It’s been a while…
If you know this project as Screenly OSE, welcome back. Same project, same team, same free and open source license. We renamed it to Anthias in December 2022 to stop the confusion with Screenly, our paid platform. Nothing was discontinued and nothing was taken away.
Read the announcement: Screenly OSE is now called Anthias
We’ll be honest with you. For a stretch there, Anthias didn’t get the attention it deserved. That changed this year. We’ve shipped fifteen releases since May, rebuilt the parts that frustrated people most, and put every one of them through a rack of real hardware before release.
If your player has been quietly looping the same playlist since 2020 (or in some cases, long before that), it still works. It’s just running software we’ve largely replaced. Here’s what you’re missing.
Video finally plays properly
This was the top complaint for years, and it’s fixed.
Anthias now uses the right video decoder for whatever board it’s running on, so playback is smooth and hardware-accelerated rather than grinding away on the CPU. The Raspberry Pi 4 in particular used to stutter, drop frames, and sometimes crash-loop outright. That’s gone. Audio routing works properly too, so no more surprises about whether sound comes out of HDMI or the headphone jack.
See what Anthias plays: Features
Scheduling, built in
The most-requested feature on the forum for years, and the one people built the ugliest workarounds for: per-asset scheduling. Every piece of content now gets its own days of the week and hours of the day. Morning announcements, weekend promotions, after-hours messaging. Schedules that cross midnight work too.
Web page assets also refresh themselves on an interval you choose, so a dashboard or a live feed stays current without anyone touching it.
Docs: Asset scheduling
Rotate with a tap
Portrait or landscape is now a setting in the dashboard. No SSH, no editing config.txt, no reboot roulette. And it behaves identically on every board, which was emphatically not true before.
How it works: Screen rotation
Tricky files, handled
Drop in a photo straight from an iPhone and Anthias converts it and gets the orientation right. Upload an unusual video and it’s prepared in the background while whatever’s already on screen keeps playing, with a badge telling you how it went. Previously a lot of these files just failed, often silently.
YouTube links work the same way. Anthias downloads the video and plays it from local storage, so your screen never buffers and never shows ads or recommended-video overlays.
Details: What you can upload
Turn the TV off at closing time
Anthias can now switch the connected display off outside opening hours and bring it back in the morning, on a daily schedule. No timer plug, no smart socket, no walking over with the remote. It also tells you in the dashboard whether the TV is actually powered on, so you can spot a dark screen without going to look at it.
Docs: Display schedule
Apps you don’t have to build
There’s now a growing library of drop-in apps for the things everyone kept hand-rolling. Menu boards, clocks, weather, and more. All free.
Browse them: signage-apps.com, or directly in ‘Apps’ under ‘Add Assets’ in newer Anthias releases.
Switching from another platform
If you’ve drifted to a hosted platform in the meantime and want to come back, you can now import your playlists and content directly from Yodeck, ScreenCloud, piSignage and Xibo.
Docs: Importing content from other platforms
Your player now tells you when it’s dying
Most mystery blank screens come down to two things: an underpowered supply, or an SD card at the end of its life. As of this month’s release, Anthias watches for both and puts a warning in the dashboard telling you what to do about it, rather than leaving you to spend an afternoon on it.
That’s the theme of a lot of this year’s work. Freezes, crash loops, log files eating the SD card, screens that needed a power cycle. One user reported a 19 GB log file on a long-running device. Fixed.
If your screen is misbehaving today: Troubleshooting
Which hardware?
Raspberry Pi 5, Pi 4, Pi 3, and 64-bit x86 PCs are all first-class. Other 64-bit ARM boards like Rock Pi and Orange Pi work on a best-effort basis via Armbian. Pi 2 and Pi 3 still run, but they’re in maintenance mode now, so we’d steer anything new toward a Pi 4 or 5.
Full list: Supported hardware
Upgrading
Existing installations migrate automatically. Configuration paths that still referenced the old Screenly name now point at Anthias, with backwards-compatible symlinks left in place so nothing breaks unexpectedly.
If you installed from a disk image or through balenaHub, you may already be current. Those devices update themselves over the air.
Grab a backup from Settings first. It’s one file, and it restores in one click.
If the device has been untouched for a couple of years, flashing a fresh card is the cleaner route. Anthias shows up directly in Raspberry Pi Imager under Digital signage and kiosks.
Install options: Get started
That’s it for now…
Everything above came from bug reports, forum threads, and people telling us what was broken (or things they were missing).
That’s genuinely what shaped this year’s roadmap, so keep it coming. The forum and GitHub are both read.
It’s good to have you back.
Happy displaying.
Viktor and the Anthias team