Large HEIC, TIFF and AVIF photos no longer reboot boards with little memory, and other fixes

Installing from a Raspberry Pi's own screen no longer locks you out, the server stops logging a Redis timeout every few seconds while the web interface is open, and the installer warns you before it discards your edits to the Anthias checkout.

August 5, 2026

Fixes

• On boards with less than 1.5 GB of RAM, such as the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3, a HEIC, TIFF, AVIF or other photo that Anthias converts to WebP on upload is first shrunk to fit within the pixel count of 1920x1080, keeping its shape. In the project's testing, a 24 megapixel photo used more memory than the board could give the conversion, and the board rebooted. JPEG and PNG uploads got the same treatment in Anthias 2026.08.1.
• On a Raspberry Pi, running the installer from the player's own screen and keyboard blanked the screen partway through and removed the login prompt, which left you locked out if SSH was off. This happened since Anthias 2026.05.1. The install now finishes on screen, and the login prompt is still gone after the reboot at the end, as intended.
• While the web interface was open, the server logged a Redis timeout and an Exception in ASGI application error about every 5 seconds. It no longer does.
• The API's file_asset, recover and assets/order endpoints answer a request body that's a JSON list instead of an object with a 400 response, instead of a 500.
• Running the Ansible playbook yourself on a PC or other board that isn't a Raspberry Pi no longer fails at the step that writes the Raspberry Pi boot settings.

Improvements

• When the installer is about to discard your edits to files tracked in the Anthias checkout, it prints a warning first. It still discards them. Untracked files are left alone.
• When the Docker repository key is already on the player, the installer no longer downloads it again, so a machine prepared ahead of time doesn't need network access for that step.

For contributors

• The Ruff linter now runs its expanded default rule set (about 413 rules, up from 59), and the findings across the codebase were fixed. BLE001 (blind except) stays off on purpose, because the player is meant to degrade rather than crash.
• Tests cover the entry point of the GStreamer framebuffer video player used on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3.
• The Anthias website's API page has an overview of the base URL, versioning, authentication and errors, the guide to migrating to Screenly covers what gets migrated and how to troubleshoot it, and broken links across the site are fixed.

Python and front-end dependencies and GitHub Actions were updated.