FlowAir 2.3.1

FlowAir now lives at github.com/BrandSilva/FlowAir. The old TridentSky links still redirect, and TridentSky remains the publisher.

Improved

• Update checks find the release by the repository's permanent ID, so they keep working even if the account name changes again.
• The update installer is only accepted from github.com and must match the checksum published by GitHub.
• The README, the FFmpeg licence notice and the links in Apps & features point to the new repository and to tridentsky.net.

Nothing else changed: playout, timing, conversion and your settings are exactly as in 2.3.0. Install it over your current version from the Update button, or download FlowAir-Setup.exe below.

FlowAir v2.3.0

FlowAir now plays practically any video you give it.

Every video, converted when needed

Until now FlowAir could only air what Chromium decodes natively, and flagged the rest in red. It now converts those files for you, in the background, as soon as they are added:

What the file has	What FlowAir does	How long
MP4 / MOV / WebM with H.264, VP9 or AV1	Plays it directly, nothing changes	—
A container Chromium cannot open (AVI, MKV, TS, M2TS, MXF, VOB, FLV, WMV…) with H.264 inside	Rewraps it into MP4, no re-encoding	Seconds
Audio Chromium cannot play (AC-3, E-AC-3, DTS, PCM)	Converts only the audio to AAC	Fast
Video Chromium cannot play (HEVC / H.265, MPEG-2, VC-1, DivX, ProRes…)	Re-encodes to H.264	Depends on the machine

• Heavy conversions use the graphics card when there is one that works — Intel Quick Sync, NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF or Windows Media Foundation — and fall back to software otherwise. On an Intel N97 mini PC, a 6-second 1080p60 HEVC clip converts in about two seconds.
• Frame rate, resolution and duration are always preserved, including 60 fps, 120 fps and variable frame rate.
• While a file is being prepared, its row shows the progress and it is skipped on air, so the screen never goes black. Heavy conversions can be set to start automatically or only when you choose Convert from the row menu (Settings → Compatibility).
• Converted copies live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\FlowAir\media-cache, are reused for every copy of the same file, have a size limit, and are removed when FlowAir is uninstalled.

Fixed

• Air could freeze on a skipped row. When a row was skipped because it could not be played, the schedule still counted its full length, so the next clip was timed that much later and the picture held in between. A skipped row now takes no time at all. This fault predates this version; the new conversions made it much more likely.
• Pressing Space after clicking Cue did two things at once. Play, Stop, Next and Cue no longer keep keyboard focus after a click, so Space and Enter only trigger their shortcut.
• The header wrapped at the smallest window size. Buttons keep one height and shorten their labels as the window narrows.
• The installer sidebar said "Trident Sky". It now reads TridentSky.
• The "very high bitrate" warning no longer fires on normal 4K bitrates.

Verified before release

• Conversions of AVI, MKV, variable-frame-rate MKV, AC-3, 10-bit HEVC, 60 fps HEVC, 120 fps HEVC and MPEG-2: every output is H.264 + AAC, same resolution, same frame rate, same duration within 0.1 s — 110 automated checks.
• A playlist mixing 23.976, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94, 60 and 120 fps and a variable-frame-rate clip transitions within 0.03 s of schedule, with no accumulated drift.
• A playlist of converted clips airs in order within 0.04 s of schedule, and no ffmpeg process is ever left behind.

Install

Download FlowAir-Setup.exe and run it. Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" because the installer is not code-signed: choose More info → Run anyway. Installing over an earlier version keeps your settings. The installer is larger than before (about 148 MB) because it now includes ffmpeg; its licence ships next to it.

FlowAir v2.2.2

Long videos, remote desktop, and update notices.

Long videos play like short ones

A one-hour file at 10 Mbps is 4.5 GB, and FlowAir was offering the player the whole file in a single response. The player reads the first megabytes, jumps to the end of the file for the index and abandons that download — but the engine kept reading the disk for a response nobody wanted any more. On a fast disk you never notice. On a slower one it takes away exactly the bandwidth the new request needs, which is why long videos took a long time to start and did not feel fluid while short ones were fine.

Responses are now capped, so an abandoned one costs 16 MB instead of gigabytes. Measured on that same 4.5 GB file: the first frame still appears in one second and the total traffic is unchanged.

The next clip is also prepared 20 seconds before its turn instead of at the start of the previous one, so two long files are never being buffered at the same time.

Fixed

• The fullscreen output came back on its own. Closing it with the shortcut only changed it in memory, so the next start projected again. It is remembered now, and the output is only restored when the display it was using is still connected. If the audio device is gone, the sound falls back to the system default and returns to your device when it is plugged back in.
• FlowAir could run without showing its window, typically over a remote desktop session or with an unusual graphics stack. The window now appears anyway after a few seconds.
• The update notice could stay silent. The check gave up after five seconds and did not try again for six hours. It now waits longer and retries a few minutes later.

Install

Download FlowAir-Setup.exe and run it. Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" because the installer is not code-signed: choose More info → Run anyway. Installing over an earlier version keeps your settings; there is no need to uninstall first.

FlowAir v2.2.1

Fixes from the first real day on air, plus support for machines that are not powerful.

Fixed

• The last clip looped forever. When the last item of a playlist ended, the video jumped back to 00:00 and replayed instead of holding its final frame, while the countdown froze. The engine was stopping without telling the player. It now announces every stop, including at a STOP row, and a finished clip is never restarted.
• A perfectly good file was marked as damaged. On a machine that decodes video with the CPU, opening a file took longer than the player's patience: it gave up, reloaded (which made it slower still) and reported a failure. The file was then flagged red and skipped from that point on. The player now measures progress instead of counting seconds, a slow start is only a warning that interrupts nothing, and only a real decoder error takes an item off air. A row flagged by mistake can be checked again from its right-click menu.
• Editing a note did not show until you moved it.
• Row buttons were cut off on small screens. The playlist columns now adapt down to 1280x720 and to Windows display scaling.

Faster on modest hardware

• The next clip is preloaded into a second player and swapped in at the transition, so it starts from an already-open decoder: 0.14 seconds instead of several seconds on a machine without graphics acceleration.
• FlowAir now tells you when the machine is the problem. If Windows has no working graphics driver, video is decoded by the CPU: playback stutters and the countdown freezes while the processor looks idle. FlowAir detects it, says what is degraded and what to do, and can stop decoding the same video twice (preview and fullscreen output) to free the machine. Settings has a Diagnostics section with a Copy button for support.
• The audio meter now measures what is really going to air, reported by the fullscreen output window, so it stays honest even when the preview is paused to save the processor.

Install

Download FlowAir-Setup.exe and run it. Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" because the installer is not code-signed: choose More info → Run anyway. Installing over 2.2.0 keeps your settings; there is no need to uninstall first.

FlowAir v2.2.0

FlowAir v2.2.0 focuses on what an operator actually lives with: never going black on air, telling you at a glance what is happening, and keeping the machine cool enough for a small PC to run it around the clock.

Playback

• Fixed: black screen after CUE. Pressing PLAY right after CUE could leave the output black until you pressed STOP and PLAY again. The player now waits until the file is really ready, retries on its own, recovers from a stalled load, and reports a genuine failure to the engine instead of staying dark.
• Unplayable files never reach air. HEVC, 4:2:2 and 10-bit H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1, DivX/Xvid, ProRes and containers such as AVI, WMV, FLV and MPEG are detected when the file is added, flagged red in the playlist, and skipped during playback. Files that play without audible audio (AC-3, E-AC-3, DTS) are flagged amber.
• Damaged files fail clearly. A truncated or unreadable file reports the real reason instead of a generic error, and a file replaced on disk is analysed again automatically.
• Timing is untouched. The scheduling core is byte-identical; 4s/5s/6s clips still transition at 3.76s and 8.75s.

Playlist

• Duplicates work everywhere. Adding a file that is already in the playlist adds a copy, Ctrl+drag copies an existing row, and duplicating is instant because the file is not analysed twice.
• Multi-level undo. Up to 50 steps. Deleting the entire playlist and pressing Ctrl+Z brings it back in order, with notes, OBS events, STOP rows and loop flags.
• Keyboard. Shift+arrows extends the selection, Ctrl+arrows moves the selected rows, Ctrl+F filters the view without ever hiding what is on air, Ctrl+A selects all.
• Double-click a location to open that file's folder in Explorer.

Interface

• Green is the row on air in every state, including cued and stopped. Amber appears only when the engine is really about to take the next item. Red means the file will not play.
• Denser rows, one aligned grid, and STOP, NOTE and OBS rows with their own colour and icon.
• The countdown turns amber at ten seconds and red at five.
• A new icon set replaces the emoji, and the ON AIR indicator no longer shifts the header.
• Confirmations are keyboard-driven: Enter confirms, Escape cancels, and the safe button holds the focus.

Settings

• Custom shortcuts. Reassign play, stop, next, cue, delete, undo, copy, paste, find, select all, exit and the fullscreen output toggle. Conflicts are refused, system combinations are protected, and everything can be reset to the defaults. Your bindings persist.
• Audio output device. Send the program audio to a specific Windows device, so the operator keeps the PC audio on their own speakers while the broadcast goes out through HDMI.
• Every setting now confirms that it was really applied.

Updates

FlowAir checks for new versions quietly and can download and install them for you. With no internet it fails silently and never delays startup, it never shows a popup, it remembers a version you dismissed, it warns before installing while something is on air, and the whole check can be turned off.

Installer

• Installing over an existing copy keeps your settings and no longer risks interrupting a running broadcast.
• The Windows entry carries the right version, publisher and icon; .flowair files open with FlowAir; uninstalling removes the firewall rule and the application data.

Under the hood

Validation runs one analysis per file instead of three, the interface stops redrawing the whole playlist every second, player windows no longer receive the full playlist on every tick, and the engine no longer pauses its own timing thread for garbage collection. Measured over three minutes of continuous playout with 80 items: 0.7% of one CPU core, stable memory and no thread growth.

---

Install: download FlowAir-Setup.exe and run it. The installer is not code-signed, so Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info → Run anyway. Installing over version 2.1.0 keeps your configuration; no need to uninstall first.

FlowAir v2.1.0

What's new in v2.1.0

The first public release of FlowAir, now with a Windows installer.

• Windows installer. FlowAir installs like any Windows program: Start Menu and desktop shortcuts, a clean uninstall, and nothing else to install (no Python, Node.js or FFmpeg).
• Self-managed playout engine. FlowAir starts and stops its engine by itself, restarts it if it ever stops unexpectedly, and never closes other Python or Node.js programs on your computer.
• Session recovery. After a crash or a power cut, FlowAir offers to restore the last playlist.
• Safer on-air editing. Pasting, loading or inserting items can no longer change the item that is on air. Moving several items keeps OBS events and loop settings, and undo restores items in their original positions.
• Fixed: repeated files stuck on "Validating...". Adding the same video more than once (bumpers, ads) no longer leaves copies that never advance.
• Fixed: Ctrl+S stopped playback. Letter shortcuts now ignore Ctrl/Alt and key repeat, so holding N no longer skips several items.
• Network security. Other computers can only view the player while Network Streaming is enabled. Playlist control and file access stay on the FlowAir computer.
• Output display handling. If the output display is disconnected, the full-screen output closes instead of covering your main screen.
• Settings restored on startup. Output aspect ratio, scaling and the OBS connection are applied automatically.
• OBS events no longer delay playback when OBS is slow or not responding.
• Update notifications when a new version is published.
• Electron 44, a smaller download (only ffprobe is bundled), and the screen stays awake while FlowAir is running.

Windows: download FlowAir-Setup.exe below and run it. If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info and then Run anyway.