The screen recovers when a web page stalls or the webview crashes

The viewer shows images, web pages and video through a separate webview process. When that process stalled or died, a screen could freeze, go dark, or restart the whole viewer container. Anthias 2026.06.3 fixes several ways that happened.

A page that stops loading

If a web page's connection stalled halfway, for example when Wi-Fi dropped without closing the connection, the screen stayed frozen on the previous content until the viewer container restarted. The webview now gives each page 30 seconds to finish loading. If it doesn't, the load is canceled and the same page is requested again. A page that fails right away, such as when the network is down, is retried every 30 seconds too, so a playlist with a single web page recovers once the network is back.

To change the 30 seconds, set ANTHIAS_WEBPAGE_TIMEOUT_S in the viewer container's environment. Values are held between 5 and 3600.

A webview that crashes

On the 32-bit Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 image, the webview can crash while it starts. Anthias 2026.06.1 retries the start, but a crash just after the start, or while the viewer was sending the webview an image or a web page, still restarted the viewer container. On the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, x86 and arm64, where video plays inside the webview, a webview that died while starting or stopping a video left the screen dark until the next item.

In all these cases the viewer now starts a new webview and sends the same item again. The new webview shows the current item straight away, including when the playlist has only one item, which before stayed blank.

Raspberry Pi 5 and x86

On the boards whose webview runs inside the cage display server (Raspberry Pi 5, x86 and generic arm64 boards), the viewer could start the webview before the display server was ready, for example after the webview restarted. The webview then failed with Failed to create wl_display on every attempt and the viewer container restarted. The viewer now waits for the display server first.