HMP release notes

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"Info"
The latest HMP Firmware is version "Jungfrau" 2.2.4 released on 24.01.2012.
  • Please check the Firmware page for more details on upgrading the firmware.
  • Also check the Known issues with the latest firmware.
"Warning!"
Updating to Firmware 2.2.X from Firmware 2.1.X may cause backward compatibility issues on the content!
If you plan to upgrade the devices of an existing installation, we recommend you to test your content on an updated test-device at first.

Contents

Release 2.2.4 (23.01.2012)

Backward compatibility issues

Minor features / improvements

General

  • The quality of the VGA output on all HMP models has been improved for pixel rates up to 80 MHz (e.g., up to 720p60 output resolution), the output is now sharper and better adapted to computer graphics content.
  • The VGA output in all HMP models now has a DC voltage offset in the RGB signals by default. This improves the quality of the black levels and is compatible with the vast majority of displays. If a display or repeater does not support this voltage offset the feature can be disabled by deselecting the VGA display supports DC offset option under the Advanced tab of the Display Settings page of Control Center (the image should appear as overexposed when the DC voltage offset is not supported).
  • A device self test is now included in the firmware to exercise and functionally verify all peripherals. It can be started from the Maintenance page of Control Center, under the Advanced tab.
  • Improved user error messages on USB storage formatting timeouts.
  • Various minor diagnostics and log improvements (network statistics, timezone reporting, re-enabled symbolic kernel stack traces, SD card error messages, streaming packet capture start and stop log messages, USB storage formatting logs, hardware watchdog about to expire warning).
  • The timezone database has been updated to version 2011n (was 2011e), the update affects regions in the following places: Canada, Cuba, Brazil, Falkland Islands, Egypt, South Sudan, Palestine, Fiji, Samoa, Belarus, Moldavia, Ukraine and Russia.
  • The config backup file syntax has been extended to include the new configuration items (VGA display supports DC offset and Make fusion my default start page), see Backup for the updated documentation.
  • Added a new spx:transport attribute to SVG media elements to specify the RTP transport to use when controlling the session via RTSP, valid values are the following.
    • tcp: request RTP streaming interleaved within the RTSP TCP connection, this allows to do RTP / RTSP streaming over NAT routers and firewalls which do not have transparent RTP / RTSP support but has the disadvantages of TCP based streaming (i.e. head of line blocking and conflicting TCP rate control) causing uncontrolled delay under adverse network conditions.
    • unicast: request unicast RTP streaming over UDP.
    • multicast: request multicast RTP streaming (always UDP).
    • attribute not set: use the server's default, typically unicast or multicast RTP over UDP.

HMP200

  • Improved audio quality on HMP200, the occasional audio dropouts should no longer occur.
  • Vertical HD videos (1080x1920) are now supported on HMP200.

Fusion

  • Fusion can now become that default (i.e. main) web page instead of Control Center for ease of use, this feature is selectable when enabling Fusion.
  • Various minor Fusion user interface improvements.

JavaScript

  • The jSignage library, beta version 0.9.0, is now included in the firmware, this is a JavaScript API dedicated to the building of professional digital signage applications with Scalable Vector Graphics enabled players akin to jQuery; see JSignage:JSignage_API for more details. Note that the version included is beta and may be subject to change before the final release of jSignage 1.0.
    The included version is automatically used when the magic URL http://download.spinetix.com/spxjslibs/jSignage.js is used to load it.
  • The JavaScript variable document.documentElement.previewMode can now take the following values
    • 0: normal mode
    • 1: preview mode (can be used to generate custom preview in Fusion)

Bug fixes

General

  • When the device crashes or has a power failure during the writing of a very large file to the internal storage the recovery time at reboot could exceed the watchdog timeout, leading to a reboot loop that could place the device into recovery mode. The watchdog timeout has been adapted to match the worst case situation on each model, fixing this situation. This problem may still persist when even larger files are published to slow USB flash based storage, this change greatly reduces the chance of it occurring but a 100% robust solution is pending for next firmware release; the exact file size that triggers this problem depends on the speed of random 4 KiB writes on the USB storage device under use.
  • Incorrect memory accounting would allow the write file cache to grow excessively when publishing very large files (directly or via pull mode) and could lead to "memory thrashing" errors and device reboots. This was most common with flash based USB storage on HMP200 but could also occur in other configurations and on HMP100 and HMP130 products.
  • Updated the embedded http server to Apache httpd 2.2.21, solving CVE-2011-3192.
  • Only a handful of JPEG images could be shown simultaneously, the limits have been raised by optimizing the use of resources; the new limits are as follows.
    • HMP100 and HMP130: up to 14 1920x1080 images or 32 1280x720 images.
    • HMP200: up to 32 1920x1080 images.
  • The interface level network statistics were incomplete.
  • When downloading files larger than 512 KiB a race condition could truncate the file to 512 KiB instead of retrieving the remaining parts; this affected all remote HTTP content.
  • Fixed some logs that had partially incorrect information.
  • Writing to the internal EEPROMs would sometimes incorrectly fail with a timeout, most often when the system was under high load.
  • When updating from firmware 2.0.4 or earlier to 2.2.1, 2.2.2 or 2.2.3 the player could not start and no logs were created due a a directory permissions change. This is now fixed and upgrades from firmware versions 2.0.4 to 2.2.4 work as expected.
  • The DNS caching daemon would crash, causing a device reboot, if a name lookup that previously returned only one IP address and was still in the cache suddenly returns two or more IP addresses. Although this was rare it could occur every few hours when referencing some dynamically hosted Internet services.
  • Under some circumstances an RTSP streaming session could be left in an open state (i.e. no TEARDOWN request was sent) potentially overloading some streaming servers that continued to stream the no longer active sessions.
  • When upgrading from an old 1.x firmware to 2.2.x a screen ID could not be set from Control Center.
  • If the player configuration file could not be loaded by Control Center an exception could occur and no functional page was displayed.
  • In some rare cases the crash report could be missing from the crash logs.
  • Project fonts on removable USB storage may not be picked up when plugging the USB storage device until next reboot or a new project with changed fonts is published. Likewise, after unplugging the USB storage device any differences in project fonts may not be picked up until next reboot or a new project with changed fonts is published.
  • Publishing a project with large fonts (e.g., Asian) may cause the device to reboot because the font analysis may take more than 30 seconds; as of 2.2.4 the player will appear to freeze while rescanning the new fonts when reloading the index.svg file and then resume playback, but will not reboot the device. Note that this font rescanning can take up to a few minutes when using several large fonts. However, font rescanning only occurs when files under the fonts folder are modified.
  • Documents with a fixed begin time well in the past but with content of known length could take a long time to open, possibly leading to a reboot on HMP.
  • Resuming a paused video element would crash if the element's end was used as the begin or end time of another SMIL element.
  • Some visual glitches could occur in the rendering of the first frame of an animation.
  • Rendered objects could be incorrectly clipped when their position was animated.

JavaScript DOM API

  • Leading and trailing whitespace in the =textContent=property of an element was not preserved as required by the DOM API.
  • parseRSS() would return incorrect enclosures when the link is the same for all items.
  • A rare race condition in the log framework could cause a crash.
  • Missing arguments to JavaScript functions would crash the player (regression since 2.2.0).

HMP100/HMP130

  • Some MPEG-4 (part 2) video streams could crash the decoder on HMP100 and HMP130 if they contained video buffering verifier and fixed VOP rate parameters in the Video Object Layer header.
  • On some HMP130 units the display power save and serial port could not be properly enabled, they could be configured but were non-functional.
  • For high bitrate streaming (about 8 Mbps and higher) incoming network packets could be occasionally dropped due to suboptimal priorities on the central processor bus; this led to lost frames in the decoded video, the number of lost frames depends mostly on the packetization strategy utilized by the streaming server. This affects HMP100 and HMP130 only, not HMP200.

HMP200

  • The VGA output on HMP200 could show a vertical blue line on the right, just outside the output image. This is now solved when enabling the new VGA display supports DC output offset feature (it is enabled by default). The blue line cannot be removed from the output signal if this feature is disabled.
  • Some MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 could be incorrectly decoded on HMP200 showing grey areas.

Control Center

  • Control Center would not allow to set the URI for the pull mode ICS file to a URL without a dot in the hostname part and would return a confusing message on validation errors.
  • Fixed issue where Internet Explorer could not open compressed log files when opened from Control Center.
  • Control Center would report a 1970 date for the firmware update log if no firmware update was ever run.

Pull Mode/RPC

  • The exponential back-off retry time of the pull mode could grow without bound, it is now limited to 10 minutes.
  • A malformed XML file database for pull mode would be incorrectly considered a success.
  • If an event crashed the pull mode component the event would be retried after reboot, potentially crashing the pull mode component again making the device reboot in a loop and ending in recovery mode; the faulting event is now removed to prevent this.
  • After the device was running for a long time without any pull mode operations occurring, the pull mode could not run its jobs due to a temporary directory being cleaned up and not properly recreated.
  • When enabling Fusion from Control Center an exception was returned if the pull mode was set to a local ICS file.
  • An invalid URI string for the ICS file of the pull mode would cause a crash.

Fusion

  • When a default Skin is created, it would incorrectly show a Main scheme color option.
  • The playlist, program and slide previews would not show on Internet Explorer 9.
  • Various other Internet Explorer 8 and 9 compatibility fixes.
  • In some cases incorrect previews were generated when uploading content.
  • Schedules did not include the end day as part of the schedule (e.g., for an end date of December 17, the scheduled range ended on midnight of December 16 instead of 17 as usually expected).
  • When using a vertical skin layout the highlight area for vertical content was wrong.
  • The .SPXDAV directories that could be present in uploaded archives were not ignored, potentially causing some problems on the WebDAV server of the device.
  • When creating a new slide from the preview (not using the + button), a second slides with name Slide 1 was created
  • When creating a template or a skin, attributes marked as fusion editable inside an spx:group were not recognized by Fusion
  • Textarea with a duration and editable with Fusion will not be rendered correctly
  • When no global Skin options are defined, do not show an empty title in the Skin edition dialog

Release 2.2.3 (02.09.2011)

Release notes of version 2.2.3 "Jungfrau" (02.09.2011)

Backward compatibility issues

Minor Features

General

  • The xml:id attribute in the SVG DOM is now also set when the id property is set in JavaScript
  • Reduced the loading time of JavaScript files
  • Added backwards compatibility for the News template of HMD 2.1.x for the "id is null" problem
  • Shared variable servers can now be accessed via IPv6
  • New relatedTarget property on the SVG MouseEvent object
  • The firmware update module now uses credentials entered in Control Center for authentication when the download of update files is password protected
  • The publish subfolder now remains writable when Fusion is enabled, allowing mix of Fusion and externally managed content; this is now the default destination of pull mode when Fusion is enabled
  • It is now possible to playback streaming captures
  • Literal IPv6 addresses in URLs are now supported
  • More status info about attached USB storage devices is now included in report files
  • Various minor optimizations
  • Improved logging for diagnostics

Pull mode/RPC

  • The player configuration can now be set via RPC (see RPC documentation for details)
  • Pull mode actions can now be submitted via RPC, this enables users to do things such as "pull now from this server", (see RPC documentation for details)
  • Pull mode actions can now operate on a subfolder, recursively or non-recursively, instead of the whole content (see pull mode documentation for details)
  • Default name for the report uploaded using the pull mode is now "spxreport-%s-%D-%H.tar.gz"

Fusion

  • Updated Fusion's Swedish translation

Control Center

  • Various minor improvements to Control Center
  • Streaming captures can now be enabled and cleared from the Debugging tab of Control Center's Maintenance page
  • Custom video modes can now be set in Control Center under the Advanced tab of the display configuration by selecting Custom as Configuration type
  • Improved validation of custom video output mode specifications when probing
  • Show a warning in Control Center's status page when only an automatic link-local IP address is present, which is a symptom of DHCP problems or conflicting static IP addresses

Bug fixes

General

  • The synchronization of synchronized content was broken when included into an iCal file, which is another synchronization source
  • Streaming from odd port numbers with the udp:// protocol was not working
  • Checking for changes of resources on HTTP servers that do not return an Etag was broken, with such servers some files would not be reloaded by the player when modified
  • The preserveAspectRatio attribute did not work on SVG files included from an iCal file (regression since firmware 2.2.0)
  • iCal files generated with MS Office 2010 could crash the player due to unlimited recurrence rules
  • Font rendering engine was updated to FreeType 2.4.4, solving outstanding font rendering issues (some characters could display artifacts on some fonts); the autohinter is now re-enabled
  • Resolved issues with loading of large GIF images over slow networks when the image is updated often at the server
  • Invalid UTF-8 characters in files would make the rest of the file unreadable
  • On HMP200 video files with audio could produce some crackling noise in the output
  • Updated third party libraries (libapr, libapr-util)
  • Reduced CPU usage when an effect that shrinks or increases font size is applied
  • Visual bug when a layer is moved by a script that moved other layers as well under some conditions
  • Speed up opening of documents inside a calendar
  • Some timings were computed incorrectly when an animation tag with media duration refers to a media with zero duration
  • sendComPort javascript function did not work as specified
  • some animation tag would fail to terminate before the min time when they had a min attribute
  • nodeType property for document nodes in the DOM should be 9
  • A video file with an audio stream but no audio packets could trigger a memory leak that would reboot the player
  • Under some cases some garbled pixels (e.g., green, blue) could appear around edges of objects
  • Some MPEG-4 files with uncommon width could appear garbled on HMP200
  • Some MP4 files with AAC audio would not output any audio
  • When streamed MPEG2 transport streams had multiple video frames per PES incorrect timing was derived and the video could play at only 1 or 2 frames per second.
  • Display power save on VGA output was not working when output video mode was 1080p and similar high frequency modes (HMP200 only)
  • The device could reboot due to a race in the DNS resolver cache if the network connection is unstable
  • System reports generated from the recovery console were missing the system log files (HMP100 only)
  • Updated Apache httpd to 2.2.19, solving multiple security issues (CVE-2010-1452, CVE-2009-2412, CVE-2009-0023, CVE-2009-1955, CVE-2009-1956) (see HMP#Platform_security)
  • Visual artifacts may appear when decoding multiple H264 clips in parallel on HMP200
  • Files from a remote server returning an error could be indefinitely cached as non-existent by the player

Pull mode/RPC

  • Pull mode may crash (causing the player to reboot) if the source server returned an error in the middle of the download.
  • If the server used for the upload in pull mode was returning an error, it would block the pull mode until the device was rebooted.
  • Various bugs when using the option "-content" in the upload of the pull mode potentially rebooting the device.
  • POST HTTP requests were malformed (incorrect boundary formatting) for non text files.
  • The upload of logs via pull mode over slow network links could fail due to a time out reading response headers, increased the timeout to 2 minutes (was 30 seconds)

Fusion

  • Errors in the display of some slides layout if no media files had been uploaded inside Fusion.
  • Firefox 6 compatibility fixes in Fusion
  • View box in the slide preview was not at the correct location when the template was composed of more than one SVG file.

Control Center

  • Various fixes to Control Center configuration error feedback
  • In some cases benign errors would not be shown when doing a firmware update from Control Center
  • Since Control Center was rewritten a corrupted firmware would no longer be reported at the top of all Control Center pages
  • When uploading splash screens with file extensions which were not all lowercase no thumbnail would be displayed
  • After restoring a backup that does not reboot the device, the Maintenance page would not work until reloaded.
  • The Clear Logs button of Control Center cleared the logs but returned an Internal Server Error to the client browser
  • During a firmware upgrade the Support large number of USB devices setting would be reset to its default value (enabled)
  • Restoring configuration backups created from a device with an administrative password set would prevent all future access to Control Center
  • Enabling or disabling network API from Control Center did not reboot the device although that is required for it to take effect
  • When a custom video mode was set in Control Center it was no longer possible to revert to a preset video mode
  • Setting a custom video mode in Control Center would not report it back correctly before applying
  • A user could abort Control Center scripts via a browser and leave a device in an inconsistent configuration state

Release 2.2.2 (24.05.2011)

Release notes of version 2.2.2 "Jungfrau" (24.05.2011)

Backward compatibility issues

Minor Features

Fusion

  • Added Swedish translation in Fusion.
  • Updated Russian translation in Fusion.

Bug fixes

HMP200 specific

  • Analog audio output was incorrectly initialized occasionally leading to no audio output and/or pops during startup.
  • The audio output driver could fail while rebooting possibly leading to unclean reboots.
  • H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC streams that did not contain bitstream restrictions data in the Video Usability Information within the stream's parameters could fail to decode and lockup the player.
  • Restoring a configuration backup via Control Center generated an error.

Fusion

  • Previews of slides with multiple pages was not working if there was a line break after the inline keyword.
  • Improved Internet Explorer 7 compatibility.

Control Center

  • The configuration backup could contain invalid items when Fusion is enabled.
  • When a configuration used custom video modes the configuration backup was incorrectly generated.
  • Generated configuration backups contained a typo in the XML element name (screeen instead of screen, both syntaxes are now accepted to ensure backwards compatibility).
  • Configuration backups did not clear previous credential data before adding the credentials in the backup, leading to accumulated credential data instead; the configuration backups now contain the proper syntax to remove the current credentials before adding the saved ones when restoring.
  • If the first item in a manually generated configuration backup file was not preceded by white space it was not applied.
  • Miscellaneous text typos.

Release 2.2.1 (19.04.2011)

Release notes of version 2.2.1 "Jungfrau" (19.04.2011)

Backward compatibility issues

Issues with Firmware 2.1.2 and earlier. Please check the release notes of version 2.2.0. Also check Migrating from 2.1 to 2.2.

  • News templates (created with a previous version of HMD) with multiple lines will generate a JavaScript error and will not be displayed on the screen.
    The svg file should be edited using the text editor to replace the line (around line 91/92):
    if ( id.length>0 )
    by
    if ( id!==null && id.length>0 )

Minor Features

General

  • Better check of codecs specification to avoid green frames
  • Optimized opening time for H.264/MPEG4-AVC files
  • Improved SMIL compliance
  • Improved debugging of streaming sources
  • Improved debugging logs
  • HMP200 limitations lifted
    • Arbitrary output video modes up to 1920x1080 are now supported, some common presets have been added
    • DDC VGA is now supported, VGA displays are detected and the VGA output is, by default, automatically powered down when no display is detected
    • Serial port is now functional
    • Playback among multiple players is now fully synchronized
    • Dynamic adjustment of frame rate is now activated
    • Snapshot feature is now implemented
    • Splash screen is now implemented
  • Improved robustness in case of filesystem corruption
  • Internal storage can now be reformatted without requiring a firmware re-install and hence all settings are preserved
  • Custom video modes are now fully validated with respect to hardware capabilities, so it is no longer possible to choose an out-of-spec video mode
  • The EDID from HDMI displays was not read in full and as a result some of the supported display modes where not reported
  • Decoding of EDID from HDMI and VGA would incorrectly decode horizontal blanking values for high resolution formats
  • Improved logging to diagnose storage, network and output video mode

Control Center

  • HMP200 specific
    • Added the following preset video modes: SXGA+ (1400x1050), WXGA (1280x800), WSXGA+ (1680x1050)
    • Enabled control of the shutdown temperature and report current temperature in the interface
  • Added RPC interface in push and pull modes. Possible actions: get info, restart, change passwords and upgrade firmware of a device
  • Added Backup and restore of the configuration
  • Added reset to factory default and format internal storage buttons under Maintenance; the format internal storage button can be used to recover from filesystem corruption without needing a re-install of the firmware hence keeping all the settings
  • The official URL path for snapshot and info do not contain the .php extension any longer, future use of the links with the .php extension is discouraged, however the old names are kept for backwards compatibility. The official URL paths are now:
    • /snapshot/snapshot instead of /snapshot/snapshot.php (admin and monitoring users)
    • /snapshot/info instead of /snapshot/info.php (admin and monitoring users)
    • /snapshot instead of /snapshot.php (admin user only)
    • /info instead of /info.php (admin user only)
  • Enabling Fusion now disables the pull mode and the network sources
  • Restoring the default content will now disable Fusion
  • Can setup the timezone using fixed UTC / GMT offsets
  • HDMI displays are now assumed to correctly support underscan by default, as this is almost always the case now

Fusion

  • Updated translations (Spanish)
  • Accept SVG files as images
  • Support for fonts in Mulitmedia projects

Bug fixes

General

  • Updated timezones to database 2011e; which includes updates for the following regions: Egypt, Morocco, Hong Kong, Palestine, Australia, Samoa, Fiji, Turkey, US, Cuba, Chile
  • File from remote server would be cached indefinitely
  • Executing too many getURL() from JavaScript on a slow server would crash the player
  • SVG files with embedded raster graphics could cause reboot of player
  • Very large images (more than 2Kx2K) could cause the player to reboot
  • Crash when the network interface goes down while subscribed to a remote shared variable
  • News ticker driven by a shared variable could cause the player to reboot after 24h
  • Player could eventually reboot when accessing file on the network and the server could not be reached
  • Backward compatibility with old fit_text of 2.1 version
  • When booting multiple players configured for DHCP at the same time it was possible for a player to use the address of another causing an IP address conflict
  • When parsing serial input, the %c formatter could generate and invalid UTF-8 sequence and crash the player
  • Multiscreen
    • Fades could be very slow
    • Images may not be displayed in large multiscreen
  • Audio:
    • Pause on an SVG file with audio was producing a bad noise.
    • Audio mixing with 3 channels or more was not working
    • A single SVG document could contain only 16 >audio< elements even if not playing at the same time
  • Video / Streaming:
    • Audio-video sync could be lost for 1-2 minutes when publishing a new project
    • Video from remote server may be incompletely displayed
    • Reducing the preroll time for H.264 files, thus improving the opening time of the files
    • ASX files pointing to a Publishing Point on a Windows media server did not work.
    • Support legacy fourcc for MPEG1 and MPEG2
    • Streaming sources with an unsupported codec would not play correctly even if supported codecs are also present
    • Freeze and reboot when streaming MPEG2TS and packets dropped
    • Increased compatibility with common H.264 encoders
    • Parsing of MOV file containing MPEG4 not always working
  • SVG / SMIL support
    • overflow=visible attribute on top svg was broken
    • dur=media and repeatDur=indefinite would cause the player to reboot
    • Using multiple begin on a video before it is finished would not work
    • Crash when opening a SMIL document with a layout but no root-layout or topLayout
    • Pinned video may not be displayed
    • Prefetch element was not working
    • Shared variable would be updated at undefined time when set from inside a >script<
  • HMP100 specific:
    • Audio noise (clicketing) could be heard on HMP100 HW rev. 2.12 / 1.40
    • Some VGA displays on DDC could generate a large amount of warnings in the logs on HMP100 HW rev. before 2.12 / 1.40 when powered off
    • The recovery console would complain about missing kernel image in the diagnostics page when the firmware was upgraded from 2.1.x or earlier
  • HMP200 specific:
    • Enabling audio could freeze the player
    • Audio decoding could produce clicking noise depending on load
    • Under some circumstances some system files could not get fully written
    • Temperature reading could fail sometimes, incorrectly triggering a false temperature alarm and causing system shutdown
  • Add more debugging info in case of errors in the pull mode
  • In case of reboot, the last logs might be missing from the files
  • Fixed memory leaks in SNMP daemon
  • Fixed security vulnerabilities in libc (CVE-2010-0830, CVE-2009-4880, CVE-2009-4881, CVE-2010-0296)
  • Fixed crash when beginElementAt() or endElementAt() is called with undefined, null or NaN?.

Control Center

  • Clearing the log was not working
  • Some hyperlinks (storage and fusion) would not be correct when using IPv6 or port forwarding
  • "localhost" was not accepted as valid URL in Credentials page
  • Setting time before 10 am or anytime betweem xx:00 and xx:10 was broken
  • Formatting of USB keys / discs was not showing any progress on the browser and would appear to timeout for large USB discs
  • Changing only the URI in the pull mode configuration page was not detected as a change by the system
  • ICS file used by the pull mode could not be retrieved anymore
  • Credentials were not working in IE8

Fusion

  • Slow generation of preview with png files
  • Checking invalid characters in slides and files names
  • Support for templates with multiple SVG in the root folder
  • Removed audio tab which was not usable
  • Scheduling was not working without a fix to be uploaded as backup
  • Highlight of the selected media was not at the right position
  • Using 08 or 09 as time was not accepted
  • Upload of a fonts folder in a zip was was generating an error
  • The Remember me feature could lead the user to log in with no rights at all (needed logging in again)
  • Entering 0 as default duration in program or playlist may prevent it from being displayed on the screen

Release 2.2.0 (18.02.2011)

Release notes of version 2.2.0 "Jungfrau" (18.02.2011)

Backward compatibility issues

Please check Migrating from 2.1 to 2.2.

  • Text area layout has been modified. The position of the baseline of the first line is now equal to the line-increment. This causes text to be lower than in version 2.1.2
    Side effect: fit_text template might not display the text anymore due to rounding error. The solution is either to use the new fit_text template, or to edit the template the increase the vertical margin by 20%.
  • SVG with no animations have a duration of 0 (they had duration of indefinite in 2.1.2). Thus the user should not use a duration of media with those file, but indefinite.
  • Image, when included in an animation tag, have a duration of*Thus event triggered on the endEvent of the animation will be executed as soon as the image is opened (May causes problem when output effect were applied to a media in the news template. Setting explicitly the duration to indefinite will solve the problem)

Known limitations

  • ASX file pointing to a Publishing Point on a Windows media server does not work
  • SVG file downloaded from an HTTP server will not be reloaded if they are modified unless the HMP100 is rebooted
  • Audio / video sync may be temporarily lost when a document is reloaded

Fusion

  • Requires IE7 or later
  • File name should not have ' in the name. In this case they cannot be included in playlist or programs
  • Skin template including multiple SVG file, should not include png previews otherwise the activation of program can take up to 3 minutes
  • Audio file can be imported into Fusion, but cannot be used anywhere. The Audio tab in Media will be removed in the release.
  • Highlighted area when selecting a media position in the slide dialog is not at the right position
  • Deleting a Skin will leave the page incomplete until reload
  • Templates based on multiple files cannot be renamed
  • Scheduling inside Programs is not enabled. Special patch backup file must be applied to make it functional

HMP200

(to be resolved in next firmware)

  • Only the following output video modes are currently supported: 1080p50, 1080p60, 720p50, 720p60, 1080p30, 1080p25 and 1080p24 and 640x480@60 (VGA); selecting other video modes will disable video output
  • The snapshot feature is not yet implemented
  • The serial port is not yet functional
  • Playback among multiple players is not yet fully synchronized, so applications requiring precise synchronization (e.g., video wall) may not work as expected
  • Dynamic adjustment of frame rate based on load is not yet activated, when the load is too high the player will skip
  • DDC is not yet activated on the VGA port, so there will be no information shown about displays plugged on the VGA port

Major Features

  • Fusion
  • Up to 50% greater performance due to a much improved parallelisation between DSP and ARM tasks and to caching of compiled scripts and parsed documents.
  • Complete rework of the streaming support
    • Greatly reduced connection times
    • Much shorter end-to-end latency
    • Improved reliability with auto-reconnect
    • MPEG2TS encapsulation now supported for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC video as well as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or AAC audio
    • Support for HD video streams (HMP200 only)
  • Huge improvement in decoding speed for audio which is now handled directly by the DSP.
  • HD video decoding (HMP200 only)
  • Support for SMIL 3.0 documents
  • Deinterlacing of interlaced video removes comb effects

Minor Features

  • Better support for windows media audio should removed the cracking noise heard on variable bitreate files.
  • Option to capture streaming into a file to facilitate remote diagnostics by SpinetiX support.
  • Better demultiplexing of audio and video which lift the requirements that audio should be multiplexed ahead of video in AVI files.
  • Added an option to dump the javascript heap to assist in tracing garbage collection issues
  • New "accounting-tag" attribute on media elements to add a custom tag in the accounting log

Bug fixes

  • Disabled the auto hinter for true type fonts because it caused rendering problems on some fonts.
  • Crash with interlaced GIF images whose height is not a multiple of 8.
  • Performance slowing to a crawl after a few days when the same file is kept open, cannot render at the maximum frame rate and uses javascript.
  • Document with large viewbox were not rendered correctly.
  • The bounding box for a rectangle with border was incorrect.
  • Incorrect clipping would prevent some images from showing after applying a fly in effect.
  • Report an error when the document returned by getURL() has character encoding errors.
  • Video would sometimes not freeze on the last frame but on the first frame.
  • Aspect ratio was sometimes wrong on video files.

Release 2.1.2 (31.05.2010)

Release notes of version 2.1.2 "Dent Blanche" (31.05.2010)

Minor Features

  • PHP scripts are now executed when opened from JavaScript via the getURL function (.php file extension for local scripts and x-httpd-php media type for remote scripts).
  • There is now a network watchdog which can reboot the unit if the network cannot be properly initialized, it is configured from the advanced network settings and is disabled by default. It is intended mainly for buggy 3G modems that sometimes hang.
  • Added capability to output custom string to accounting logs: when the spx:accounting is specified for a media an additional attribute "spx:accounting-tag" can be used; the value of the attribute will be added to the end of each line of the accounting log.
  • When in safe mode the "safe mode" string is now overlay on the display to avoid confusion.
  • Updated the firmware upgrade module to be compatible with future firmware releases.
  • More robust handling of some DHCP failures through DHCP watchdog.
  • The type of device start (e.g., power cycle or reboot) is logged in the diagnostics report.
  • Explicitly include timezone information in the diagnostics report.

Bug fixes

  • DNS lookups could be temporarily inoperative although the network was working if the network interface was not fully initialized within the first minute after boot; this was most often the case with 3G modems but could also occur when using Ethernet; now DNS lookups start working as soon as the network interface is fully initialized. The extra boot delay of 60 seconds when 3G modems are configured is thus no longer necessary and has been removed.
  • Seeking into MP3 audio files could block and reboot the player if spiking a sufficiently long duration, this usually happened when including an MP3 within a schedule.
  • The left border of images may be incorrectly rendered in some situations.
  • Minimum checking time for the ICS file of the pull mode was 5 minutes. Now reduced to 10s.
  • Pull mode should ignore folders starting by ".", in particular the ".SPXDAV" metadata folder created by HMD.
  • Ignore caching instructions returned by the server for the checking of the pull mode ICS file, as this is specified in the web administration interface.
  • When an HTTP redirect was received the new location was used for all subsequent requests by the player; now the player properly performs subsequent requests on the original URL and follows the redirects as instructed.
  • Inactive HTTP connections could be left open for several minutes creating very long timeouts when closing them later if a NAT router is used (since the connection is no longer known to the NAT router); now the maximum keep-alive time indicated by the server is obeyed and 15s is used as a default.
  • Documents having an explicit duration but only elements with indefinite duration where incorrectly assigned an indefinite duration when opened.
  • An incorrect hardware revision string was returned by the info.php script.
  • Sporadic DDC errors on the VGA port could temporarily disable the VGA output when in automatic power mode (default).
  • On newer hardware revisions VGA displays with faulty DDC could affect the proper functioning of the unit (e.g., real-time clock, Ethernet MAC address).
  • The on screen information displayed when the push button is pressed displayed the version of the player component instead of the overall firmware version.
  • The underscan capability of displays was not re-read when the display was changed or plugged after boot (regression of firmware 2.2.0).
  • The web administration interface did not include caching directives and some browsers where caching the information for too long; now caching by browsers is disabled as all content is dynamic.
  • Internet Explorer compatibility fixes of the web administration interface.
  • Fixes for security vulnerabilities CVE-2009-3560 and CVE-2009-3720.
  • An incorrect audio clock was used prior to playing the first audio sample, this had, however, no audible consequence.
  • Possible filesystem corruption.
  • In some situations (e.g., the first boot) some filesystems could not be fully unmounted on shutdown and were re-mounted read-only instead.

Release 2.1.1 (23.03.2010)

Release notes of version 2.1.1 "Dent Blanche" (23.03.2010)

Known issues

  • DNS lookups may be temporarily inoperative with 3G modems if the connection is not up within the first minute after boot, the situation recovers after 100 failed lookups

Minor Features

  • Updated timezone data
  • Support new minor hardware revisions
  • Firmware updates must now have a valid signature to be applied, improving security
  • Limit oversize URLs in resource log to a reasonable size
  • Pull mode: let the user specify the order of download and delete

Bug fixes

  • Network credentials saved with 2.0.x or earlier firmware versions could not be read by the player nor the pull mode modules; this firmware fixes the issue automatically.
  • Pull mode: when the server does not provide an ETag nor a last modified date, the getlastmodified tag of the xml database was used instead of the getetag.
  • Pull mode: when the last modified date or ETag is present in an xml database then it should always be used in place or server returned values
  • Pull mode: if an ETag was provided in the xml database for a collection and the collection was modified it was not updated
  • Upload of user defined splash screens was broken in firmware 2.1.0
  • Multiscreen documents may be rendered incorrectly
  • Could crash if using a shared variable in JavaScript after a document restart
  • Firmware info link was not correct in the configuration page
  • UDP IPv6 packets may be sent with broken IP and MAC address fields under some circumstances
  • Security fix for NTP vulnerability CVE-2009-3563
  • Security fix for OpenSSL vulnerability CVE-2009-3555
  • Gratuitous ARP requests may be ignored by some non-Linux hosts
  • Detection of plugged VGA displays was overly strict; displays with a malfunctioning DDC or invalid data were not detected as plugged, leaving the VGA output powered off when in the default "Automatic" power setting. Now all VGA displays with DDC should be detected as plugged even in case of DDC errors. VGA displays with no DDC will not be detected and still require setting the VGA output power setting to "Always On".
  • VGA / DVI power save feature may malfunction after a few hours of uptime if large files are being played
  • The overlay shown when the push button is pressed did not include the automatic link-local IP address (169.254.0.0/16) if one was active
  • Reports did not include the serial number of plugged USB HID devices
  • Firmware upgrade performed font upgrades in first pass which could lead to out of storage space errors
  • When some core components of the firmware are updated the system may not be cleanly shutdown
  • Under some rare circumstances the firmware update may incorrectly detect an inconsistency and flag the firmware as corrupted

Release 2.1.0 (24.02.2010)

Release notes of version 2.1.0 "Dent Blanche" (24.02.2010)

Known issues

  • Network credentials saved with earlier firmware versions cannot be read by the player nor the pull mode modules. To manually fix this go to the Media Sources page of the web based administration interface of the HMP100, select the Advanced tab and press the Apply button; there is no need to retype the credentials. This will save the same credentials again in a way that can be used by the new firmware. This will be, nevertheless, automatically fixed in the next firmware release.
  • DNS lookups may be inoperative with 3G modems if the connection is not up within the first minute after boot

Major Features

  • Use of Zeroconf for IP connectivity, compatible with Bonjour (TM)
    • Support for Multicast DNS (mDNS)
    • Announcements over DNS-SD
    • DHCP is now the default network configuration
    • Fallback to automatic link-local address (169.254.0.0/16) while a permanent address cannot be obtained
    • The unit is now always reachable at http://spx-hmp-<serial-number>.local/ (e.g., http://spx-hmp-001d500001b8.local/) from Zeroconf enabled computers on the local network
  • Rendering speed improvement (up to 2-5 times faster depending on the content)
  • Support for 3G modems (see 3G modems for a list of supported modems)
  • Support of USB digital IOs (input/output via USB IO dongles, for instance U-HID, Joysticks, Gamepads, etc.)
  • Support for defining schedules in the local timezone
  • Can turn off displays using the power management features (VGA and DVI displays only)
  • Support of custom video modes (e.g. 320x240)
  • Pressing the push button displays device info (IP, serial number, MAC, hostname, ...) on the screen

Minor Features

  • Logs are now rotated at midnight and kept for compressed for 7 days, plus the current day uncompressed; this facilitates log management and analysis
  • Higher decoding performance for JPEG, GIF and PNG images
  • Broader support for JPEG flavors (e.g., progressive, RGB)
  • Various security improvements
    • Newer version of php, openssl, libpng, ntpd, neon, libxml2
    • SNMP is no longer accessible from the network by default, access can be selectively enabled for a subnet or all the network
    • Better privilege separation of different modules
  • Improved pull mode
    • Upload of yesterdays logs
    • Upload past logs (up to 7 days) and log already uploaded will not be uploaded again.
    • Can configure the log level for debugging
    • Can list and upload the content of the internal storage
    • Integrity checking of downloaded files using MD5 checksum
    • User can configure the check interval of pull mode schedules
    • Can include the date and time of uploaded logs in the destination file name
  • Safe mode now lasts at most for 1h, then the player reboots into normal mode automatically
  • Added SVG pinned video mode for full screen video optimization
  • Various improvements of the web based administrative interface
  • Improved status data returned by info.php
  • Added comport protocol for Panasonic plasma displays
  • Updated timezone definitions
  • Reboot limit is increased to 4 (from 3) before starting in recovery mode in order to separate safe mode in two phases (player and pull mode) note that the counter is reset after 30 minutes of uptime
  • Added extended report mode for more in-depth diagnostics
  • Support of SDP files for streaming (local and remote via HTTP server)
  • The JavaScript engine is now shared among documents, improving performance
  • Lifted the limitation in the ordering of insertion and removals into the XML document tree from JavaScript
  • Replaced the Japanese font Sazanami with IPA Mincho and IPA Gothic, which have higher quality
  • Autodetection of unreliable / incomplete caching information from HTTP servers, this prevents reloading of RSS feeds and restarting the display when the actual content has not changed
  • Focal point of radial gradients is no longer used (they are not part of SVG Tiny 1.2 and have never been fully supported)

Bug fixes

  • Transparent PNGs not rendered transparent
  • Improved video support
    • MPEG2 even size showed green bar on bottom
    • Small H.264 videos were not supported
  • Problem with playlist in synchronized screens
  • Handling of 8-bit input and output was incorrect in RS-232 port automation
  • The left and right audio channels were swapped in the analog out
  • Text rectangle with effect not displayed
  • Two effects on news.svg will make news not visible
  • Very small SVG files might not be rendered in full screen
  • Big PNG image is displayed all green on player
  • Enabling events did not reboot but actually requires reboot to become effective
  • Project on USB remains displayed after USB key is removed
  • Admin password can't be set after having removed it
  • Pull mode may fail if the remote ICS is reported to be modified by the server on every request
  • Initialization of internal storage (SD card) could be incorrect
  • Multiple minor security fixes
  • Filesystem of internal storage could become corrupted
  • Various small fixes for USB HID devices
  • Device may crash randomly during pull mode operations or project publishing
  • NTP could stop functioning until next reboot if the IP address changes due to a DHCP transient failure, leading to time drift and loss of synchronization
  • Doing a firmware upgrade with a USB key plugged in and configured as content source would fail
  • Updated Sharp Aquos comport protocol to avoid possible deadlock
  • RSS feeds with <link> under <item> where not parsed correctly and the article was not shown
  • Media type audio/wav was not recognized as a WAV file
  • Pull mode could incorrectly report some failures as success
  • Resetting pull mode to no action would not reset a past action in error state (it would be retried indefinitely)
  • Pull mode would restart the content even when no files were downloaded because of errors and thus no content was changed
  • Output of large commands to serial port could be truncated
  • SVG document sizes no longer limited to 200Kb
  • Event on sunday did not repeat
  • Some uncommon schedule repeat patterns could be computed incorrectly
  • Some WMV files could display glitches by missing a few frames at start
  • Video files using open GOP structures would be desycnhronized by one or two frames after seeking
  • Some h.264 streamed video could appear garbled if the stream contained audio as well
  • Cached data (e.g., RSS feeds) could be temporarily not displayed after sudden loss of network connectivity

Release 2.0.4 (05.11.2009)

Release notes of version 2.0.4 "Cervino" (05.11.2009)

Minor Features

  • Added display of current clock calibration in the Date/Time settings page of the web based administration interface
  • Added a button to reset the clock calibration to the Maintenance page of the web based administration interface
  • Execution time of JavaScript code is now limited to 15s to avoid freezes of the rendering engine.

Bug fixes

  • The player could freeze on some remote network outages, causing a reboot
  • Added support for streaming from AXIS H.264 encoders when video size is not SD.
  • Playlists in schedules might stop playing.
  • Time:
    • Time handling was inaccurate on reboots, possibly causing an important time drift if there is no external time source available
    • Clock frequency was slightly off causing a larger than usual time drift when the system clock was not properly calibrated with NTP
    • The quality of system clock calibration via NTP was degraded when the NTP servers were distant (default setup) due to the clock frequency being slightly off
    • SNMP could incorrectly report the ntpd process as in error state when the ntp server names cannot be resolved
    • Improved information about NTP in report for better diagnostics
  • Rendering of some long running documents with animations may slow down after a few hours
  • AVI files that contained contradicting information for the frame rate could be played at a slower speed
  • HTTP servers using basic authentication but no realm were not accepted
  • Pull mode:
    • In case of error in the download of the ICS file controlling to Pull mode, do not wait 24h before doing a retry
    • Pull mode does not handle directories without a terminating slash properly
    • Make sure the the upload of the log is retried in case of errors
  • Rendering engine:
    • Animating a rectangle with round corner, might cause the rectangle to move to a wrong position.
    • Interline of text with tspan might not be correct.

Release 2.0.3 (21.09.2009)

Release notes of version 2.0.3 "Cervino" (21.09.2009)

Minor Features

  • Added support for streaming from AXIS H.264 encoders
  • iCal support in the news template can now handle overlapping events
  • Pull mode now creates destination folder for uploading the log, if they do not exist
  • Improved the verbosity of the pull mode in case of errors
  • HTTP connections are kept open only for a limited time. Useful when the IP of the server changes at night for instance.
  • Better verification of the validity of the IP settings

Bug fixes

  • Some touchscreens with a D-WAV scientific controller were detected but non-functional (0% accuracy was reported during calibration)
  • HTTP TRACE method has been disabled since it could be used to exploit security vulnerabilities in some browsers
  • Updated timezone information to latest available
  • Internet Explorer 5 and 6 could not access the advanced tabs when authentication was turned on, this is now fixed
  • Pull mode was needing the HMP100 to reboot to take changes into account
  • Using accented character in the device name will make it impossible to configure the device anymore
  • When entering a third DNS would save the address of the first DNS server as the third
  • Automatic playlists from files in folder could miss a few files
  • Remote files generated by php that grew in size between http requests were not correctly handled

Release 2.0.2 (10.06.2009)

Release notes of version 2.0.2 "Cervino" (10.06.2009)

Minor Features

  • Support for multiple multistatus sources in pull mode

Bug fixes

  • Some H.264/AVC encoded video streams in containers other than Quicktime or MP4 files may not be decoded
  • Pull mode set with the HTTP interface will be kept in memory until the unit is rebooted
  • Firmware updates from USB keys cannot be done (the interface says it could not start the update process and then stops)
  • Network API needs to reboot the HMP100 to be applied
  • Web based admin interface would not correctly reset the proxy settings when the proxy server is removed, making firmware upgrades from a network server not possible
  • News feeds were not updated unless the document was re-opened
  • Some schedule repeat patterns may not be correct when multiple days in a week are specified

Release 2.0.1 (19.05.2009)

Release notes of version 2.0.1 "Cervino" (19.05.2009)

Minor Features

  • Video and streaming
    • Significantly decreased the startup time of streaming sessions (by approx. 3 seconds)
    • Improved the time necessary to open video files, in particular MPEG-2 Program Streams (e.g., VOB); this reduces the risk of dropping frames when starting a new video
    • H.264 encoded video with width or height not multiple of 16 are now supported
    • H.264 encoded video in .mov, .mp4, .3gp and .3g2 files is now supported again
  • When in safe mode or when no content is present the player now shows a black/white screen instead of the SpinetiX logo
  • The splash screens (e.g., boot, shutdown) are now user configurable
  • Improvements to the firmware update process:
    • During firmware updates the player is stopped and a splash screen is shown if more than a handful of packages are to be updated
    • Package downloads are now much more resilient to network level problems
    • A status message is regularly output when package downloads take long
  • The network configuration (DHCP or static IP settings) can now be changed from the recovery console
  • Added com port FSM file for GPS receivers that use the NMEA-0183 protocol (GGA and VTG messages supported)
  • Touch screen support
    • Better diagnosing of USB touchscreens in device reports
    • Improved debugging of touchscreens
  • JavaScript
    • Added support for variables DEVICE_NAME and SERIAL_NUMBER in JavaScript
    • Added support for CSV files without a column header line
  • Added an installation mode in which configuration changes do not automatically reboot the device but require a manual reboot to activate; this is intended for installers which can perform all the configuration changes before rebooting the device and is enabled from the advanced maintenance page
  • Separated logs for the admin and content http servers for easier diagnostics
  • SNMP agent now listens on UDP and TCP transports over IPv4 and automatic IPv6 addresses
  • The automatic IPv6 addresses of the Ethernet interface are now kept active even if IPv4 cannot be activated due to address conflict or unavailable DHCP server
  • Added onIgnored transition for FSM protocols
  • System reports now include a filesystem and package check when run from the recovery console
  • The http proxy, if configured, is now bypassed for the local network by default
  • Shared variables can now be set through HTTP GET requests as well, in addition an optional redirect argument will return a redirect
  • Added support for broken HTTP servers that close the connection when a range request is received, which resulted in failure to download the data; now the player retries without range requests in such cases

Bug fixes

  • Video
    • MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 encoded video with a width or height not multiple of 16 could be incorrectly decoded
    • Video files encoded with Open GOP structures could briefly show a green frame after seeking
    • Video files encoded with XViD could show green frames
    • MMS streaming could pause every few seconds
    • Windows Media video files with audio could have bad audio quality when encoded in CBR; it is strongly recommended to encode in VBR mode when using Windows Media for best audio quality
    • The duration of elementary media files (e.g., elementary MPEG-4 streams) without explicit duration info was incorrectly reported; these are now reported as having indefinite duration, use of a proper container format (e.g., .mov, .mp4, .avi, MPEG-2 Program Stream) is strongly recommended
    • Video encoded with VC-1 Advanced Profile was mistakenly identified as supported
    • The frame rate of video files was not correctly detected
  • A player that was in safe mode could reboot in recovery mode if it crashed after publishing content to it; now it reboots in normal mode in such a case
  • Corrupted EDID data from VGA caused a log message to be output every 2 seconds; making the logs grow very large
  • Connection of some non-HID 3M EXII, eGalax and TSC-10 DM USB touchscreen controllers failed
  • Minor security fixes for http authentication
  • Even if the administrative interface was password protected local content could access it via JavaScript
  • Fixed various security vulnerabilities in the SNMP agent (some could be used to remotely reboot the device and force it to recovery mode)
  • Pull Mode
    • Pull mode (i.e. uploader) might crash the HMP100; in this case a full factory re-install was necessary to recover
    • Some player and pull mode state files where not reset on reset to factory defaults
    • X-spinetix-serial header was sent only for the GET commands; now sent for the GET, HEAD, PROPFIND, PUT, and POST from the player and the uploader
    • Safe mode was being applied for player only; now it is also being applied to the uploader (i.e. pull mode)
  • Local shared variables using the @localhost syntax required the network API to be enabled despite being only local
  • Parsing RSS feeds may temporarily freeze the player if network connectivity problems arise leading to a reboot
  • Minor administrative web UI fixes
  • A crash was possible when parsing invalid XML fragments after parsing RSS feeds
  • When using setAttribute() to modify the href of an image from ECMAScript the image was not modified
  • Accesses to https connections were not thread-safe
  • Security fixes for SSL connections
  • Remote data (e.g., RSS feeds) may not be updated under some circumstances
  • Reuse the modification time returned by an HTTP server in the If-Modified-Since header of HEAD requests for increased compatibility with broken servers
  • Several fixes in the com port FSM file regular expression matching

Release 2.0 (20.03.2009)

Release notes of version 2.0 "Cervino" (20.03.2009)

Major Features

  • ECMAScript (i.e. JavaScript) is now supported within svg documents
  • Added support for handling events from input devices (touchscreens, keyboards, mice, etc.)
    • Support for touchscreen calibration
    • Support for many USB touchscreens including all HID and many proprietary protocols
    • SVG 1.2 event handler are supported
  • Streamlined support for multiscreen (e.g., video wall)
    • Device configurable multi-screen ID; content is designed for a virtual large screen and each screen picks up its assigned
  • Vastly improved video decoding performance for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 and WMV
    • H.264 streams limited to width and height multiple of 16.
  • Improved fonts support
    • Large user provided font files (e.g., Asian) are now supported; the maximum total size of font files in use is 20 MB
    • Fonts for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi and Urdu are now bundled for ease of use; fonts for Roman, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic were already bundled
    • Uploading of user provided fonts within a project now takes effect immediately
  • Improved rendering speed of vector graphics
  • State variables can now be shared among HMP units allowing for event propagation between units and event generation from external applications (a.k.a. instant messaging)
  • Improved video and audio streaming compatibility, including live TV streamers like exterity
  • Enabled support for 1080p output with low vertical refresh rates only (e.g., 24/25 Hz); compatible only with some TV displays

Other changes

  • Improved NTP features:
    • An HMP100 unit can now act as NTP server to other units, so that an NTP server is not strictly required for small multiscreen installations (but see documentation for caveats)
    • Improved NTP statistics report in web based interface to aid in diagnosing synchronization problems
    • NTP servers may now remotely request status variables of the ntp service (with ntpq)
    • Improved NTP synchronization speed (benefits mainly multiscreen installations)
    • All NTP servers specified by IP address are used for initial clock synchronization (formerly only one was used); improves initial time synchronization quality
  • A live status report in XML form can now be returned by the device for status polling
  • Better SVG 1.2 compliance
  • Content changes now take effect immediately after publishing from HMD
  • Configuration changes that do not require a reboot now take effect immediately
  • The name of a device is now configurable
  • Added support for HTTP proxies
  • If the device reboots repeatedly in a short time it enters a safe mode instead of removing content and resetting player configuration
  • The VGA port power mode is now "auto" by default; if the VGA output turns off after boot it means that the VGA display is not detected properly, force VGA power mode to "on" in the web admin UI to resolve the issue
  • Updated timezone definitions for latest daylight savings changes
  • Firmware update is now more resilient to network problems (e.g., unstable networks, outdated caches)
  • Corrupted firmware upgrades are now clearly shown in web admin UI so that they do not go unnoticed
  • Embedded http server now returns serial number, firmware revision and player revision in response headers to every request
  • Maximum rendering delay is now configurable (of interest to interactive content)
  • Better diagnostics in case of boot failures
  • More robust parsing of XML documents
  • More robust support for broken RSS feeds
  • Added support for pinned video in SVG
  • HTTP requests made by the player include the serial number and version info as request headers; which can be used for conditional content generation from a web server
  • Added an iCalendar parser to ECMAScript engine to use calendaring data from remote servers (e.g., Google Calendar)
  • The maximum SVG document size is now 200 KBytes

Bug fixes

  • Unreachable DHCP servers or IP address conflicts could prevent a device from booting in normal mode and make it start in recovery mode
  • Eliminated memory leaks that could lead to jerky display and device instability
  • Some network timeouts could temporarily freeze the player and reboot the device
  • Very large projects (thousands of files) could crash the device when publishing or updating through pull mode
  • Removing some user provided fonts could crash the device
  • Only the first face from TrueType collections was being used (typically affects asian fonts only)
  • Under some circumstances log files could fill up the system storage, preventing the device from properly rebooting and requiring a firmware reinstall to recover
  • NTP could mistakenly drop some packets and reduce clock accuracy
  • USB sticks with no partition table were not recognized
  • Other minor bugfixes
  • With some VGA monitors the DDC and I2C busses could become locked if the monitor is powered off, resulting in many peripherals to malfunction
  • When the content server is password protected pull mode would fail with an authentication problem; users should re-enter the content and monitoring passwords after upgrade to fully solve this issue
  • Changing the passwords in the security page could make pull mode start failing with authentication problems
  • Serial port output could silently fail to initialize, resulting in no data being sent on the serial port
  • The WVGA 768x480 option in the basic display settings configuration was actually selecting 800x500 resolution
  • Some combination of options in the basic display settings configuration page resulted in unexpected video modes being chosen
  • Various security fixes
  • Various stability fixes
  • When scheduled items start before a daylight savings time change and end after the recurrent time is not correct
  • Some video files with the .mpg extension could be incorrectly detected and displayed garbled images

Release 1.1 (23.07.2008)

Release notes of version 1.1 "Finsteraarhorn" (23.07.2008)

Major Features

  • New pull mode:
    • Local content can be automatically updated from a remote server on a user selected schedule
    • Accounting files, previews and log files can be automatically uploaded to a remote server on a user selected schedule
  • Improved SVG support and compliance
  • Improved USB storage support
    • Can use USB storage in read-write mode
  • Added support for connecting to secure http (https) servers over SSL/TLS
  • Added support for entering username and passwords to be used when connecting to remote servers
  • Added support for shoutcast audio server
  • Added separate user for accessing the unit's log files and preview over the embedded web server, administrator access is not required any longer

Other changes

  • Daily automatic firmware updates are now disabled by default
  • Fixed sync problem with streaming WMA
  • Enable sending of NUL bytes in the protocol string for serial port management
  • Fixed possible freeze (deadlock) in serial port management
  • Properly support remote larges files (>2Gb)
  • Fixed clocks not showing the correct time between 12 AM and 3 AM
  • Fixed playlists, and other dynamic content requiring PHP, not working with content on USB storage devices
  • Fixed USB port becoming disabled until next reboot when a high powered USB device was connected
  • Under some circumstances fonts in the content directory may not be used, this is now fixed
  • The embedded web server may hang making the unit unreachable, this is now fixed
  • Added basic support for progressive JPEG
  • Under some circumstances the EDID information of VGA screens could not be read, this is now fixed
  • Some non-compliant HDMI and DVI displays where not fully recognized
  • Large USB disks may not be recognized and used, this is now fixed
  • Remote support services are now only enabled upon user demand
  • Properly support fread on remote file in PHP
  • VGA port is now powered down if no VGA display is connected
  • Date/Time configuration page now provides NTP statistics if NTP is configured, to ease diagnosing time synchronization
  • Security fixes (PHP 5.2.6, Apache HTTPd 2.2.9)

Release 1.0 (28.04.2008)

Release notes of version 1.0 "Mont Blanc" (28.04.2008)

Major Features

  • Significantly improved write speed to internal storage, current performance is in the order of 3.5 to 4 MB/sec.
  • Significantly improved network performance due to removal of kernel debugging features.
  • Improved rendering smoothness of difficult scenes (increased video memory).
  • Added support for display information retrieval (i.e. DDC) on VGA interface; requires HMP100 hardware revision 2.13 or later.
  • Added support for manually setting the date and time if no network time (i.e. NTP) server is defined.
  • Updated many of the external libraries used by the product.
  • Fixed possible hangs in device reboot when reboot initiated via push button, under some circumstances the button may have appeared as having no effect.
  • Improve logging and feedback of updater, in particular manual updates now show progress in real-time.
  • Detect corruptions that may appear during updates when power is removed from the device.
  • Video files that start playing from a point other than the beginning of the video should open much faster (media seeking).
  • Increased the maximum font file size to 1 MB, so as to handle complicated (e.g., asian) fonts.
  • Support for larger video files (including mpeg2 ML@MP) (video optimization)
  • Support for vertical screens
  • Support for serial port output controlled by the player
  • Improved SVG tiny 1.2 compliance
  • New HTTP administration interfaces
    • Possibility to change the time zone of the HMP100
    • Possibility to configure serial port usage
    • Checking for firmware updates
  • File-level accounting on open, close or both.
  • New audioDelay attribute to adjust audio/video lipsync
  • Support for MPEG-4 audio/video RTSP streaming
  • Support attaching multiple USB storage devices (formerly only the first one was mounted)
  • Support non-ASCII characters in folder / file names on USB storage
  • Time server feature (i.e. ntp) now correctly recovers from missing network and DNS failures at startup

Bug fixes

  • Caching of remote file when the power of the device is lost
  • Using php files as sources for svgx files (news connectors)
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