This release makes Intel iGPU acceleration usable end to end: the OpenVINO backend can now offload BirdNET and Perch inference onto an Intel integrated GPU, and the container image and installer wire the GPU render device through automatically. It also promotes the built-in Go FLAC encoder to the default and drops the FFmpeg FLAC path, closes a token leak in the HTTP access logs, and fixes RTSP sources that stopped capturing when a camera rejected an audio-only handshake.
New Features
Intel iGPU Acceleration (OpenVINO)
The OpenVINO backend added in the previous release can now offload inference onto an Intel integrated GPU, not just the CPU. On amd64 hosts with a supported Intel iGPU the container installs the Intel GPU runtime and gets access to the render device, and both the container image and install.sh pass the host /dev/dri device through so OpenVINO can see the GPU out of the box (#3888 by @xconverge, #3907).
Which models can actually use the iGPU depends on the model file, and the shipped defaults are not iGPU-ready yet:
- BirdNET ships as a TensorFlow Lite model, which cannot run on the iGPU. To accelerate BirdNET on an iGPU, switch to the fp32 ONNX model: BirdNET_v2.4_fp32.onnx.
- Perch has shipped as ONNX from the start, but iGPU offload needs the no-DFT variant, where the DFT/spectrogram stage is moved out of the model graph so the rest can run on the GPU. Pick the model for your area from Perch-v2-Models/regional; for now you have to choose the correct region yourself.
Choosing these models will move into the UI in a later release. Until then, see the OpenVINO CPU/iGPU acceleration guide in the wiki for setup steps.
Native FLAC Encoding by Default
The built-in Go FLAC encoder, previously an opt-in preview behind BIRDNET_FLAC_ENCODER=native, is now the only FLAC encoder for both saved detection clips and BirdWeather soundscape uploads. FLAC (including EBU R128 loudness normalization) now encodes entirely in Go with no FFmpeg dependency; FFmpeg is still used for MP3, AAC, and Opus and for clip download transcoding. On a host without FFmpeg, a FLAC export setting now produces real .flac files instead of being silently downgraded to WAV (#3900).
Security
- HLS/media tokens scrubbed from access logs. Signed HLS and media stream tokens embedded in request URLs were being written to the HTTP access log; they are now redacted from both the path and the query string there, closing a gap left by the earlier v2 API log scrubbing (#3861).
Bug Fixes
Audio & Streaming
- RTSP sources recover when audio-only capture fails. After the audio-only RTSP handshake was introduced, some cameras that cannot set up the audio track in isolation stopped capturing entirely. Those streams now fall back automatically to the full RTSP stream (video is still discarded after decode), while cameras that already worked are unchanged (#3905).
Installer & Diagnostics
- Installer runs
systemd-analyze verifywith sudo, so service-file validation no longer fails on permission errors during install (#3894). - Support dump tails logs fairly, giving each log file a fair share of the tail budget so a few large logs no longer crowd the others out of the dump (#3904).
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