What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.22
Camera tiles that used to stay blank now fix themselves: Go2RTC streams fall back to MSE when WebRTC cannot play them, which covers Fire tablets. A screenshot of the device's screen is one button press away in Home Assistant, updates install on pinned kiosks, and camera motion detection recovers from the screen turning off.
New Feature: MSE fallback for Go2RTC cameras (#160)
- WebRTC stays first for its near-realtime latency, but a tile that connects and decodes nothing, a WebView with no WebRTC at all (Fire tablets), or repeated failed connections now switch to MSE automatically instead of staying blank, and the App Logs record the switch.
- A new Prefer MSE over WebRTC toggle (Camera settings, Playback; off by default) flips the order for devices you already know cannot do WebRTC, skipping the detection round trip; WebRTC then becomes the fallback. MSE adds a second or two of delay, which is why it is not the default.
- MSE sessions go through the app itself, so a Go2RTC server behind a login or a self-signed certificate works exactly as it does for WebRTC. WHEP and Home Assistant cameras are WebRTC by definition and are unaffected.
New Feature: Take a screenshot from Home Assistant (#168)
- Every device gets three new entities: a Take screenshot button, a Screenshot camera entity showing the captured frame, and a Last screenshot timestamp sensor so an automation can tell when the frame is fresh.
- It captures whatever the display is actually showing, dashboard, screensaver or kiosk menu, scaled to at most 1080p, and the frame is retained on the broker so it survives a Home Assistant restart. Made for checking on a panel in another room or building without exposing the remote admin beyond Home Assistant.
Bug Fix: Updates install on a pinned kiosk (#170)
- With app pinning on, pressing Install appeared to do nothing: pinning blocks Android's install confirmation screen outright, and even unpinned, the kiosk's foreground guard would have pulled the app back over it within seconds.
- The kiosk now stands down right before an install that needs confirming, leaves the confirmation alone while it is up, and re-arms when the install is declined or fails. A confirmation nobody answers re-arms the protections on its own after ten minutes; a successful install re-arms on the relaunch as always.
- The download is no longer wasted either: the APK is kept and recognized on the next attempt, so a declined or never-shown confirmation does not cost a second download.
Bug Fix: Camera motion detection survives the screen turning off
- Android revokes the camera from any app within seconds of the panel powering off, and until now that revocation was silent: the motion sensor looked alive in Home Assistant but saw nothing until the app was restarted. The camera now reports the revocation and rebinds the moment the screen comes back on, and the same recovery covers another app taking the camera.
- Worth knowing: no app can watch the camera while the panel is truly off, that is an Android rule, not an app choice. The screen-off that keeps motion detection alive is the Black screensaver, which turns the backlight to zero while everything keeps running. The camera docs now spell this out.