Anthias v2026.07.1 is a hardening release. The changes worth actually paying attention to are a security fix, a memory fix, and a nice addition: you can now browse signage-apps.com without leaving Anthias. Everything else is smaller quality-of-life polish.
Security fixes in the asset API
We closed two holes in the API that creates assets. Both required network access to the device, and both are the kind of thing that matters most if Anthias runs with authentication disabled, which is the default.
The first: the API accepted a file path as an asset source without checking where that path pointed. Anyone who could reach the device could ask it to turn one of its own files, like the configuration file, into an asset, and then read it back through the player.
The second: the API trusted the client’s word that a URL was a YouTube link. Claiming a URL was a YouTube video made the device download it server-side, which could be abused to make the device fetch things on its local network on someone else’s behalf.
Both are fixed: file-based assets are now confined to the asset directory, and the YouTube importer only accepts actual YouTube URLs. We’re not aware of anyone having exploited either one, but if your device is reachable by people or machines you don’t fully trust, update promptly. Better yet, enable authentication in Settings if you haven’t.
Restoring a large backup won’t run your device out of memory
If you keep a lot of media on a device with limited RAM (a 1 GB Raspberry Pi, for example), restoring a large backup used to risk crashing the process partway through.
Restores now stream in gradually instead of loading everything into memory at once, so this is no longer a concern, even with a backup running into the hundreds of megabytes.
Browse signage-apps.com without leaving Anthias
If you haven’t seen signage-apps.com: it’s a free library of ready-made screen content we launched a couple of weeks ago from Screenly Labs, clocks, weather, quotes, headlines, and more.
It previously took a trip to the site to grab a link and paste it in as a web page asset. Now there’s an Apps tab right in Add Asset that browses the same catalog and, for apps that need setup (a location for weather, a feed for headlines), gives you a real form instead of making you build a URL by hand.
Smaller things you’ll notice
The picture won’t get stuck at low resolution after a power cycle
On older Pi hardware connected over HDMI, if the TV power-cycled itself, Anthias could occasionally get stuck rendering at a much lower resolution than it should, and needed a reboot to fix. That’s resolved: the display now recovers on its own.
Sound doesn’t go silent after a restart
A leftover file from a previous restart could sometimes stop audio from starting up cleanly. Also fixed.
For the technically curious
Under the hood, this release also patches an ffmpeg gap on the newer 64-bit Pi 3 image that was leaving hardware video decoding switched off, hardens a handful of Celery background tasks against a misbehaving balena supervisor, and further trims down noisy error reports we send ourselves so real problems don’t get lost in routine ones.
The full technical changelog, PR by PR, is on GitHub for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
Catching up: what shipped in v2026.06.3 and v2026.07.0
We owe you two release posts we never got around to writing. Here’s the short version of what’s landed since v2026.06.1.
New hardware support
Anthias now runs on a 64-bit image for Raspberry Pi 3 (in addition to the existing 32-bit one), and we added support for the Rock Pi 4, a low-cost ARM single-board computer that isn’t a Raspberry Pi at all.
Bulk asset management
You can now select multiple assets at once and enable, disable, edit, or delete them together, instead of one at a time. Multi-file upload, which had briefly gone missing in an earlier redesign, is back too.
Screen rotation and a “prefer dark mode” setting now work everywhere
Rotation previously worked reliably on some hardware and not others; it’s now consistent across every supported board, including Raspberry Pi 5. Web page assets also gained a “prefer dark mode” toggle, so sites that support a dark theme will use it.
Turn the screen fully off, not just black
Alongside the existing display on/off control, Anthias can now properly power down the screen itself (not just show a black image) on hardware that supports it.
A lot of quiet reliability work
We added proper crash reporting across Anthias for the first time, which let us find and fix a long list of small but real issues: audio going silent on newer boards, the on-screen web browser occasionally not recovering from a crash cleanly, new assets sometimes not appearing without a restart, and backups timing out on large libraries (now streamed, same idea as the restore fix above).
None of these were single big headline features, but together they add up to a noticeably more solid experience if you’ve had any of these gremlins in the past.
Upgrading
Existing installations upgrade automatically. If you’re on Balena, fleet management is handled in-container, so your playlists and settings carry over.
The latest documentation always lives at anthias.screenly.io.
Thanks, as always, to everyone filing issues and testing builds between releases. Keep it coming.
Happy displaying.
