info-beamer hosted 16 released

The info-beamer hosted operating system gets a release. All existing Pi models, back to even the Pi 1 are still fully supported.

New Features

Smart GL cropping

The info-beamer player software got an update to improve performance for some content. Often a large video is overlaid by smaller content. For example a scroller at the bottom. A smart algorithm now tries to minimize the rendered area.

Content like a video with a scroller at the bottom by default is made up from two parts: One is the video, the other is the rendering of the scroller made. The latter is rendered using the OpenGL API. Both so called planes are composed when rendering them to the screen. Previously even the plane containing only a scroller at the bottom would be rendered in full on the output, even if most if it was fully transparent.

info-beamer player now implements multiple cropping algorithms that try to reduce the actually rendered output to those areas filled with content. Large transparent areas are skipped if possible.

You can see this in action in the following video. The pink debugging overlay shows the area rendered. The large black area is fully skipped. The cropping algorithm tries its best to reduce the overall size while using at most two distinct non-overlapping areas. In case of a scroller at the bottom, a single area covering only the scroller is sufficient. In the example below, more complex content requires smart separation and selection of up to two areas.

Avoiding large transparent areas can greatly reduce memory bandwidth used. This can make a big difference, especially when using 4K output. The smart cropper is automatically active if it makes sense and improves performance without requiring any changes to content or device configuration.

Dual 4K output

info-beamer can now output dual 4K. Both side-by-side as well as stacked display layout configurations are supported.

Supporting such high resolutions required additional code to render out content: The GPU on the Pi can only output 4096x4096 pixels. A dual 4K output is either 7680x2160 or 3840x4320 pixels depending on the layout. Both exceed the maximum the GPU can do in a single rendering pass. But there is a way to move the rendering viewport within a larger target buffer. Some content will need to be rendered twice, but the overhead is usually managable.

Dual 4K is still at the very upper limit of what the Pi5 can do, so this all is still somewhat experimental. There are cases where the output starts to flicker. But high resolution images and a single video should play fine. Get in contact if you need help evaluating this feature.

Consistent dual snapshots

info-beamer now implements snapshotting dual display configuration in a single pass. Previously info-beamer used to take two snapshots: for example once for the left display and once for the right display. Such snapshots could not be taken simultaneously, so there was always a small delay between both snapshots. The backend would combine those two images into a single image returned when requesting such a remote snapshot. For non-static content the edge between both displays would often be visible.

This has now been improved, thanks to another method of taking snapshots: All content is briefly rendered using OpenGLES only. The resulting output buffer then contains the full output of both displays.

Booting from USB and NVME

info-beamer OS can now be installed on USB drives or NVME disks on Pi4 or Pi5 devices. Depending on the state of the device the EEPROM has to be flashed once before this is possible. Use the Raspberry Pi Imager software and use the "Boot from NVMe before trying USB and then SD Card" option in the "Misc utility images" / "Bootloader" section to initially configure a Pi to use these boot modes. After that the normal install.zip or install.img based installation methods will work as usual.

Following upstream versions

info-beamer OS update a few components to be up-to-date with the latest developments:

• Kernel is now 6.12.66
• Mesa (the OpenGL driver) is updated to 25.0.7
• EEPROM version 2025-12-08 / 2026-01-09

Other improvements and fixes

In addition to many small performance and stability improvements, the following changes have been made:

• In some cases Pi5 models would not start and complain about a missing SD card. This has been fixed.
• In addition to the existing custom A/B booting mode, the OS now also supports A/B booting using the Pi's tryboot method. This isn't used yet, but is already implemented for forward compatibility with a later release.
• The info-beamer player now supports taking smaller display snapshots in either "preview" (up to 640 pixels) or "thumb" (up to 256 pixels) mode. These snapshots can be requested via the API soon and offer a big reduction in snapshot data size and delay in case only a small peek into what's on the display is needed.
• On very old Pi devices, zram support is enabled. This allows swapping out unused pages into compressed RAM. This sound somewhat useless, but could potentially help freeing up a bit of memory due to compression.
• The Compute Module 0 is now supported.
• The new Pi4 Dual RAM variant is now supported.

Updating to the latest release

As usual, 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.

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.