info-beamer hosted 14 released

The info-beamer hosted operating system gets a release.

As always, the OS aims to be fully backwards compatible with both all Pi models as well as all deployed packages. This means even installations using very old Pi1 or Pi2 models are still fully supported and can install the latest OS. They even got some performance improvements.

New Features

Support for Pi5

This release adds support for the Raspberry Pi5 (and in theory for the unreleased CM5 too). It required a big rewrite in how info-beamer now handles video acceleration and manage video modes which also benefits the Pi4.

Major rewrite for Pi4/Pi5

Back when info-beamer OS version 13 was released, accelerated video decoding for the HEVC codec, required for 4K videos, wasn't in a good state. The only way to implement video decoding was to rely on a heavily patched FFmpeg fork. Reliability wasn't great in some cases. With the release of the Pi5, the state of the kernel and support libraries like FFmpeg is now much better than back then.

Similarly for controlling screen resolution, the full KMS mode is the default on the official Raspberry Pi OS, so it's somewhat safe to expect it to fully work now. Previously on version 13, info-beamer OS was reliant on FKMS (fake KMS) which is weird mix of old proprietary broadcom APIs as well as Linux KMS/DRM APIs for managing display output. While it worked it wasn't the way forward as FKMS is rightfully getting deprecated.

This was a good opportunity to completely rework how info-beamer implements video mode setting as well as video acceleration.

Managing the displays

info-beamer (the core program running on the OS) now uses KMS (kernel mode setting) and DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) to handle everything video related. Gone are the old broadcom dispmanx or mmal APIs. The advantage is that this is a default Linux API, so it's not going anywhere. It also supports features not previously possible like HDR.

info-beamer now has finer control over how content is placed on the screen and uses these newly gained super powers for multiple optimizations like clipping partially occluded content to improve performance or having a built-in screenshot feature to capture what's shown on the screen with minimal performance impact.

Video decoding

info-beamer now uses the default FFmpeg fork maintained by the Pi Foundation. Both H264 as well as HEVC video codecs can now be decoded reliably with full hardware acceleration where possible. H264 on the Pi5 uses software decoding as there isn't a hardware decoder for that anymore. But the Pi5 is fast enough for that.

Unlike in the previous version 13 release, multiple HEVC videos can now be decoded at the same time and decoding is very stable so far. Playing 4K HEVC videos on a 4K display or playing a single 3840x1080 video across two displays is now a trivial task for the new video engine.

Updated RPI Firmware/EEPROM/Kernel

The Pi firmware, EEPROM and Linux kernel have been updated. This includes a very recent 6.6 Linux kernel which required some custom development as a deprecated GPIO access method is now longer available. info-beamer now provides a transparent wrapper tool to emulate the old behaviour so existing packages continue to work.

Other improvements

• CEC support on Pi4 and Pi5 now includes the second display.
• HDMI audio now supports both attached displays.
• Switched to a faster PNG/JPEG decoder
• Pi4 and Pi5 now use a 64bit kernel
• A new way of embedding content produced by external programs right into info-beamer itself. A new package can use this to embed a chromium browser right into all other content on the Pi4 and Pi5.
• Additional zero-overhead screen transformations on Pi4/Pi5: Flip vertically, horizontally or both.
• Performance and memory usage improvements for older Pi models, including the very first Pi1 model with 256MB of memory.
• Improve SD free space management for tiny SD cards.
• Fine grained progress bars on the dashboard/welcome screen while downloading assigned content.
• Lots of other minor behind-the-scenes improvements.

Updating to the latest release

You don't have to do anything manually. Within the next months, your devices will be gradually upgraded automatically. Please get in contact with support if you have any questions.

If you want to upgrade manually, you can click on the Activate stable channel option in the Manage menu on the device page of the device you want to upgrade. This will install the new version and reboot the device once. Alternatively you can preinstall the update: Go to the device page, click on Manage and Toolbox.. and select "Trigger deferred update to 'stable'". This will install the update but won't reboot. This is especially useful if you're currently running the testing version of the OS.

A device is also updated if you use the web dashboard configuration editor and apply a new configuration to a device. As usual the updating process includes a failsafe and a device that doesn't reconnect back to the info-beamer service after a configuration change/OS upgrade will be rolled back to the previous working configuration automatically after a few minutes.

Fetching the new version, upgrading the OS all happens in the background and only a reboot that should not take longer than 20-30 seconds interrupts playback briefly.

Questions/Feedback?

Head over to the community forums for questions or feedback regarding this release.