June 2, 2026
Smoother video on Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 5
Video on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 5 plays smoothly in Anthias 2026.06.1. Since the viewer started playing video itself in 2026.05.1, these boards decoded video without trouble but only got 8 to 12 frames per second onto the screen, so video looked choppy.
In the project's testing with a 1080p, 30 fps clip:
| Board | Frames per second on screen | Viewer CPU use |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4 | 8.3 before, 30 now | about 115% before, 64% now |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 11.7 before, 26.6 now | about 155% before, 13% now |
The old path copied every frame from the GPU back to the CPU before drawing it. Frames now stay on the GPU until they're on the screen. x86 and generic arm64 boards use the same viewer, but the project measured the change on the Pi 4 and Pi 5 only. The Pi 4 decodes H.264 in hardware up to 1080p; a 4K H.264 file still decodes in software, which uses every core and drops frames.
If you read the viewer's playback log, /data/.anthias/playback-stats.log, the SAMPLE, END_FILE and STOP lines now have a frames-rendered field next to frames-delivered. frames-delivered counts frames the decoder handed over, and frames-rendered counts how often the picture was drawn to the screen, so a big gap between them means the screen isn't keeping up. Fields are key=value, and the new one sits in the middle of each line, so a script that reads them by position needs updating.