v0.2.1

Release Notes

Added

• Channel config version 0.1.2 adds normalization.video.filters.scale.flags to choose the software scaling algorithm (e.g. bicubic, lanczos, fast_bilinear)
  • Applies to the main picture, graphics and image subtitles wherever software scaling runs
• Playout version 0.0.6 adds retry_budget_ms and retry_backoff_ms to dynamic sources, to retry a failed request with backoff
  • Transport errors, timeouts and 5xx responses are retried; 4xx responses and an invalid body are not
  • Retry is off when retry_budget_ms is absent or 0
• Channel config version 0.1.2 adds fallback.duration_seconds to set how long the fallback plays before the channel tries again (default 60)
  • After a failed dynamic source, the fallback lasts at least the source's retry_budget_ms

Changed

• Software scaling now defaults to bicubic instead of fast_bilinear, which reduces aliasing when downscaling
  • Set normalization.video.filters.scale.flags to fast_bilinear to keep the previous output
• ersatztv-channel now logs through tracing and includes the channel number (channel{number=7}) in all messages
  • Set ETV_LOG_FORMAT=json for one JSON object per line with the channel number in span.number

Fixed

• Always encode 4:2:0 output, which many clients require
  • Still images and song backgrounds were previously encoded as 4:4:4 by software encoders
• Fix CUDA streams failing with a watermark in yuva420p (e.g. lossy WebP with transparency) and opacity below 100%
• Fix CUDA streams with a watermark failing when encoding with software (e.g. mpeg2video)
• Fix VideoToolbox h264 streams failing on content with embedded (A53) closed captions
• Fix VAAPI hevc streams hanging on content with embedded (A53) closed captions with Mesa before 26.2.3
  • Captions are left out of hevc output on those Mesa versions; update Mesa to keep them
• Reject normalization.video.filters options that contain filter graph syntax when the channel config loads, instead of failing every item
• Fix crop scaling mode cropping a zoomed-in window from content that is at least as large as the output (e.g. 4K on a 1080p channel) instead of scaling it to cover the output first
  • Anamorphic content is also converted to square pixels before the crop
• Play silence for sources without an audio stream, instead of the fallback for the whole item
  • Applies to every source kind, and to a probe hint with no audio streams
• ersatztv-channel now stops after 90 seconds without a client even when .heartbeat was never created, and counts from when the channel became ready
  • Previously a worker spawned directly (not by ersatztv) whose client never requested a segment transcoded forever
  • Troubleshooting runs no longer stop on a stale .heartbeat
• Disk errors in ersatztv-channel now name what failed and which file, instead of all reading unable to load channel config (io)
  • e.g. failed to scan the segment folder .../5: No such file or directory
  • A missing playout folder is no longer reported as a channel config problem
• No longer fail to black when an old segment that ersatztv-channel was trimming was already deleted from disk
• Fix green output with legacy Intel QSV encoders

Compatibility

• Channel config: reads versions 0.1.0 to 0.1.2
• Lineup config: reads versions 0.0.0 to 0.0.1
• Playout: reads versions 0.0.0 to 0.0.6
• ErsatzTV-ffmpeg: 8.1.2-4, bundled in the docker images and recommended for the native binaries