Players showing the same playlist drift apart less

Two screens in a shop cycling the same menu board in German and English used to drift apart, until after a few hours they switched languages seconds apart. The player started an asset's countdown only after it had refreshed the schedule, read the database and told the display to load the asset, so each rotation took the asset's duration plus that overhead, and the overhead differs from one device to the next.

From Anthias 2026.10.0, the countdown starts when the rotation does, so an image or web page with a 30 second duration rotates 30 seconds after its rotation began. If loading takes longer than a short asset's duration, the player moves straight on to the next one. The viewer log shows the wait next to the duration, for example Sleeping for 29.8 of 30s.

A video's duration is its length, so the overhead now comes off the end of the clip instead: the last fraction of a second can be cut, more on a slow board. Stopping a video still adds time to each rotation, so a playlist with videos still drifts, more slowly than before. In the project's testing on a Pi 2 with a mixed playlist, drift went from about 36 seconds an hour to about 28.5.

Players still don't line up with each other: each one starts its playlist when it boots.