New and changed assets reach the screen without a restart, and other fixes

Backups from Settings download without timing out, content on your local network is no longer skipped, and installs on 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS and on the Raspberry Pi 3 run to the end.

July 2, 2026

Fixes

• In Anthias 2026.06.3 the viewer could miss content you added or changed. On a fresh device the first item you added never appeared, and the screen stayed on the standby image until the viewer restarted. New and changed content now reaches the screen on its own.
• Settings > Backup & restore > "Get backup" starts downloading as soon as you click it. On a device with a large content library, the download sat at 0 B until the whole archive was built, and could time out.
• Content on your local network, such as an intranet page, a file on a NAS or a page served by another container on the same player, is no longer marked unreachable and skipped. Before, it showed when you added it, then dropped out of the playlist after a reboot or the next reachability check. Anthias checks those addresses like any other now, so the ANTHIAS_ALLOW_PRIVATE_FETCH variable, which used to let them through, isn't needed anymore.
• On a Raspberry Pi 3 running 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS, which starts a 64-bit kernel by default, the installer and upgrade_containers.sh picked the 64-bit image, and the download failed with no matching manifest for linux/arm/v8. They now pick the 32-bit pi3 image.
• Installing on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 64-bit OS no longer stops with Required environment variables missing or invalid.
• Installing on 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS no longer stops with fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory.
• Installing on a minimal Debian Trixie image, such as Armbian on a Rock Pi 4, no longer stops partway when you let Anthias manage the network. The installer adds polkitd, which NetworkManager needs there.
• A display power check or a usage telemetry report that hung for more than 30 seconds was killed along with the background worker process running it. It now gives up after 30 seconds and tries again on the next run. On a Raspberry Pi the display power check could still hang past that limit until Anthias 2026.08.1.
• The viewer's stop and play commands pause and resume the playlist. Before, stop only skipped to the next item and play did nothing. Restoring a backup in Settings sends both, so the screen now holds still while a restore runs.
• Mistakes on the Settings page, such as passwords that don't match or a wrong current password, are no longer reported to Sentry as errors. Through the API, PATCH /api/v2/device_settings answers such a mistake with its reason, where it used to return An error occurred while saving settings.
• Tall dialogs, such as "Edit asset" with its error message and advanced options open, scroll inside the window, so their buttons stay on screen.

Improvements

• Web pages shown by Anthias send a User-Agent that ends in Anthias/ and the release, such as Anthias/2026.07.0, so a site's server can tell a request came from an Anthias screen.
• The installer refreshes the package lists once instead of twice.
• The x86 installation guide explains what to do when you set a root password while installing Debian, which leaves sudo uninstalled.

For contributors

• The Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 viewer image builds its web view with Debian's crossbuild-essential-armhf cross compiler. The Linaro toolchain download it used before is gone, which had stopped those image builds and kept the latest-<board> tags from moving.
• The hourly balena job that unpins devices knows the pi3-64 and Rock Pi 4 fleets, which had made every run end in an error.
• New tests cover bulk asset actions, multi-file upload, display blanking, dark mode, streaming links, the backup download, the Pi 5 codec rules and the reachability check.

Dependency updates also went in, among them yt-dlp, which downloads YouTube videos, from 2026.3.17 to 2026.6.9, plus the Redis client, the Sentry SDK, ansible-core and GitHub Actions.