Releases: emerytech/couchside
Release list
v2.9.29
A boot-session fix for Bazzite, and early groundwork for other kinds of box.
- Fixed: "Boots into → Desktop" could leave a Bazzite box at the login
screen. It pointed the automatic login at a desktop session that exists on
SteamOS but not on Bazzite, so the box stopped at the password prompt and then
came up in Game Mode anyway — and if your Couchside service runs under your own
login, it would not start until you signed in, so the phone lost the box. The
box now uses a desktop session it has confirmed is installed, and refuses to
change the setting at all if it cannot find one. This is the part of this
release that is tested and working. - Groundwork, ALPHA — boxes that do not use SDDM. The box can now identify
which login manager it runs, and there is early support for setting the boot
session on greetd (common on Arch/CachyOS gamescope builds and ChimeraOS).
This has not been tested on a real greetd machine yet — it is written
ahead of proper support rather than proven, so treat it as experimental and
expect it may not work. GDM and LightDM are recognised but not supported at
all yet; on those the setting simply will not appear. - If greetd support does run, your existing configuration is preserved and a
backup is saved beside it, and anything that cannot be changed safely is left
alone rather than risking your boot.
v2.9.27
Send files to the box from your phone — and the screen preview works again.
- Send a file to your box. A new card on the Console tab: pick anything on
your phone — a ROM, a save, a PDF, a photo — and it lands in
~/Downloads/Couchsideon the box. Big files are fine; they stream straight
across rather than being held in memory. On the desktop, Show on box opens
that folder on the TV so you can get at what you just sent. - The screen preview is fixed. If you had ever switched between Game Mode
and the desktop, the preview would quietly stop updating — a stale picture, or
nothing at all, taking about nine seconds to give up each time. It was aiming
at the session you had left, which sticks around after it ends. The box now
checks whether that session is genuinely still running, so the preview follows
you between Game Mode and the desktop. - Preview frames arrive about 2.4x faster — roughly two seconds down to
under one — so the Screen card feels far less sluggish. - Windows: pairing from the app works. Tapping your PC in "Scan for boxes"
used to fail with unauthorized — the PC had no way to show you a PIN, so the
only ways in were the QR page or typing the token by hand. Now it shows a
six-digit PIN on the PC's own screen, same as a Steam Deck. - Windows: a fix for the missing Pad tab. Some
.exeinstalls shipped
without the driver file the virtual controller needs, so the box reported no
gamepad support and the app hid the Pad tab entirely. Builds can no longer be
made that way. If your Pad tab is missing, reinstall with the current
CouchsideSetup.exe. - Coming from before 2.9.53, you also get: the trackpad no longer goes dead
after the phone sits idle, and on Windows your Epic, GOG and Xbox / Game Pass
games appear next to Steam.
v2.9.22
The trackpad stays alive — and on Windows, your whole game library shows up.
- No more dead mouse after the phone sits idle. If the app was in the
background (or the phone locked, or you switched to Desktop mode), the
connection could go quiet and the box would quietly drop it — you'd come back
to a green "connected" dot and a trackpad that moved nothing, and the only fix
was force-quitting the app. The box now keeps the link awake itself, and your
first swipe rebuilds the connection if it did die. Pointer, keyboard, and
controller all recover on their own. - Windows: Epic, GOG, and Xbox / Game Pass games now appear next to your
Steam library, in the same cover grid — tap one and it starts on the TV. The
Launch tab also shows up on a PC that has no Steam installed at all. - Windows: a double-click installer.
CouchsideSetup.exesets the service
up without pasting anything into PowerShell. Grab it from
https://couchside.tv/windows.
v2.9.21
Storage now reports how full a drive really is. It was dividing by space you
cannot actually use, so a nearly-full drive could read several points low.
Game drives appear too — a Steam Deck's SD card was invisible before.
The GPU no longer looks like it has half a gigabyte. Handhelds share memory
with the system, and only the small dedicated slice was being reported — it now
shows the whole pool, plus how busy the GPU actually is.
Memory now shows swap in use and, when the box is actually struggling, how much
time it spends stalled waiting on memory — the thing you feel as stutter, which
a used-percentage does not tell you.
Handhelds also show current power draw and the machine's power profile — and
while charging, how long until the battery is full.
You can close the running game from your phone. The Gaming card shows what is
playing and how long it has been on, with a button to quit it.
Game cover art now appears on Android. It never has — the phone was quietly
dropping the credential on image requests, so every tile fell back to a plain
card.
While the box updates itself, the app now shows what it is actually doing, and
the box's own screen shows an update page so you are not staring at a frozen TV.
v2.9.20
Poster art now appears for games that were showing a blank card. Recent Steam
files its artwork somewhere the box was not looking, so it was on your machine
the whole time — nothing is downloaded.
Handhelds report their own battery: charge, whether you are on AC, and how long
is left.
New "Send keys instead of a controller" option in the app. Steam navigates the
same way, but the box stops announcing a controller every time you connect — so
a game already running cannot lose player one to your phone.
v2.9.19
v2.9.17
v2.9.16
Couchside 2.9.14
App 2.9.14 (iOS build 67 / versionCode 51) · Linux agent unchanged (2.9.33) · Windows agent unchanged (0.3.7-win)
An app-only release — your box needs no update.
Snappier TV navigation
D-pad presses on a TV took a longer path than box control (an extra probe round-trip before every key). They now go straight to the box, so controlling a TV feels closer to instant.
Clearer text-to-TV
Sending text to a TV only lands if a text field is focused on the TV. With none focused it used to silently do nothing; now the app says so, and points you at the search box that makes it work.
Agent assets on this release are the same signed 2.9.33 files as v2.9.13, re-signed under this tag so install.sh and couchside update keep working.
Couchside 2.9.13
App 2.9.13 (iOS build 66 / versionCode 50) · Linux agent 2.9.33 · Windows agent unchanged (0.3.7-win)
Scan for TVs actually finds them
Discovery only ever saw devices that reply directly to our query, so TVs that answer over multicast were invisible — a Google TV and an 85" LG were both missed on a real network while a scan returned only an unrelated panel. It now listens properly, and finds LG sets over mDNS as well as SSDP.
Pairing identifies the device first
Aiming pairing at the wrong kind of device used to fail with a raw TLS error that said nothing about the actual problem. Couchside now works out what is at an address and either pairs with the right protocol automatically, or explains what the device is. You can still force a pairing — a TV that is off cannot be identified at all.
LG commercial / signage displays
Panels from LG's commercial line do not speak consumer webOS. They are now supported directly over their own control port: power, input and mute, with no pairing.
Pick which TV the remote drives
A box with more than one paired TV drove whichever brand ranked highest, so pairing a second TV appeared to succeed and then did nothing. Setup now lets you choose.
Agent assets are signed with the offline Ed25519 release key; install.sh and couchside update verify them before installing.