2.97.7

New features

• Operators can exclude the first 0 to 600 seconds of an episode from ad detection, with feed-level overrides. PR #753
• An opt-in remote Whisper pool can process multiple episodes concurrently. PR #722
• Ad chapters can publish kept and held segments as Podcasting 2.0 chapters. The feature is off by default and is configured under Transcripts & Chapters. PR #722
• A Recents feed can combine newly processed episodes from subscribed and local feeds. It is opt-in and created from Add Feed. PR #722 and issue #721
• Detection, verification, chapters, and review can use independent primary or secondary provider slots. Secondary routing is off by default and is not automatic failover. PR #748
• The LLM usage ledger now records per-call provider, model, token, and cost data. Stats adds sortable, paginated cost views and episode phase breakdowns. PR #748
• Per-episode pass-through overrides, grouped dashboard episode views, and a system health panel are available. PR #748
• Provider admission can reserve daily budget, concurrency, and uncertain charges before work starts. PR #729
• Feed authentication can issue separate revocable subscriber keys, and Recents subscribers can access only eligible source assets. PR #729

Fixes

• Ad-free transcripts regain coverage that was lost when Whisper repeated the initial prompt. PR #722
• Reviewer boundary corrections that conflict with protected merged evidence go to manual review instead of cutting the full merged span, and compatible pass-1 and pass-2 cuts render once from the original. PR #730 and issue #458
• Provider budget reconciliation retains actual completed-call costs after run history is written. PR #733 and issue #732
• Feed refreshes, search indexing, and SQLite writes use shorter transactions and recovery paths, reducing lock contention and restoring work after worker failure. PR #722 and PR #729
• Provider rate limits, authentication failures, quota exhaustion, reasoning-budget exhaustion, and custom-setting rejections now retry or hold according to their status instead of silently losing work. PR #722 and PR #748
• Prompt and description inputs are scrubbed before LLM calls, including HTML, URLs, timestamps, comments, and excess text. PR #749
• The dashboard, queue, spend views, episode controls, and settings now fit narrow screens better, preserve loading state, expose errors, and use accessible touch targets. PR #748, PR #756, and PR #757
• Reviewer boundary handling protects measured evidence, tolerates small measured disagreements, and avoids holding an entire merged ad for an estimated pattern tail. PR #748
• Feed refreshes are staggered, malformed bodies back off, invalid gzip responses retry without compression, and shared-outage detection reports only feeds actually attempted. PR #756
• OpenAI-compatible transcription word timestamps are read from the top-level response, restoring boundary refinement for compliant remote servers. PR #756
• Editing an LLM provider endpoint or type no longer crashes Settings, and spend date fields and provider names no longer collide on phones. PR #761
• anyio was updated to 4.14.2 to address CVE-2026-63374 and CVE-2026-64847. PR #760

Upgrade notes

• This promotion includes releases 2.96.0 through 2.97.7 after stable 2.95.3.
• Existing installations run additive migrations for processing ownership and recovery, subscriber keys, provider admission, uploads, backups, and correction scoping. Legacy corrections without a podcast scope remain unresolved until assigned or deleted. See PR #729.
• Compose now requires initial password setup and blocks unauthenticated feed requests from starting processing. Compatibility overrides are available for operators who need the previous behavior. PR #729
• Rate-limit holds now return episodes to the normal queue and remove the older deferred-episode expiry fields. Existing deferred holds are migrated. PR #722
• Encrypted backups use the MPBK02 streaming format. Use the documented cold-restore and offline passphrase-rotation commands, and ensure workers are stopped for passphrase rotation. PR #729
• This release predates the search-rebuild and provider-recovery fixes in 2.97.14 (PR #782).