What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.11.6
This release fixes crashes on Echo Shows when showing album art or photos and keeps a camera working when its driver never answers a JPEG capture. Home Assistant connecting no longer takes a camera snapshot. Screensaver videos can now follow Fill the screen and stop with the photo timer, and plugin screensavers can tint the widgets.
Improvements
- Pick how long screensaver videos play (#1298). A new Video length row on the Immich Media, Home Assistant Media, Local Media and Photo Gallery screensaver pages, on the kiosk and in the remote admin. Whole video (the default, as before) plays each video to its end. Same as photos stops a video once its seconds per photo run out or at its end if it is shorter, so a long clip no longer holds the screen for minutes. See Screensavers.
- The voice overlay leaves more room for the answer on short screens (#1306). The command now stays on one line with its line breaks removed and ends with an ellipsis if it does not fit. Above 100%, Text size grows the command and tool lines at half the rate of the answer. On an Echo Show 5 this shows about one more line of the answer.
- Home Assistant connecting no longer takes a camera snapshot. The Camera entity needs one frame to become available after Home Assistant connects. That frame used to be a real capture, so a picture landed in Home Assistant on every start and reconnect, even with Disable snapshots on detection on. It is now a black frame and the camera stays closed. Fetching the picture in Home Assistant, such as from a dashboard, still captures a real frame.
- Plugin screensavers can tint the widgets (#1299). A new
setScreensaverTintplugin command draws the corner widgets and At a Glance row over a plugin's screensaver in one color, the way the Clock screensaver's Night mode does, for example when the room goes dark.clearScreensaverTintgives them their own colors back. The tint ends once that screensaver leaves the screen, so a plugin that never clears it cannot tint the Clock or another screensaver. Only thescreensavercapability is needed. See Plugins.
Fixes
- Updates no longer use up storage until the next reboot. On Android 11 and older, with Kiosk Satellite set as the home app, the old APK could stay on disk after an update until the device restarted, so devices with little storage eventually ran out of space and updates failed. Android kept trying to restart the home app during its own update and each try drew a starting window. Kiosk Satellite no longer asks those Android versions for one. Space already lost comes back with one reboot.
- Echo Shows no longer crash showing album art or photos. On devices where Impeller draws with OpenGL ES, such as the Echo Show 8 and the Portal Go, Impeller shrank cover art and photos on the GPU. On the Echo Show 8 that step could fail, mostly in the seconds after the app starts with music playing, and Impeller then closed the whole app. These devices now decode a JPEG cover or photo straight at the reduced size its decoder supports and shrink other images on the CPU first. On an Echo Show 5 this costs about the same CPU and memory as before. Devices that draw with Vulkan or the Legacy renderer are unchanged.
- A camera that never answers a JPEG capture no longer stays broken (#1304). On some camera drivers, such as the SHIELD Tablet's on LineageOS 15.1, a JPEG snapshot never finished and closing the camera then hung until the device restarted. The first snapshot after each start set it off, so motion detection, snapshots and RTSP stopped working on every boot. When a capture goes unanswered, Kiosk Satellite now aborts it, stops requesting JPEGs from that camera and takes snapshots from its analysis frames at the Snapshot resolution. If the abort does not free the camera, one restart of the device does.
- The Music Library shows the playing track's cover. The player at the bottom of the Music Library and the playing row of its Queue showed a music note instead of the cover Now Playing shows, whenever that cover came from the music stream itself, from another app or from AirPlay. They now load it the way Now Playing does.
- Videos follow Fill the screen (#1298). Videos in the photo slideshows always kept their frame between black bars, whatever Fill the screen said. They now follow the same rule as photos: Smart crops a video shaped close to the screen to the edges and Always crops every video. A video that is not enlarged keeps its black bars instead of the blurred backdrop photos get, since blurring every frame would cost too much on a kiosk.