Web page transitions stop flashing another page, and other fixes

"No cache" web pages are fetched fresh every time they show, a player that booted with no display shows a picture once one is plugged in, and upgrades no longer stop partway on boards short on memory. This release shows itself as 2026.07.1 in System Info.

July 13, 2026

Version number

Anthias 2026.07.2 reports itself as 2026.07.1. System Info shows v2026.07.1, so does anthias_version in /api/v2/info, and outside balena the "Update available" badge on System Info stays on until you move to a newer release. You're running 2026.07.2 all the same. Anthias 2026.07.3 reports its own version correctly.

Fixes

• On a Raspberry Pi 4 (64-bit), a Raspberry Pi 5, x86 and other boards with 2 GB of RAM or more, moving from one web page to the next could briefly show a different page from the rotation. Every transition now goes straight to the next page. These boards now run one web view instead of two, which frees about 100 MB of memory in the project's testing.
• A web page asset with "No cache" turned on could still come from the cache when it came around again. It's now fetched fresh every time it's shown.
• On a Raspberry Pi 5, x86 or a generic arm64 board such as the Rock Pi 4, a player that booted with no display plugged in could stay black after you plugged one in. The viewer now restarts itself about a minute after the display appears, and the picture comes up. A display that was plugged in but switched off at boot still stayed black until Anthias 2026.08.0.
• The viewer no longer keeps everything the video player prints in memory, only the last 64 KB. Some MP4 files make the video decoder print a warning for every frame, and on a 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 with large files that output filled the memory and blanked the screen for minutes between assets. A report after this fix says long blank gaps can still happen on such a board.
• On boards with less than 1.5 GB of RAM, such as a 1 GB Raspberry Pi 3B+, cycling through web pages could fill the memory until the screen went black. Web pages on those boards now run in Chromium's low-memory mode, and the "Low-RAM mode" note on System Info says so.
• An upgrade could stop partway on a board short on memory, at the Ansible step that turns swap off. The upgrade now stops the Anthias containers first, skips turning swap off when memory is tight, and carries on if that step still fails.

Improvements

• Selecting several assets and choosing "Edit" also lets you set "No cache" and "Skip asset check", each to on or off, alongside the dates, duration, play times and weekdays it already covered.
• The API reference on the Anthias website shows endpoint paths, status codes and field names. It used to show them as 0, 1, 2 and so on.

For contributors

• bin/start_viewer.sh is split into a shared script and one per display stack (Wayland, eglfs and linuxfb) under bin/lib/viewer/, with no change in behavior.
• The ANTHIAS_LOW_RAM variable for the viewer container is gone, since every board now runs a single web view.
• Error reports to Sentry leave out more expected events: requests with a Host header the player doesn't answer to, a browser that disconnects while the web interface is being told about a change or while a file is still downloading, and the warnings about missing or outdated basic-auth credentials that a database upgrade can log. The background task that recovers assets stuck in processing now stops cleanly at its time limit instead of being killed.
• The Anthias website publishes llms.txt and llms-full.txt.
• More test coverage for the import providers, the viewer and timezone handling.

Dependency updates also went in, among them Pillow, uvicorn and TypeScript, which moved to version 7, plus GitHub Actions.