What's new
- New stream menu, the same on Android and desktop: a panel of compact tiles with the game and the stream's mode (such as 1440p · 144 FPS · HEVC HDR) on top, and Return to stream, Disconnect and Quit game always in view. Rarely used items moved to More.
- Your keyboard shortcuts are tiles in the menu, beside Task Manager, Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, Start menu and Show desktop. Add shortcut picks the keys with a controller or touch, right from the stream.
- With a controller, Y opens the keyboard, X the controller mouse, RB the overlay, LB your shortcuts and B returns to the stream; the first tile has focus at once.
- Settings → Controls → Stream menu holds how the menu opens and your shortcuts. On Android it adds an optional floating menu button you can drag anywhere.
- Desktop's menu also offers Close game, Quit game and End host session, each asking first.
- The modern on-screen controller's sticks move like real ones: pushed all the way, the knob rides out to the edge of its base and half of it reaches past the ring, lifted on a soft shadow, so you see how far you are pushing. Input, dead zone and layouts stay the same.
- Hold Guide to open the stream menu: holding a controller's Guide (or Back, with Back button as Guide) for 1 second opens the stream menu; a short press still goes to the PC as Guide. Off, 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2 seconds in Settings.
- The classic on-screen controls get an opacity per control: while resizing, touch a control and set its opacity beside its size.
- In the stream menu's bitrate dialogs, D-pad Up and Down move between the slider and the fields at once.
- Desktop: on Windows the title bar is dark like the rest of Nightjar.
- Desktop: with a controller, the first press of the D-pad, a stick or A picks the first item when nothing is selected.
- Desktop: long pages such as Settings scroll along as the D-pad moves through them.
- Desktop: Up and Down move past sliders and number fields, in Settings and the stream menu; Left and Right change them.
- Desktop: B on the home screen offers to close Nightjar, with Cancel selected.
- Desktop: holding Guide for a second opens the stream menu; "Hold Guide to open the stream menu" changes the time or turns it off. A short press of Guide still goes to the PC.
- When the PC ends a stream on an error, Nightjar asks the PC why and shows its answer in the error dialog (for example that HDR is on but the display is not in HDR), on Android and on Windows and Linux. PCs that don't say keep the error as before.
- A stream the PC closes before its first picture no longer tells you to close protected videos or restart the PC: the game has usually just closed, so the message says to start it again.
- AV1 on MediaTek TVs and sticks gets only the low-latency switches, no queue, wait or skip settings: both earlier presets showed rainbow colours on a Fire TV.
- 4K streams at high bitrates start with an input buffer large enough for a keyframe, so the decoder no longer restarts mid-stream to grow it.
- Android: plugging in headphones, connecting Bluetooth or a USB DAC mid-stream reopens the low-latency audio output on the new device, instead of leaving it for the slower fallback output (with its higher latency and no gap concealment) for the rest of the stream.
- Android and desktop: when the device's audio clock runs a little slower than the PC's, the client now trims the extra audio one packet at a time with a short fade. Before, audio latency crept up by up to 40 ms over about 20 minutes, then a packet was cut with a click.
- A decoder error late in a long stream is recovered again: the ten recoveries a stream gets now refill after 600 good frames and 10 seconds, instead of running out after ten errors hours apart.
- A decoder that stops taking input is reset once before the stream ends, and the stream still ends with a reason if that reset hangs too.
- Desktop: with "PC's frame times", the hardware decoder gets enough surfaces for every picture held after a network hiccup, so its next frames no longer fail at high frame rates.
- Desktop: with V-Sync on, controller buttons and sticks, mouse clicks and, with "Capture system keys" on, keys are now sent while a frame is being shown instead of after it. On Linux this covers controllers.
- Desktop: after updating, Nightjar lists once the PCs and games that keep their own settings, with Reset all. Before 4.1.1, pressing A on a PC setting could keep it for every game without a choice.
- Experimental: Smoothest and the frame rate limit no longer keep a frame or two of extra decoder delay for up to a minute after a stream starts or recovers (seen on the NVIDIA Shield). Once the extra delay has lasted about 1.5 seconds, Nightjar skips one waiting frame at a time until it is gone, then shows every frame again.
Tested. On the Retroid Pocket 6 in a live stream, Hold Guide and a controller's Back opened the new menu with focus on its first tile, the header named the stream's real mode (1080p · 120 FPS · AV1), a shortcut added with the controller alone reached the PC after the menu closed, and the floating menu button kept its place after a drag; the desktop menu opened, navigated by keyboard and sent a shortcut to the PC. The new stick drew its knob over the ring at full push with input unchanged, and the classic stick looked as before. There, a decoder that stopped taking input was reset once and the stream then ended with the reason and Disconnect / Reconnect, with no freeze or ANR; two 22 min streams showed no audio latency creep before or after the drift change, so the trim never had to act there. On Windows, the PC's reason for an oversize stream appeared in the error dialog, and the one-time list of PCs with their own settings reset them, in English and German. 4164 Android unit tests with no lint errors and 1103 Rust client tests pass. The audio route change, Linux controllers and the desktop input timing are not tested on hardware yet.