🚀 XC_VM v2.5.2

✨ Major Features

🎬 Player v2

• Added the new Player v2 web application with dedicated frontend assets, SPA scripts, styles and vendored libraries.
• Added Player v2 access-code authentication and scope wiring.
• Added stream and subtitle token generation through the centralized token system.
• Added Active Code login support for Player v2.
• Hardened Player v2 against IDOR and XSS vulnerabilities.
• Added output restrictions and protection against empty output configurations.
• Improved legacy player integration and controller compatibility.
• Restored player resize authorization checks.
• Made channel listings fail-closed when ACL validation fails.
• Added escaping for catalog poster URLs and category emoji.

🎟️ Active Codes & Category Templates

• Expanded the Smart Activation Codes system with the complete code lifecycle.
• Integrated Active Codes into reseller and admin line/MAG workflows.
• Added category-template custom_data support to activation codes.
• Added admin and reseller interfaces for Category Templates.
• Added automatic application of template custom_data to supported entities.
• Restricted applyToAll operations according to template visibility.
• Improved Active Code tables using the standard DataTable implementation.
• Localized Active Code management pages and restored missing ac_* translations.
• Added server-side voucher details rendering.
• Fixed package and bouquet selection, null handling and reseller portal URLs.
• Fixed device-locked activation codes so they can only be used by their assigned device.
• Prevented concurrent requests from activating the same code more than once.
• Fixed an information disclosure issue where locked codes could expose their bound MAC address.

🔐 Security

• Added a unique per-install OPENSSL_EXTRA secret for stronger installation-specific cryptographic isolation.
• Added tamper-proof stream tokens using AES-256-GCM, configurable per panel.
• Hardened stream authentication by performing constant-time comparisons for shared secrets and HMAC stream links.
• Hardened admin and reseller authentication with fresh session IDs and improved session-cookie handling.
• Restored login flood protection for blocked addresses.
• Hardened image-resize requests against SSRF and DNS rebinding.
• Added TLS verification for outbound image requests, with TLS verification disabled only for trusted servers.
• Removed credentialed reflected-Origin CORS behavior from the Player API.
• Hardened reseller API authentication against operator-precedence issues.
• Prevented empty output configurations from bypassing authorization logic.
• Improved device and activation-code authorization boundaries.

🏗️ Bootstrap & Core Architecture

BootKernel

• Replaced the monolithic procedural XC_Bootstrap flow with an injectable BootKernel pipeline.
• Added dedicated PSR-4 ConstantsInitializer and ErrorResponder components.
• Consolidated legacy bootstrap prelude shims into ConstantsInitializer::init().
• Routed Web API database initialization through the shared bootstrap stages.
• Removed redundant require_once operations from the streaming bootstrap path.
• Centralized STATUS_* initialization.
• Added explicit handling for bootstrap stage skip paths and side-effect stages.
• Converted remaining procedural prelude code into backward-compatible shims.
• Added documentation describing the purpose and lifecycle of the bootstrap system.
• Removed stale documentation references to the old prelude files.

⚙️ Configuration

• Moved frequently edited release constants to clearly visible top-of-file define() declarations.
• Improved boolean configuration handling with the corrected getBool() behavior.
• Hardened Web API profile guards and handling of falsy HTTP status codes.
• Fixed fanout idle-buffer ratio handling so decimal values such as 0.25 are accepted.

🧹 Code Quality & Refactoring

Rector Migration

• Added a dedicated Rector refactoring infrastructure with configuration, documentation and Make targets.
• Applied reviewed Rector transformations across core, streaming, public controllers and Ministra components.
• Performed multiple convergence passes to simplify control flow and remove dead code.
• Decomposed RadioService::process() and its massEdit() logic into smaller tested helpers.
• Improved type declarations throughout the codebase.
• Corrected overly restrictive automatically inferred parameter types.
• Added nullable PID support across process-management paths.
• Restored access-control conditions affected by automated transformations.
• Reverted unsafe __DIR__ include transformations that could break table loading.
• Converted inline \XcVm\... fully-qualified references to normal PSR-4 imports.
• Reworked database access to use DatabaseAware::db() instead of passing the global $db through call chains.
• Added additional Router, Translator and parsing cleanups.

🎨 Coding Standards

• Adopted the project's K&R + tab formatting convention across the codebase.
• Required parameter type hints as part of the coding-standard migration.
• Updated PHPCS rules and documented the remaining exceptions.
• Kept extract() prohibited while explicitly allowing selected safe is_null() usage.
• Resolved PHPStan and PHPCS failures introduced during the refactoring work.
• Updated the PHPStan dependency.

🧪 Testing

• Added broader bootstrap tests covering stage execution, skipped stages and side effects.

• Added a dual-backend test database supporting SQLite and MariaDB.

• Added panel-aware test skipping for environments where integration tests cannot run.

• Expanded core test coverage for:

  • Database and migrations
  • Settings and repositories
  • FileCache
  • Authorization
  • Brute-force protection
  • DomainResolver
  • RequestManager
  • XML streaming
  • HTTP request abstractions and sanitizers
  • Update channels
  • Module extension registries

• Added tests for ChannelService mass-edit and ordering branches.

• Improved the SQLite test harness after strict-typing changes.

• Moved phpunit.phar into the tests/ directory and updated references.

• Reduced test-run noise from stdout and error_log.

📊 Admin UI

• Restored the Users navigation tabs from the bottom "More" catch-all menu.
• Fixed saving edits from the new UI returning an empty page.
• Fixed adding streams without an icon.
• Fixed deletion of unpaired MAG and Enigma2 devices.
• Restored the Streams page Resources column data.
• Fixed CPU information so it is populated correctly from the first resource pass and remains available.
• Added responsive-table configuration at the panel level.
• Added profile appearance/customizer options to the user profile editor.
• Added bouquet sorting controls for moving entries up, down, to the top or to the bottom.
• Applied the live-channel filter correctly on the live connections page.

📺 VOD & Streaming

• Added MediaAnalyzedEvent dispatch after successful VOD media analysis.
• Improved VOD stream Range worker lifetime during concurrent requests.
• Exposed bouquet ID, name and order through bouquet listing output.
• Added safeguards around cached FileCache instances and static cache deletion helpers.
• Fixed database connections to explicitly use utf8mb4.
• Improved handling of nullable database hosts for CLI bootstrap compatibility.
• Fixed CLI monitor crashes caused by nullable process IDs.
• Fixed server permission handling when permissions are null.
• Improved live/on-demand and fanout-related authentication and process handling.

🛠️ Stability & Bug Fixes

• Fixed stream resource reporting and restored missing resource information.
• Fixed new UI edit submissions returning empty responses.
• Fixed stream creation when no icon is supplied.
• Fixed deletion of devices that have not yet been paired.
• Fixed several nullability issues exposed by stricter typing.
• Fixed transactional database operations so an Error also triggers a rollback.
• Fixed concurrent on-demand viewer startup so multiple viewers do not start the same stopped stream more than once.
• Fixed various authentication, access-control and process-management edge cases.
• Fixed stale configuration and documentation references left behind by the bootstrap migration.

📚 Documentation & Maintenance

• Reworked bootstrap documentation to describe the new BootKernel architecture.
• Updated contributor and development infrastructure to support the ongoing Rector/PSR-4 modernization.
• Removed obsolete bootstrap references and unused legacy code paths.
• Integrated dependency updates and community pull requests.
• Continued migration toward stricter typing, test coverage and maintainable PSR-4 architecture.