April 2024
Updated the testing release. Improvements:
- Reworked HDMI screen blanking on Pi4/5. Now uses KMS blanking as
vcgencmd display_power is no longer available.
- Amount of space reserved on an SD card now uses 10% of available space up to 512MB. This helps with smaller SD cards (in case you still have 1GB cards around
)
- Added a way to transparently flip either one or both screens on Pi4/Pi5 devices with zero performance overhead. This helps with dual display setups if both displays are physically rotated differently. You can now also use the same setup on devices with different orientation. Flipping is by 180 degree only. Right now there is no way to easily configure this option on the dashboard. Stay tuned (or get in contact if you want to use this right now). EDIT: It’s actually possible to split this feature into horizontal and vertical flipping. So if you have a rear projector, the output can soon be flipped horizontally only. Stay tuned.
- Pi4/5 video decoder now properly handles single frame videos.
- Assigned video modes are now tested to ensure they work on the connected display. If not, the resolution is first reduced to 1920x1080 and finally to 640x480, so there is always at least some output.
1 reply
April 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated testing (now 240424-14917d) again.
- Support for independently rotating/flipping one of both displays on Pi4/Pi5
- Support for overscan setting on Pi4/Pi5
- Support for ignoring HDR on Pi4/Pi5
- Updated kernel to 6.6.28 / FFmpeg to 5.1.4-rpi_24 / EEPROM to April 20th version
- Fixed some package properties (like streaming support) not getting activated properly
1 reply
April 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated testing (now 240426-280b1b):
-
Added support for content processes (allowing embedded browser content). See this very technical post. If you want to try it out on a Pi4 or Pi5, click this button to import the experimental package into your account. Be sure to update your testing release to the latest version (Device detail page > Manage > Activate testing channel). Do not use it in production please
1 reply
April 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated again to 240427-cb91f4:
- Fixes content process code in info-beamer required to run the browser demo package linked in the previous post.
1 reply
May 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated to 240506-552176:
- Fix EEPROM update condition on Pi4/Pi5
- Avoid briefly switching resolutions on info-beamer restart when changing setups.
- Fixed H264 playback on Pi4 (oops)
- Improved info-beamer to support both RGBA and BGRA pixel formats for future content process plugins
- Potentially improved rendering performance when using fully opaque textures
- Improved CEC handling. Might hopefully be more compatible with more displays?
Known issues:
- PoE hats don’t really automatically adjust fan RPM. Note sure yet why that doesn’t work: The necessary modules and overlays should all be there. See this other post.
1 reply
May 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated to 240515-125a8c:
- Allow
YUVJ420P and YUVJ422P video frame format.
- Added a way to remotely show a small text overlay on demand. Could be used for another ‘second factor’ auth in the future or as a way to recover account access. This isn’t used yet.
Known issues:
- The PoE issue from above
- There’s still sometimes an annoying flickering of the last two frames when info-beamer is briefly stopped while switching setups. I’m not sure why that happens as nothing info-beamer is doing should cause that. It seems almost as if double buffering swaps between buffers while DRM/KMS is shut down. Odd.
1 reply
July 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Updated to 240712-b61773 and promoted to stable-0014 
- Changing the device configuration now keeps the currently installed OS version
- Updated kernel to 6.6.33 and EEPROM to 2024-06-05
- Improved 270/90 degree rotation handling on Pi4/Pi5: No longer requires package specific workarounds
- Fixed a small memory leak when playing videos
- Updater process on the device can now install specific versions. This isn’t used yet but will help with future version migrations.
- Fixed flickering mentioned above.
Known issues:
- Some display names are not correctly detected. This will be fixed in a followup release soon.
1 reply
August 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 240821-01d6ef:
- [Pi4/5] Fall back to FullHD (or potentially 640x480) if no display is connected and no video mode is configured.
- [Pi4/5] Support emulation for
hdmi_cvt modes (see [Solved] I can't set custom resolutions)
- [Pi4/5] Added support for very old
/config/tvservice config files.
- [Pi4/5] Video streaming improvements like an new
video:buffer() call for video objects to query the buffer size in seconds as well as a more reliable start for RTP/UDP streams.
- [Pi5] Added support for power button press. Can be used by packages and also signals presses to the backend.
- Updated kernel to 6.6.45, EEPROM to 2024-07-30.
- Add overlays for more CM5 lite models.
1 reply
August 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 240828-69d35d:
- [Pi4/5] Potentially slightly faster boot time
- [Pi4/5] Reduce memory usage when playing more than one HEVC video.
- [Pi4/5] Reworked internal frame buffer handling. Prevents flickering in rare cases and fixes an incorrect API assumption regarding video textures: Turns out one has to use individual DMA handles per plane and not a single dumb buffer containing all planes, as that results in DMA file descriptors being closed too soon.
- [Pi4/5] info-beamer now supports non-blocking DRM commits as well as asynchronious snapshotting. But unused at the moment, but could be interesting. See this thread.
- [Pi5] Potential support for hardware sleeping: Powers down the Pi and wakes it up X seconds later. Could maybe be used to deep sleep if nothing is scheduled. But of course a Pi is then offline until the scheduled date and no amount of dashboard changes will wake it up before that.
- [Pi4] Reduce memory usage when playing H264 videos.
September 2024
Released testing 240904-80d628:
- [Pi4/5] If no explicit video mode is set, a hotplug detection is now activated to monitor both HDMI ports. On change, the info-beamer process is restarted to readjust the resolution as necessary.
- [Pi4/5] When info-beamer tries to connect to (for now only) the embeddable browser process, the connection is reattempted if the browser isn’t running yet. This avoids having the browser sometimes not appear on first load if it’s too slow to start.
- Update Linux kernel to 6.6.47
September 2024
Released testing 240914-8e59d0:
- [Pi5] Added support for the Pi5 2GB model. Turns out there were quite a few tricky things missing: From a missing overlay without which booting was rudely interrupted by an instant kernel panic to changes required to Mesa that fixed GL output due to broken shaders.
- [Pi5] Optimized software decoding of H264 videos: Now avoids 180MB/s of memcpy calls per FullHD video or around 25% of the total video decoding CPU usage during playback of a H264 video.
- [Pi4/5] Reorganized DRM handling of 90/270 degree rotated videos. Moving between DRM and OpenGL rendering now no longer flickers for one frame, so videos can be rotated seamlessly at 60fps. This can potentially be used to transparently move video rendering between methods without visual changes to allow freeing up DRM resources if lots of videos play. This needs more testing…
- [Pi4/5] Explored the possibility of realtime capturing the screen output. Scaling down FullHD to 480x270 (so to ¼) can be captured as a 3mbit H264 video at 60fps already. Potentially better on the Pi4 with hardware H264 encoder. This feature isn’t usable yet…
- Updated Linux kernel to 6.6.51
- Updated EEPROM to 2024-09-10
1 reply
September 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 240917-381d3d
- [Pi4/5] Detection of disconnected displays. If a configured display isn’t detected for 10 seconds, a maintenance event is triggered and will soon show up in the dashboard.
- [Pi4/5] Process priority optimizations. The main info-beamer process now runs with the highest priority possible.
- [Pi4/5] Uses non-blocking DRM commits. Together with the previous item, this helps avoiding skipped output frames and achieves the perfect 60fps frame rate more consistently.
- [Pi3] In theory the Pi3 can also use the Pi4/5 version of info-beamer now. The only immediate issue is that taking screenshots crashes the process due to some unexplained “Out of space” error. Needs more investigating.
1 reply
September 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 240923-334ce8:
- [Pi5] Optimized H264 software decoder yet again by only using a single pooled DMA buf per video frame.
- [Pi4/5] Provide executable name to content-process. This can be used to improve content process start up time by avoiding to load the content process into an overlay if configured in node.json.
- [Pi4/5] Prevent content process content from being drawn prior to being marked ready.
- [Pi4/5] Allow raw video players to transition to gl player. This can allow fancy transitions by switching from faster raw playback to gl during transitions like rotations.
- [Pi4/5] The same mechanism can now seamlessly mode rendering from DRM to GL and vice versa on demand or when required by how video layers are stacked. This can help render more videos at once without using too many DRM planes. This can also be used while taking screenshots to avoid having to double the active DRM planes as would be required without this feature.
- [Pi4/5] Reduce CPU usage by avoiding syncing of video frames if they are not being drawn.
- [Pi4/5] Use optimal DMA heap depending on Pi model: system heaps on Pi5, CMA on Pi4. This also means that there isn’t any real memory restriction on how many videos can be loaded on a Pi5.
- [Pi3] Fixed the screenshot problem from the previous release. The later Pi3 models should now also use the Pi4/Pi5 OS method of video rendering, including content process features like embedding a live browser. Get in contact if you’re interested in testing this.
1 reply
October 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241002-d745a3:
-
[Pi4/5] Improved overlap tests for video content. If multiple videos partially overlap, covered areas will not be drawn in most cases. This can greatly improve rendering performance.
-
Incompatible change in some very rare cases: Moved all rendering to premultiplied alpha blending. This is something that should have been done from the very start, but is necessary now due to how video rendering on the Pi4/5 works to ensure 90/270 degree rotated videos render correctly in all cases. In very rare cases when using custom fragment shaders in custom packages could this change result in incorrect visual output. If you have shader code like this:
gl_FragColor = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.5, alpha);
you must now use the following code if info-beamer uses premultiplied alpha, so the alpha value is multiplied to the RGB components:
gl_FragColor = vec4(1.0*alpha, 0.0, 0.5*alpha, alpha);
You can detect if this change is needed, in case you use a mix of old and new versions using:
if sys.provides "premultiplied-alpha" then
-- use new premultiplied-alpha shader
else
-- use old shader
end
info-beamer tries to automatically patch existing shader code used with resource.load_shader based on a heuristic (which you can disable with node.set_flag "premultiplied-alpha", in which case premultiplied alpha use is assumed):
-
If there is a `uniform vec4 Color;" import in the shader, nothing is patched, as it is assumed that the color is multiplied with the result already like this:
gl_FragColor = the_shader_result * Color;
in which case it’s assumed that the primary alpha value is within Color. As that’s already premultiplied, nothing needs to be done.
-
In all other cases, the following code is patched before the closing brace within the main function:
gl_FragColor.rgb *= gl_FragColor.a;
If you have any questions about this, please get in contact!
1 reply
October 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241008-4fd91e:
- Updated kernel to 6.6.54
- Added experimental
gl.draw_front() and gl.draw_back() to specify where images and other rendered content will be placed: By default it’s drawn above the already rendered content, but if gl.draw_back() is called, all following draw calls will render into the background.
- Add ‘double’ data type to OSC parser.
- Added additional logging should the kernel crash and reboot.
- [Pi4/5] Fixed shaders not properly handling video textures. This fixes some non-working effects in the browser package.
- [Pi4/5] Improved texture handling: When using a video in a shader, the texture stays referenced until the end of the frame so the video frame doesn’t change mid-rendering.
1 reply
October 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241012-46fe2b:
- Updated kernel to 6.6.56. This includes a nice fix that should prevent firmware crashes if too many videos are active at once. See here, here and here.
- [Pi4] Reduced CMA memory (used mainly by the video decoder) to 512MB. More seems to not always be possible. 512MB should still be enough.
- [Pi3] Improved welcome screen performance in KMS mode. Now that intro is smooth again
- [Pi3] Added a way to switching between KMS/legacy mode using a single configuration setting. See below for how that’s used.
- [Pi4/5] Disable HDR default. Doesn’t seem to work in all cases and it’s better the output looks like SDR than and oddly colored HDR.
- Fixed a crash bug that could happen in the ZIP loader. It’s mostly unused, but the new browser packages uses it.
- [Pi4/5] A method of potentially faster transferring images into a texture has been disabled as with KMS it doesn’t make a difference any more and could result in slower rendering of those loaded images.
- [Pi5] Now also uses anti-aliasing when mirroring FullHD displays
Pi3 / Pi Zero W2 in KMS mode
When the Pi4 was released, the way info-beamer controlled the display, decodes videos and renders OpenGL content like text and images needed to be updated as the Pi4 wasn’t fully compatible with previous models. Unfortunately during those days, a full transition to a fully modern graphics stack (KMS/DRM) wasn’t available yet and info-beamer was stuck in “Fake KMS” land for a while. It was an odd mix of legacy methods and partially implemented modern methods.
This has changed around the time when the Pi5 was released. The Pi5 is completely incompatible with how things worked in the past and it seems a lot more effort was made to finally fully transition away from “Fake KMS” to KMS/DRM, Mesa for rendering GL content and FFmpeg for video decoding. It took a while to make all that work in info-beamer , but it was totally worth it. Now info-beamer on Pi4 and Pi5 are fully optimized and use all the latest features available. Adding support for future Pi6 will probably be a lot easier now.
Older Pi models still use the legacy methods. For models prior to the Pi3, this will probably remain the only way it can work. But it happens that the Pi3 and Pi Zero 2W (which is basically a slimmed down Pi3) is fully compatible with the methods used on the Pi4 and 5 (minus being able to decode HEVC). Right now this isn’t enabled by default, but can be toggled in the configuration interface. Navigate to the “Advanced/Development” tab of the configuration and check the “Enable KMS/DRM” checkbox:
If you apply this change to your Pi will reboot and will use the new method of controlling the hardware. This happens to also allow you to run the new native browser on a Pi3. Probably not on a Pi Zero 2W though as it probably hasn’t enough memory.
If you run your Pi3 in KMS mode, please provide feedback. Thanks!
1 reply
October 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241014-f022ae:
- [Pi4] Add back analog audio output
- [Pi4/5] Add
contentprocess:pixel_format() to query pixel format of content process (currently either "rgba" or "bgra".
- [Pi4/5] Update EEPROM to 2024-10-10
- [Pi3] In KMS mode, reduce CMA to 128MB on Pi3A+. Doesn’t like 256MB for some reason!?
October 2024
Released testing 241028-1f2fb2:
- Updated Kernel to 6.6.58
- Updated EEPROM to 2024-10-10: This together with the kernel includes performance enhancements on Pi4/5.
- [Pi4/Pi5] Updated info-beamer to
2.0.0.d39bb7: This includes improvements to audio/video synchronization and streaming. By slightly adjusting audio playback speed if necessary, audio should no longer go out of sync.
1 reply
November 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241119-0b8aee:
- Updated kernel to 6.6.60
- Update EEPROM to 2024-11-05
- Added initial support for (unannounced?) Pi500 by including its overlay files
- Updated Mesa to 24.2.4
- Update info-beamer:
- Fix DRM plane assignment sometimes reusing planes too seen when moving between displays
- Optimized util.config_watch to also check
__metadata.config_hash value
- Added support for 7" Pi display through DRM mirroring
1 reply
December 2024
▶ infobeamer-fw
Released testing 241204-5d6fe1:
- Added support for Compute Module 5
- CPU governor now defaults to ‘ondemand’. This allows reducing CPU cycles if it’s not fully used.
- Allow framebuffer snapshots for 32bit console output during the boot process. Previously only RGB564 was supported.
- Updated kernel to 6.6.63.
- Updated EEPROM to 2024-12-12
- Updated info-beamer:
- Fixed font rendering crashing for some TTF fonts if glyphs are missing
- Improved 7" Pi display mirroring to do rotation fully hardware accelerated. See here.
- Allow mip mapping for content process provided textures. This will soon allow the Web Browser package to provide lower resolution version of its output to info-beamer which can improve animation performance on the Pi3. The cube rotation animation now works with full 60fps even on a Pi3.
December 2024
Released testing 241212-790789:
- Updated kernel to 6.6.64
- Updated EEPROM to 2024-12-07
- Updated info-beamer:
- Potentially fixed RTSP streaming hanging if initial packet has AV_NOPTS_VALUE timestamp.
- The Pi4/5 release already detects disconnected displays and shows a maintenance notification in the dashboard. It now also detects if the display is connected again and removes the notification.
- Everything should be ready for the Pi500 and CM5 lite.
Given the massive improvements compared to the current stable release, the current testing release branch will soon be merged into stable, so it is getting installed by default for all new devices and will be rolled out incrementally on existing devices. Stay tuned.