v4.96.0

Added

• Userscript users can now send a diagnostics bundle with a bug report. Pick Copy Astra Deck diagnostics in your Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey menu, or click the new bug button at the bottom of the settings sidebar, and paste what it copies into the issue. It's the same bundle the extension's popup saves, with API keys, tokens, custom CSS, your own filter code and endpoint URLs redacted the same way, and it also says which userscript manager ran it. Copying it from a YouTube page doesn't try to reach Astra Downloader or Ollama on your computer, so it won't set off a local network prompt. Those two show as unchecked there, and the popup's Save still checks them. The bug button works in the extension too. If the clipboard won't take it, the bundle downloads as a file instead.

Removed

• Buffer / Preload and its Buffer Target slider are gone. YouTube's player no longer lets an extension set how far ahead it buffers. It decides that itself, with YouTube's servers pacing the download, so the setting had stopped doing anything. If you had it on, your other settings carry over untouched and the old value is simply dropped.

Fixed

• A setting's own Reset button in the settings panel now does what changing it by hand does. It used to save the default but leave the switch or text box showing the old value (leaving a text box then saved the old text back), and it didn't apply the change, so Custom CSS stayed on the page. The roughly 45 Guide, watch page, chat and player "hide" switches now count as changed and get a Reset button too, a select, slider, color or text edit back to the default drops the button, and focus stays on the setting. Clear on a color setting goes back to "no color" instead of saving blue, and an empty color no longer shows as a black swatch.
• Turning a setting on from the toolbar popup or the side panel now switches off the one it can't run alongside, the way the settings panel always has, and tells you which. Turning on Audio-Only from the popup used to leave Always Best Quality running too, and the next page load quietly switched Audio-Only back off.
• Force H.264 and the codec picker get along again. Turning Force H.264 on in the settings panel came back with a "could not be saved" error, and every page load with it on retried a save that couldn't succeed. Picking a codec while Force H.264 is on now switches Force H.264 off and says so, where before H.264 kept playing anyway.
• Features no longer flick on and back off when Astra saves two settings changes close together. A YouTube tab couldn't recognize its own saves coming back from storage, so an older save that landed late briefly undid the newer one. With Audio-Only and Always Best Quality both on, every page load dropped the video to 144p for a moment before Audio-Only shut off again.
• AI Summary works in the extension again, and so does translating a transcript with your own AI key. Since v4.89.0 both stopped with "AI provider policy is unavailable. Reload Astra Deck." before sending anything, because the YouTube tab never loaded the provider rules it checks your endpoint against. The userscript wasn't affected.
• Feed Prefilter drops blocked channels' videos out of what YouTube sends again. Since v4.89.0 your block list never reached the part of Astra that reads those responses, so it filtered against an empty list. Videos that load as you scroll are filtered now. The first screenful arrives with the page itself and is still hidden the usual way once it draws.
• A script on a YouTube page can no longer switch Photosensitive Flash Protection off. Firing YouTube's "navigation started" signal stopped the guard until the next real page change. It now tells one video from the next by looking at the video itself, so the cut between two videos still isn't counted as a flash.
• A script on the page also can't stop Astra's changes from reaching the codec filter, Force DVR, the flash guard and Feed Prefilter by tampering with how the browser reports page changes.
• Firing that same "navigation started" signal could also cancel the flash guard's first start, or Always Best Quality and the audio track choice waiting on a slow player, until the video loaded more. Those page-side tasks now listen only to Astra's own signed page-change notice.
• The Subscriptions page's live and "Streamed" filters hide those videos again. YouTube's newer cards dropped the markers both filters looked for, so neither hid anything, and the live one could catch a normal video with "LIVE" in capitals in its title. On older-style cards the "Streamed" one read the title and channel name too, so a video called "Streamed highlights" got hidden.
• Disable Infinite Scroll actually stops the endless loading now. On search it kept pulling in the next page as you scrolled, with the Load More button sitting there doing nothing useful. Scrolling to the bottom now stops at the button, and each click loads one more page.
• You can scroll through all of a channel's videos again. On a channel's Videos tab the grid stopped after the first 30 and never loaded more. Astra hides YouTube's loading spinner at the bottom of video grids by default, and it did that by removing the spinner's slot entirely, which is also what YouTube watches to know you've reached the bottom. The spinner now stays invisible but keeps its place, so the next batch loads as you scroll. The same grid runs Home and Subscriptions, so they get the fix too.
• Photosensitive Flash Protection no longer switches itself off a moment after it starts on computers that decode video on the graphics card. Reading each frame used to take 13 ms at 1080p and 45 ms at 4K, far past its 1 ms allowance, so the guard shut down within a few frames. It now asks the graphics card for a tiny copy of the frame, which takes about 3 ms, looks at no more than 40 frames a second, and only turns off when it stays slow on average, not after a brief hitch. Checked for a full minute of 4K 60 fps and 1080p playback.
• Your account picture shows in the top right corner again when you're signed in. Astra hides channel and comment pictures by default, and that rule also caught the account button, which left an empty outlined square where your picture belongs. It happened in the extension and the userscript alike. Hide Own Avatar still removes the button if you'd rather not see it. The same rule blanked every product picture in a video's Products panel, and in the merch shelf when you'd turned Hide Merch Shelf off. Those show again too.
• Hide Mixes no longer empties the sidebar next to a music video. YouTube links most of the songs there into a radio, and Astra took that link to mean a Mix, so ordinary music videos disappeared with the real Mixes. A card now counts as a Mix only when it has no running time, which every Mix lacks and every video shows. The same mix-up kept the Watch Feed button off those songs, and it's back.
• Title keywords in Hide Videos work on Home, Subscriptions, channel pages and the watch sidebar, Home's Shorts shelf included. YouTube's newer cards there have no element Astra recognized as the title, so a keyword only ever matched search results.
• Hide Live, Hide Mixes, Hide Movies and the other video type filters stop judging a video by its title or its channel's name. A search result called "How to mix audio" counted as a Mix, "Billie Jean (Live)" or anything uploaded by Jimmy Kimmel Live counted as a live stream, and a channel named Film Theory made every one of its videos a movie. They now go by YouTube's own badges and the views and date line.
• The low-view, low-signal and minimum-length video filters work again on YouTube's new cards. Since late September YouTube prints "1.1M" next to an eye icon instead of "1.1M views", writes "6d ago" for "6 days ago" and draws the length in a new badge, so Astra couldn't read any of them and those filters quietly let every video through. They now read the current cards on Home, Subscriptions, search, channel pages and the watch sidebar, and still read the older ones. The Subscriptions page's "Newest first (loaded only)" order reads the new ages too. If a filter can't find the number it needs on a whole page of cards, the feature's health status now says so instead of looking fine. Cards that never print the number, like a channel's live streams or a playlist, don't count against it.