by nothing, while the calendar drew a block labelled with the filename as confirmation. It now gets a playlist holding that item.

Added

• Per-display pre-release channel. Publish ScreenTinker-beta.apk with a declared version alongside the stable APK and send it only to displays you choose; untick to move a display back. See the README.

1.9.27

A real pre-release channel: publish a second APK and choose which displays get it. 1.9.26 added a per-display opt-in, but it was passive — it stopped a sideloaded test build being reverted, while the build itself still had to be installed by hand on every display. This makes the opt-in mean something the server can act on.

Added — beta channel

• A second APK slot. Put ScreenTinker-beta.apk beside the stable one and it is served only to displays with Accept pre-release builds ticked. Everyone else continues to get the stable APK, unchanged.
• The beta build must declare its version, in a sidecar ScreenTinker-beta.apk.version holding just the version (e.g. 1.9.27-rc1). This is not optional and it fails closed: a beta with no declared version — or an unparseable one — does not activate the channel at all, and opted-in displays keep getting stable. The server cannot infer it (stable's version is the server's own constant because the two ship together, and reading it from the APK means parsing binary AndroidManifest.xml on the request path), and advertising a version that does not match the bytes served is exactly the condition that produces an update loop.
• The check and the download resolve the channel identically, and fall back to stable identically, so apk_size always describes the bytes actually delivered. An unrecognised channel serves stable rather than failing.
• No player update is required. The client already fetches whatever download_url the server hands back, so displays already in the field can be moved between channels from the dashboard.

Fixed — switching back off a beta

• Unticking the box now actually moves the display. Stable is semver-older than the beta it replaces, so the ordinary "never offer a downgrade" rule stranded the display and unticking would have been another silent no-op. It is now offered the release build, reported as channel-return.
• The return requires evidence that the display was actually served the beta channel (devices.ota_channel_served, written once when it changes rather than on every check). Returning every non-opted-in display that happens to run a pre-release would have dragged existing testers back to stable the moment their server upgraded — the precise harm the opt-in exists to prevent. A tester who is ahead of the server on a build of their own is left alone, as before.

Cut beta builds with the same versionCode as the stable release they branch from. Android refuses to install a lower versionCode, so a beta numbered above stable can be installed but never returned without uninstalling the app — which loses the display's pairing. Equal numbers install in both directions, and that is what makes switching back physically possible.

Verified end to end against a live server with two real signed APKs: stable served 1.9.26, beta served 1.9.27-rc1, an unknown channel fell back to stable, deleting the version file deactivated the channel mid-run, and the opt-in → serve → switch-back lifecycle produced offer, up-to-date and channel-return in order.

1.9.26

Android playback fixes for #234, and a way to hand someone a test build without it reverting. The YouTube fault below was not specific to the reporter: any playlist containing a YouTube item stopped rotating at that item, on every Android display, indefinitely.

Fixed — Android playback

• A YouTube item now ends on its configured duration. It never ended at all: images and widgets get a timer, ordinary videos end on playback completion, and a YouTube link is played by loading an embed into a WebView — which reports no completion, and had no timer armed for it. The item's duration_sec was passed to the player and never read. The web and Tizen players already timed YouTube off its duration; Android was the only player that did not, so this restores parity rather than inventing behaviour. Local and remote video are untouched and still end on completion, so clips are not cut short.
• A playlist change is no longer stranded behind an item that never ends. #157 defers a change when the item on screen is dropped from the new list, applying it at the next advance. With a YouTube item that advance never came, so assigning a different playlist appeared to be ignored. Two guards: an empty list is never deferred (clearing a playlist is an operator saying stop, not an item rotating out), and a deferral now has a 60-second deadline so no future item type that ends on a callback can strand one again.

Verified on an Android 12 emulator against the reporter's exact shape (a 5s image and a long YouTube video set to 10s): thirteen clean cycles at exactly the configured durations, a playlist swap applying immediately while the YouTube item was on screen, and a clear stopping playback entirely.

Fixed — "No playlist" did nothing

• A display's playlist can now actually be cleared. The dashboard offered a No playlist option whose handler discarded the selection (if (!newPlaylistId) return; // Don't allow deselecting for now) — no request, no change, no error. The guard was honest about why: there was no way to do it. PUT /devices/:id has never read playlist_id, and POST /playlists/:id/assign can only set one. New DELETE /api/devices/:id/playlist, device-scoped because there is no playlist to authorize against when clearing, gated by the same ownership check as every other device mutation. Clearing an already-clear display is a no-op success, and the empty playlist is pushed to the device so the screen stops rather than holding the old content.

Added — per-display pre-release opt-in

• "Accept pre-release builds", a checkbox beside the existing self-update toggle (devices.ota_beta, default off). Handing someone a test build was a trap: a prerelease sorts below its own release (1.9.25-fix234d < 1.9.25), so a sideloaded display asked for updates, was correctly told the release was newer, and updated itself straight back off the build it had been given — same versionCode, so Android installed it without complaint. Silent, within minutes. It cost the #234 reporter an evening of testing code that had already been replaced under them.

  Narrow where it should be: it holds only a prerelease of the core already installed. A plain release, a -patchN build, an upgrade to a newer core, and a display ahead of the server all behave exactly as before, and a fleet that never sets the flag is unaffected. Wide where it must be: an opted-in display is exempt from the superseded-prerelease guard, which would otherwise pin a tester on an old build permanently — opting in must never mean never updating again.

  Note this is an opt-out of being reverted, not a second distribution channel: the server still serves one APK, so a beta build is still installed by hand.

Documentation

• The published API reference had drifted to 1.9.0 while 1.9.25 shipped, because bump-version.sh updated every other version source and not docs/openapi.yaml. It now does, and a contract test fails if the two diverge.
• A device's two network addresses are documented and told apart — ip_address is the public/WAN address the server observed on connect, local_ip is the display's own LAN address as reported by the player — along with the rest of the telemetry block, none of which was in the spec despite being returned. wifi_ssid's "permission" value is documented as a sentinel, not a network name.
• README catch-up: the public API, why a display might not self-update, what a delete-and-re-pair restores (including that a block deliberately survives it), hidden plans, and the optional location permission behind the Wi-Fi network name.
• CHANGELOG backfilled for 1.9.3 through 1.9.25, which had no entries at all. bump-version.sh now warns when a release is cut without one.

1.9.25

Android playback and account-admin fixes. Closes #234 — a playlist that only ever showed its first item — plus the registration loop feeding it, and three issues found by the same reporter in an afternoon of testing.

Fixed — Android playback (#234)

• A playlist no longer restarts at item one every time the Activity is rebuilt. PlaylistController is owned by MainActivity, so each rebuild handed it a fresh, empty instance; the playlist then arrived, looked like a first load, and playback began from index 0. On a device rebuilding at every item boundary the second item held the screen for ~135ms — invisible, which is why it read as "only one item plays" rather than "it glitches". Playback position now lives outside the object being rebuilt and resumes if the save is recent (cold starts, stale saves and shrunk playlists all still begin at item one).
• A player no longer re-registers itself once per playlist item. Every advance asked for a playlist refresh, and a refresh emits a full device:register — so a 10-second image re-registered six times a minute, per device, forever, each one running the whole identity path and pushing a playlist back down. The heartbeat already refreshes every 60s, so the per-item call was duplicating a pull that happens anyway. Measured on the reproduction: 9 registrations for 9 plays → 3.
• A leaked callback no longer relaunches the app in a loop. ProvisioningActivity left its service callbacks attached after pairing, so later events re-entered a finished activity and restarted it — a white flash on every cycle, since Android 12+ draws a splash screen on each relaunch. Measured: 240 activity starts in 180s → 0.

Fixed — account administration

• Unblock now sticks. Per-device settings are keyed to the hardware and deliberately restore blocked across a delete + re-pair, so a block cannot be shrugged off by deleting the display. Unblock only ever cleared the live copy, so the saved copy put the block straight back on the next re-pair and there was no way out from the dashboard. Unblock now clears both; blocking still survives a re-pair, which is the property that made this worth getting right.
• A refused device says why. A blocked panel sat on "Connecting to server" with nothing surfacing the server's rejection.

Added

• Every plan is visible to platform admins, with how many accounts, organizations and displays are on each, plus a flag for accounts pointing at a plan that no longer exists. A plan hidden from the public pricing page was previously invisible to the operator too.
• Player permissions can be reviewed and revoked from the setup screen. Each row stays visible once granted and becomes Manage, instead of disappearing and leaving no way back.

1.9.24

OTA control for managed panels. Everything here is about not stranding a display: an operator override, a retry budget that reflects what a retry actually costs, and a stand-down that only fires when it should.

Fixed — OTA

• Self-OTA now stands down only for a genuine foreign device owner. The check was broad enough that a stock Android panel with no MDM at all logged "self-OTA stands down" and stopped updating.
• OTA_ALLOW_MANAGED_DEVICES lets an operator override the stand-down when they run an MDM that does not distribute the player. Off by default. See the README before enabling — it does not grant the ability to install silently.
• The install retry budget went from 3 attempts to 40, and flagging moved to 3. Telling an operator a panel needs a human and giving up on that panel are separate decisions, and they were wired to the same number. A retry is nearly free — the APK is downloaded and signature-checked once and reused from cache, so later attempts pull no bytes. Past the budget it settles to about one attempt a day, indefinitely; a new version clears the count.
• "Force update" is now actually forceful, and reports back. It ignores the back-off, the attempt count and the MDM stand-down, and says what happened — including "already up to date", which used to return in silence and made a working button look broken.

Fixed — playback

• A wipe hands the frame back cleanly at the end, instead of briefly revealing the outgoing image through the transition surface.
• Turning off follower mode re-arms self-advance, so a display taken out of a synchronized group no longer freezes on whatever was on screen.

1.9.23

Scheduling on a touchscreen, and internationalization. The weekly calendar becomes directly manipulable, and a large batch of user-facing strings that were never translated go through t().

Added

• The week calendar is directly manipulable — drag and resize blocks, with grab targets big enough for a finger, gestures that work on a touchscreen, pointer handlers bound once rather than per render, and a single-day view for when a week will not fit.
• Schedules that run past midnight draw correctly.
• The calendar opens on the working day and explains what it is for.
• Empty states tell you what to do next, based on what the account actually contains.
• MAX_FILE_SIZE is parsed properly (bytes or a 2GB / 1500MB suffix), and the README documents the reverse proxy and CDN limits that cap an upload independently — raising the app limit alone often changes nothing (#233).
• An opt-in browser smoke test, deliberately kept out of npm test.

Fixed

• Untranslated keys are no longer shipped as user-facing text.
• Teams says it is switched off rather than showing an empty list.
• Proof-of-play attributes a widget play to the widget that played.
• Members is in the nav, titles reveal on touch, and a stale heartbeat no longer kills a live socket.
• A player re-establishes a socket the server closed.

1.9.22

Player identity. Two panels running the same build could collapse into one dashboard row.

Fixed

• Each player install gets its own identity. The web player's fingerprint was derived from hardware characteristics alone, so two identical panels produced the same value and merged into a single device row. Identity is now per install.
• A screen-only panel can clear its identity from the URL, giving a way to split a panel that had already merged.
• Crash reports record where a player crashed, not only what it said.

1.9.21

Measurement fixes. Small, all about not lying in the numbers.

Fixed

• Event-loop lag reports zero for a window with no samples, instead of a stale figure.
• Auth rate-limit rejections are recorded, so they can be measured rather than inferred.
• A device fingerprint is only stored against a device that still exists.

1.9.20

Scheduling across a fleet, and alerting that does not repeat itself.

Added

• Every screen's schedule on one calendar, rather than one screen at a time.
• A schedule is stored in the timezone its screen runs in, so a fleet spanning timezones behaves the way an operator means it to.
• An unpaired player can be recovered without a keyboard — relevant on signage hardware with a remote and no text input.
• A BrightSign capability probe.
• Italian translation updated (#232).

Fixed

• One alert per outage instead of one per dedup window.
• Kiosk style values are validated as CSS rather than as HTML.
• A device's OTA rate state is cleared once it proves its identity.

1.9.19

Fixed

• Proof-of-play resolves content references rather than trusting a reported id.
• sharp updated to 0.35.x, and the corrupt PNG fixture that update exposed was repaired.

1.9.18

Fixed

• Device serialization is scoped to what each endpoint actually needs, rather than returning a whole device row everywhere.
• A solo widget stays mounted and sizes its keyboard to the viewport.
• Weather-radar example: the map stays centred and bounded, and counts only the warnings on screen.

1.9.17

Added

• Self-service password reset.

Fixed

• A pairing code expires on device liveness, not row age, so a slow setup no longer runs out of time while the panel is sitting on the code.

1.9.16

Hardening pass. Findings from an internal auth/authorization review, described here in the same neutral terms as the commits: this is a public repository and detail that only helps an attacker adds nothing for an operator deciding whether to upgrade. Upgrade.

Security / hardening

• Break-glass admin recovery is backed by a revocable, auditable grant.
• Access-gating six-digit codes are generated with a CSPRNG.
• The screenshot route is authorized against the device's workspace.
• Password login is bounded per account, not only per IP.
• The unauthenticated telemetry store is bounded and no longer writes rows.
• CF-Connecting-IP is trusted only from a Cloudflare peer, not from any trusted proxy.
• An upload's stored type is derived from file content, and uploads are never served as documents.

Fixed

• The release tarball keeps .env.example, and CI asserts it is there.

1.9.15

Fixed

• Webpage widgets carry an honest note: sites that refuse embedding do not work on a device, and no client-side signal can reliably tell "blocked" from "loading" (#230).
• The "Reload now" update toast is actually clickable (#229).

Changed

• Session token resolution centralised across the manual verify sites; the unused optionalAuth middleware dropped.

1.9.14

Fixed

• Trial expiry auto-downgrade actually fires (#228).
• 11 of 13 npm advisories resolved (lockfile only) (#225).

Added

• Stripe checkout accepts promotion codes (#227).

1.9.13

Content library. A batch of workflow features for libraries bigger than a handful of files.

Added

• Multi-file upload (#222), multi-select with batch delete and batch move (#224).
• Server-side search, type filter and sort (#221).
• Subtitle / caption support as a content property (#223).
• Unstable-connection mode — caps YouTube at 720p for weak Wi-Fi (#220).
• The Add Display modal shows the server URL, and /download/apk links GitHub Releases (#210).

Fixed

• YouTube ENDED safety net for Shorts and flaky Android TV (#219).
• Visible D-pad focus stroke on the Android setup buttons (#218).
• Uploads respect the current folder (#211).

1.9.12

Added

• TOTP two-factor authentication and email verification on signup.
• Proof-of-play on Android and Tizen, closing the Tizen parity gaps.
• Tizen SSSP install.
• Designer-made widgets can be edited in the designer again, including reconstruction of legacy ones (#207).

Fixed

• Web player cold-start crash from a hoisting error in renderSeq.
• The advance timer is reconciled on group/wall mode transitions (#200, #208).
• Weather elements can switch to metric (#206).

1.9.11

Added

• Transition engine — GL wipes across the web, Tizen and Android players, including image↔video transitions (#204).

Fixed

• Android supersede wedge and leak, plus a stale-video guard on web and Tizen (#205).

1.9.10

Directory board and widget stability.

Added

• Directory board: panel-ring scroll, in-place refresh, per-device frame diagnostic (#203), and JSON/CSV import with logo-replaces-title (#195).

Fixed

• A zero-duration widget no longer self-loops. It pegged the Android main thread (#198), and the server now floors duration_sec so no player can be handed the condition (#199).
• Buffered widget swap and schedule-aware solo-board hold, killing the directory-board black flicker (#202); decode-gated image double-buffer does the same for Tizen stills (#193, #187).
• Directory board scroll stutter from a seamless-loop gap mismatch (#197).
• The cross-origin header is set on the route that actually serves content (#196).
• Modals scroll instead of overflowing the viewport (#194).

1.9.9

Fixed

• Pairing: closed a deferred-offline reclaim race and made same-code adopt idempotent (#192).

1.9.8

Added

• Directory-search widget — interactive search of a directory board, live-synced (#188).
• Dashboard version loading indicator with an immediate first poll (#181).

Fixed

• YouTube Shorts render 9:16 instead of in a landscape frame (#184, #189).
• A stuck download back-off resets on content change and network reconnect (#170, #190).
• The soft keyboard appears for PIN/URL dialogs over immersive fullscreen (#191).
• Thumbnail images use data-auth-src in modals and views (#182), with hydration lazy by default (#185).
• Raspberry Pi setup handles both chromium-browser and chromium package names (#183).

1.9.7

Added

• SMTP transport as an alternative to Microsoft Graph for email (#173, #179).

Fixed

• A reinstalled panel reclaims its device row instead of being blocked (#180).

1.9.6

Added

• Device incident log — offline cause, network-vs-reboot, display-sleep (#175).
• IndexNow and landing-page optimization (#177); integrations internal linking (#178).

Fixed

• Tizen portrait and flipped video via AVPlay hardware-plane rotation — CSS rotation cannot touch the hardware video plane and produced a black screen (#170, #174).
• /integrations/ is served explicitly so the nav link is not the login page.
• CI uses OS-assigned ephemeral ports for subprocess suites, ending a port-collision flake (#176).

1.9.5

Group sync, device-owner foundation, and agency folders. The largest release in the 1.9.x line.

Added

• Per-group synchronized playback — every member of a group derives the same (index, position) from a server-disciplined clock and a deterministic schedule, so displays start and end each item together. Offline-native (no server needed at play time) and split-brain-proof (no leader role). Includes snap-on-load, a warm next-clip double buffer, and in-place duration edits (#167).
• Device-owner tier foundation — QR provisioning, content expiry, and the tier substrate the Tier-2 controls build on (#168).
• Tier 0/1 system controls with no device-owner dependency — volume, brightness and screen timeout on ordinary panels (#160, #169).
• Per-token upload folder for agency tokens — auto-created and subtree-confined (#158, #171).
• OTA self-update kill switch — global, per-device, and MDM auto-detect (#166).
• Dashboard version indicator with a GHCR update check (#165).

Fixed

• Rotation-aware media — a portrait photo is upright on both the dashboard and the player (#170, #172).
• bump-version.sh handles the env-overridable Android version (#168).

1.9.4

Added

• Hidden settings menu on Android, opened by a multi-tap BACK/ESC sequence and gated by a PIN; the PIN is server-provisioned per device and surfaced on the dashboard, replacing a hardcoded 0000 (#152).

Fixed

• A player sends its device id and token on reconnect before pairing (#164).
• Android provisioning and playback robustness.
• Playlist GET /:id returns item schedules, so the editor shows them (#156).
• Draft preview runs in a server-side session to bypass CSP (#151).
• Tizen player wedge on a shared #stage (same class as #162).

1.9.3

Liveness contract v4 and per-device settings that survive a re-pair. Follows 1.9.2-patch3.

Added

• Exit-signal contract v1 — a player tells the server it is going away, across the server, the APK, the .wgt and the browser player, so "offline" can distinguish a clean exit from a disappearance. Surfaced in the dashboard as an offline annotation with a tooltip, a filter drill-in and a list label.
• Liveness contract v4 — uniform heartbeat acknowledgement, ack-gap tracking, a throttle-aware client watchdog, browser lifecycle triggers, and an identity block, implemented across the server, the APK, the .wgt and the browser player. Includes a three-state dashboard liveness badge.
• Per-device settings survive delete + re-pair, keyed to the hardware fingerprint: a re-paired panel comes back with its name, orientation, timezone, notes and playlist already set (#150).

Fixed

• Legacy -patchN builds are treated as released versions, so the existing fleet is offered updates.
• Tizen: watchdog config-proofing, teardown hygiene, dead-screen self-heal, offline snapshot, keep-awake re-assert and a suspend/resume handler.
• Dashboard: device-detail.js parse and runtime errors that took out the whole view; liveness badge filter regression; list-view legibility.
• CSP allows the Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon to load and report.

1.9.2-patch2

Server/CMS-only field-safe net for #148 — NO Android APK, players unchanged. Makes the server absorb a device that opens duplicate/rapid sockets, so a thrashing PAIRED device converges to ONE stable connection and stays online. It does NOT fix the client opening duplicate sockets (the APK duplicate-socket root cause — separate track); #148 is not closed on this alone.

Fixed / hardened — eviction storm (#148)

• Per-device session-settle debounce. When a device_id with a LIVE incumbent socket opens another socket within a short window (SESSION_SETTLE_WINDOW_MS, default 2500ms), the duplicate is soft-refused and the incumbent kept — so a duplicate burst converges on one connection and the device stays online, instead of churning through evictions. This closes the gap the reconnect-throttle's 30s post-restart warm-up leaves open (during warm-up only the hard ceiling applies, so a burst passed undamped and each new socket evicted the prior). The debounce is warm-up-independent.
• Liveness safeguard: the incumbent is only kept if its socket is genuinely live; a dead/half-open incumbent is replaced — the device is never stranded offline.
• Soft refusal, never a quarantine (paired-safe); single-session enforcement intact for a legitimate move; unpaired/abusive flapping still caught by the existing limiters.

Operational note: a chunk of the observed churn was the warm-up window re-opening on every rapid patch redeploy — the debounce closes that in code, but reducing redeploy frequency independently reduces warm-up-window exposure.

Server/CMS only; ships no APK (versionCode still increments so a future player build is OTA-recognized). Docker: ghcr.io/screentinker/screentinker:1.9.2-patch2 (pre-release — :latest stays at 1.9.2).

1.9.2-patch1

Server/CMS-only connection-lifecycle hardening for #148 — NO Android APK, players stay on their current builds. This strictly HELPS and de-risks, but is NOT a guaranteed #148 fix: the MAXHUB client-side reconnect failure and the disconnect synchronizer (edge conntrack / reporting) are separate, unproven-here tracks that may still require a client update / a Bold Sophos-edge review — do not consider #148 fully closed on this patch alone.

Fixed / hardened — connection lifecycle (#148)

• The flap-limiter no longer quarantines legitimate PAIRED devices on reconnect churn. A paired + authenticated device reconnecting is exempt from the 30-min quarantine escalation (a brief soft cooldown at most), so a repeated edge/NAT flush behind one SNAT IP can no longer be amplified into a self-inflicted fleet-wide lockout. Unpaired/abusive flapping is still quarantined (the attacker / unprovisioned-hammering case is unchanged).
• Marking a device offline now also closes its socket, so DB-offline can't diverge from socket-state into a silent half-open the client is never told about.
• Faster half-open detection: ping interval 30s → 15s (the pong TIMEOUT is kept at 30s so decode-loaded TV WebKits aren't falsely dropped) → dead-peer detection 60s → 45s on BOTH the server AND the client (the client inherits these via the handshake — no APK needed).
• TCP SO_KEEPALIVE on every connection so a half-open TCP can't persist indefinitely at the OS layer.

Server/CMS version only; ships no APK (versionCode still increments so a future player build is OTA-recognized). Docker: ghcr.io/screentinker/screentinker:1.9.2-patch1 (pre-release — :latest stays at 1.9.2).

1.9.2

⚠ Major internal hardening release (the "#146" rewrite) — large blast radius. 1.9.2 rewrites the connection / maintenance / OTA hot paths to kill an event-loop death spiral, plus adds usage-metering (billing) and web-player fixes. If you bisect a regression to the 1.9.x line, 1.9.2 is the big one. Core invariant introduced: no synchronous op may block the event loop for more than ~50ms, ever. Every new subsystem has an env kill-switch.

Fixed — maintenance / prune (the death-spiral root cause)

• Non-blocking, chunked, per-device device_status_log prune. The old whole-table ROW_NUMBER sort froze boot for 40–48s at ~1M rows → healthcheck fail → restart loop that wiped in-memory throttle state → the spiral. Prune is now per-device, indexed, batched with setImmediate yields (lib/chunked-prune.js), async, re-entrant, and band-gated on the interval run (the startup prune is intentionally un-gated so a bloated table self-heals on first boot without freezing it). All table-growth sweeps (status-log, play-logs, provisioning, telemetry, lag) route through the chunked helper. New index idx_devices_provisioning. Measured worst-case event-loop gap under the storm harness: <300ms across 300k rows (was 40–48s).

Fixed — reconnect / flap

• Per-device flap-rate limiter (lib/flap-limiter.js): a device reconnecting faster than CONNECT_RATE_MAX (20) per CONNECT_RATE_WINDOW_MS (5min) is refused at the register gate, keyed via a SNAT-safe identity chain (device_id → fingerprint → token → one bounded global anon bucket) — never by IP (the whole fleet egresses one IP). After repeated trips a hard flapper is quarantined IN-MEMORY for 30min and auto-clears — it is NOT a durable DB block.
• Operator block kill-switch: POST /api/devices/:id/{block,unblock} + a dashboard button; the block check resolves the effective device_id via the identity chain so a device_id-less reconnect of a blocked device is still caught. Takes effect on next register, no restart.
• Also folded in: false-offline fixes (live-socket liveness beats a lagged heartbeat clock; evicted-socket re-arm race) and per-connection fail-fast so one device's handler throw can never exit the process.

Fixed — OTA (SNAT-safe)

• /api/update/check early-returns before any filesystem call when there's no offer; APK metadata is cached. /download/apk gains a band-aware global concurrency + rate guard that sheds with 503 Retry-After only under elevated/critical loop-lag — under normal band, downloads serve freely (a coordinated fleet rollout is never staggered when healthy). All limiting is global/aggregate — no per-IP limiting (SNAT).

Added — telemetry / logging / observability

• Batched event_loop_lag inserts (buffered, flushed every 10s) and coalesced high-frequency logging (one summarized line per key per 30s; band changes stay immediate).
• Throughput counters (running total + last-completed-window) in the /api/status debug block so a flapper/flood shows on the server itself (flap.refusedLastWindow climbing while band=normal = the limiter absorbing it cheaply). The debug block is now admin-toggleable (Admin tab, persisted, no restart; default follows STATUS_DEBUG_ENABLED).
• devices_connected on /api/status (always-on): the live WS-socket count from the heartbeat connection map (NOT the lagging devices.status='online' column).

Added — billing (usage metering)

• Billable Screens metering per the ByteTinker–Bold agreement — the contractual system-of-record. A durable daily rollup (device_usage_daily) is accumulated incrementally off the heartbeat tick from live presence (retention-independent), pruned chunked. Exposed on a dedicated, admin-gated GET /api/billing/usage route (NOT on /api/status; billing is revenue data). Readable via an owner-minted, revocable billing:read scoped token (scripts/mint-billing-token.js) that authorizes billing-read and nothing else, OR a platform-admin session. See docs/billing.md.

Fixed — web player

• "Unchanged" refresh no longer drops the video. On a reconnect the server re-emits device:paired while content is already playing; the player showed the idle "Waiting for content…" overlay unconditionally (covering live video; audio kept playing underneath) and the following "Playlist unchanged" left it up. Idle now shows only when genuinely idle, and an unchanged refresh is a strict no-op that leaves playback exactly as-is.
• Hardened PlayerMediaHealth call sites to guard by method (not object) so a stale-cached player module can't throw shouldShowIdle is not a function and abort a socket handler.

Added — translations

• Italian (it) locale updated (#145).

1.9.2-beta1 — unreleased

Fixed — server resilience (#142)

• A single flapping device can no longer saturate the event loop. A new load-aware, per-device reconnect throttle (lib/reconnect-throttle.js) gates genuine reconnects before the heavy register work (DB writes + playlist build). The verdict is per-device; global event-loop lag only multiplies an already-flagged device's backoff and never throttles a healthy one. Hard ceiling
  • cold-start warm-up so a full-fleet reconnect after a deploy is never throttled.
• device_status_log growth is bounded. Added idx_device_status_log_device_ts, a global retention sweep (pruneStatusLog, STATUS_LOG_RETENTION_DAYS default 3) covering removed/idle devices and the offline_timeout path, and de-duplicated the table's CREATE TABLE.
• content-ack spam de-duplicated. Repeated identical (device_id, content_id, status) reports are suppressed within CONTENT_ACK_DEDUP_MS (default 10s).
• Provisioning cleanup window corrected. Unclaimed provisioning devices are now swept after 24h (the code used 365 * 86400 — a year — contradicting its own comment).

Added — observability (#142)

• Event-loop lag telemetry via perf_hooks.monitorEventLoopDelay(). Sampled to a bounded event_loop_lag table (indexed + pruned, LAG_TELEMETRY_RETENTION_DAYS) and surfaced on /api/status as loop_lag (mean/p50/p99/max + band).

Maintenance

• Operators whose device_status_log is already bloated from a pre-1.9.2 deployment should reclaim disk with a one-time manual VACUUM in a maintenance window; retention now bounds further growth. Auto-VACUUM is intentionally not enabled. See docs/maintenance-device-status-log.md.

1.9.1-beta3 — unreleased

Fixed — Tizen player

• #118 Sticky "Not authenticated" banner. On TV sleep/wake the socket reconnects and a heartbeat could fire on the fresh, not-yet-registered socket; the server rejected it with device:auth-error, which the player showed as a sticky toast over still-playing content (and, worse, dropped its saved credentials and re-paired). Heartbeats are now gated on a per-connection authenticated flag (set only between device:registered and disconnect/auth-error), the heartbeat timer is stopped on connect/disconnect/ auth-error, the stale banner is cleared on device:registered, and the auth-error toast is non-sticky so any transient case self-clears.
• #119 app_version stuck at 1.0.0. The hardcoded constant made every Tizen device report 1.0.0 regardless of the installed .wgt. The version now resolves at runtime from config.xml via the Tizen application API, with a fallback constant that build-wgt.sh stamps from config.xml's version="".

Added — Tizen player

• Video walls (wall:sync). The Tizen player now supports wall membership: when the payload carries wall_config, a new WallController positions the stage (vw/vh) as this screen's slice of the wall and drives the single-zone player as leader or follower. The leader broadcasts wall:sync at 4Hz; followers align their index and keep their video locked to the leader's clock with a latency-compensated drift controller (hard-seek past 0.3s, gentle ±3% playbackRate nudge past 0.05s), and request an immediate position on (re)connect via wall:sync-request. Mirrors the web player (the Android player has no wall support). Per-tile rotation is not applied yet (web-player parity). Wall emits are gated on auth + connection so a pre-register tick can't trip device:auth-error.
• Multi-zone layouts (Android parity). The Tizen player now renders assigned layouts, not just fullscreen single-zone. A new ZoneRenderer (ports the Android ZoneManager) positions zones by percent geometry with z_index/fit_mode/background, groups assignments by zone_id (unassigned content goes to the first zone), and rotates each zone independently with the same per-item schedule gating (#74/#75). app.js selects the renderer from payload.layout; single-zone playback is unchanged. (Video walls wall:sync are still Android-only.)
• #121 Remote commands. Added a device:command handler (refresh, launch, screen_on, screen_off, plus honest no-op toasts for update/reboot/shutdown, which need B2B/MDM privileges a sideloaded app lacks). Removed the dead device:reload listener (the server never emitted it) in favour of device:command refresh.
• #120 Dashboard preview. Added device:screenshot-request / device:remote-start / device:remote-stop. Images capture for real; <video>/YouTube fall back to a status card because the TV's hardware video plane and cross-origin iframes can't be read into a <canvas>. See tizen/README.md for the support matrix.
• #122 Updates / boot. Documented the supported paths — .wgt re-sideload or URL Launcher/MDM refresh for updates, and display-level kiosk/URL-Launcher settings for auto-launch on boot (there is no in-app OTA or config.xml autostart for a sideloaded consumer TV web app).

1.9.0 — 2026-06-11

Added

• Per-playlist-item schedules. Each playlist item can carry one or more schedule blocks — active days, a start/end time-of-day, and optional start/end dates. An item plays when the screen's local "now" matches at least one block; an item with no blocks always plays. Edit per item via the clock icon in the playlist editor (a badge summarises the schedule on each row).
  • #74 dayparting: time-of-day + day-of-week windows, including overnight windows that cross midnight (a Fri 22:00–02:00 block is active Sat 01:00).
  • #75 auto-expire: inclusive start/end dates; an item past its end date stops showing automatically — even on offline screens, because evaluation is on-device.
• All three players (web, Android, Tizen) evaluate schedules client-side against their own clock, so dayparting and expiry work offline. They share one evaluator contract, shared/schedule-vectors.json — 39 conformance vectors covering DST (US + AU), overnight-wrap day anchoring, timezone correctness, and date boundaries. CI runs the vectors against the JS evaluator (node) and the Kotlin port (Gradle/JUnit); the Tizen copy is byte-identical to the JS source and checked under node.
• Device detail now shows the screen's reported timezone and clock, with a clock-skew warning when the device clock differs from the server by more than 2 minutes (a bad device clock makes schedules fire at the wrong local time).

Changed — device-level schedule timezone (behaviour change)

• Device/group schedule overrides (the existing calendar feature) are now evaluated in each device's effective timezone instead of the server's local time. Previously the schedules.timezone field was never applied and "07:00" meant the server's 07:00. Now "07:00" means the screen's 07:00 — which is what was intended.
  • Who is affected: self-hosters whose server timezone differs from their screens' timezone — their existing device schedules will shift to fire at the screens' local time. Single-timezone deployments (server and screens in the same zone) are unaffected. A device with no timezone set and not reporting one falls back to the server clock (unchanged from before).

Fixed

• #81 — release APK is now v1 + v2 + v3 signed. With minSdk 26, the Android Gradle Plugin defaulted the v1 (JAR) signature off, producing a v2-only APK that some MDM-managed commercial signage (e.g. MAXHUB via the Pivot MDM) silently removes on the next reboot — so screens that power-cycle nightly lost the app and fell back to the setup screen. Setting enableV1Signing = true had no effect at minSdk ≥ 24; the release build now re-signs with apksigner and a low --min-sdk-version to emit the JAR signature alongside v2/v3. Verified to install and run on Android 14+/API 36 as well.

Notes

• Scheduling fails open. If the on-device evaluator ever errors (bad timezone id, malformed block), the item plays rather than being hidden. A blank screen is worse than an over-running promo — this is a guarantee, enforced in all three players.
• Windows are enforced at item boundaries: a long item finishes before the schedule is re-checked, so it can overshoot its window by up to its own duration.
• A single video with a schedule now re-renders at each loop boundary so its window can be re-evaluated; seamless native looping still applies to unscheduled single videos. Deliberate tradeoff — a brief seam each loop for a scheduled lone video, in exchange for its daypart/expiry actually being honoured.
• Re-publish required: editing a schedule puts the playlist into draft; publish to push schedules to devices. Existing published playlists keep playing unchanged until re-published.
• Players that predate this release ignore the new fields and keep playing everything (graceful degradation) — update players to honour schedules.