What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.14
Fix: cameras that stream H.265 no longer show a blank tile
- A camera whose stream is H.265 could sit black forever with nothing wrong anywhere: no error on the tile, nothing in the App Logs, and the same camera failing in every grid position while its neighbors played (#160). Android WebViews advertise H.265 support in the stream request whether or not the device can actually decode it, so the camera server hands over H.265, the connection succeeds, video data arrives, and not a single frame is ever decoded.
- Kiosk Satellite now asks for H.264 (or VP8, VP9, AV1) and leaves H.265 out of the request. A Go2RTC server that has ffmpeg available then transcodes the camera to H.264 on its own and it simply plays; a server that cannot transcode answers with a real error instead of silence.
- Allow H.265 streams, a new toggle in the Camera Streams settings' Playback group, turns the restriction off for devices that really do decode H.265. It is off by default, lives on the device and in the Remote Administration UI alike, and a device that cannot decode H.265 shows a blank image instead, so it is worth trying one camera at a time.
Improvement: camera tiles say what actually failed
- Every camera tile now runs a decode watchdog. A stream that connects and receives video without ever decoding a frame says so on the tile and writes a warning to the App Logs naming the camera, the codec, the packets received and the frames decoded, so a blank camera can be diagnosed from the logs alone. A stream that plays logs its codec and resolution once, so a bug report carries what the device actually negotiated.
- A tile that cannot start now says which side failed instead of always reading Connection failed, which implied a network problem even when the camera server had answered and refused. It reads Stream not found on the camera server, The camera server rejected the login, The camera server could not start this stream, or Cannot reach the camera server, each still followed by the retry countdown. Connection failed is now reserved for a stream that negotiated and then dropped.