A new display schedule blanks the screen outside opening hours

A screen in an office or a shop stays lit all night and all weekend for nobody. People have asked Anthias for a way to turn it off out of hours since 2012, and some ran their own cron job to do it. Anthias 2026.08.1 adds a display schedule to Settings that switches the screen off at closing time and back on in the morning.

The schedule is off by default, so a player that has always stayed lit keeps doing so after the upgrade. Turn on "Enable schedule" under Settings > Display schedule, then set:

• "Turn on at", 08:00 by default.
• "Turn off at", 18:00 by default.
• The days it runs. If you uncheck every day, it runs every day.

Times are in the player's timezone. An overnight schedule belongs to the day it starts: with 18:00 to 06:00 and only Friday checked, the screen comes on Friday evening and stays on until 06:00 on Saturday.

What the screen does

At each change, Anthias blanks or unblanks the screen itself, and pauses or resumes playback with it. On the Raspberry Pi 5, x86 and arm64 images the display output is switched off, so the display gets no signal. On the Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 images the viewer shows a black screen instead.

Anthias also sends the HDMI-CEC standby or power-on command to every HDMI port with a CEC display attached. Doing both means a plain monitor goes dark, a TV that obeys CEC goes into standby, and a player with one of each on its 2 ports handles both. You don't need a CEC adapter or a CEC display for the schedule: it isn't hidden on boards without one.

The schedule is checked every minute, so a change lands within about a minute of the time you set. Anthias also repeats the current state about every 10 minutes. That's what puts a black screen back after the viewer restarts in the middle of the night, and it also means that if you switch the screen on by hand during off hours, it goes off again within about 10 minutes.

Turning the schedule off while the screen is off brings the screen back on within a minute.

What to check on your setup

Whether a TV goes into standby is up to the TV. Anthias 2026.08.1 hasn't been tested end to end against a CEC-capable display, so if you rely on a TV powering down, watch it the first evening and report what you see. HDMI-CEC display controls no longer fail on a Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4 has the rest of what changed for CEC in this release.

For developers

The schedule is 4 fields on /api/v2/device_settings, readable with GET and writable with PATCH:

• display_power_schedule_enabled, a boolean.
• display_power_on_time and display_power_off_time, as HH:MM. HH:MM:SS is accepted and stored as HH:MM.
• display_power_days, a comma-separated list of weekday numbers from 0 to 6, where Monday is 0. An empty value means every day. Asset play_days counts Monday as 1, so the 2 don't match.

A malformed time or weekday gets a 400 response from the API. In the web form, a malformed time keeps its previous value and shows an error.