Helios October 2026: Helios in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex

Helios in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex: helios mcp previews videos inside the conversation and renders frame-exact MP4s on your computer. Install helios.mcpb in Claude Desktop, or see docs/site/guides/ai-assistants.md.

Helios September 2026: DOM rendering fixes and cleanup

DOM renders now use SeekTimeDriver, keeping the event loop running during media seeks. Screenshot capture also has a timeout that reports the stalled frame time, so a distributed worker can fail clearly when capture gets stuck. PR #4985 addresses the hangs reported in #4977, #4978, and #4979.

Also included

• The rendering guide explains how to distribute jobs using exact frame ranges.
• Studio uses Core’s SRT serializer for caption downloads.
• npm test runs every workspace suite once and propagates failures.
• Duplicate tests and disposable coverage/render outputs have been removed from the repository.
• The README has an updated video preview.

Compatibility

The unused initInfrastructure() placeholder export has been removed. Code that calls it should remove that initialization call.

The Linux browser/codec investigation remains open in #4984.

Verification

• npm test passed 2,134 workspace tests and all 70 renderer verification scripts.
• All six package builds and four release-contract checks passed on commit bcb37313ea412150e94669bc37b8243eeb97159b.

This GitHub release publishes the source on main at that commit. Package versions are unchanged.

Thanks to @andupotorac (Andrei Potorac) for the detailed DOM-rendering reports and reproductions that helped us track down these hangs.

Full changelog

Helios August 2026 platform update

Helios August 2026 ships six coordinated package updates, including renderer reliability fixes and a broader public core API.

Packages

• @helios-project/core 5.13.2
• @helios-project/player 0.78.1
• @helios-project/renderer 1.78.3
• @helios-project/studio 0.107.3
• @helios-project/cli 0.45.2
• @helios-project/infrastructure 0.25.0

Included

• The renderer now waits for media and composition stability before capture, tracks CDP execution contexts correctly, and captures DOM frames with current Chrome on macOS.
• WebCodecs H.264 chunks are decoded into binary buffers before FFmpeg. Startup, cancellation cleanup, and concat manifests now handle failures and escaped file paths consistently.
• Core exposes additional composition, driver, signal, caption, timecode, easing, and render-session APIs.
• Infrastructure reports its published package version consistently.

Verification

• The full renderer verification suite passed.
• 2,147 Vitest tests passed across core, player, studio, CLI, and infrastructure.
• All six builds, the release contract, six package dry runs, and a clean six-package consumer install passed.