meshbay.git/docs, branch 0.8

feat: add Photos group app

2026-08-25T09:46:17Z

A new group application (docs/apps.md's plug-in mechanism), following the plan in docs/photos.md. Unlike Videos/Music: several photo roots per group instead of one (photo_roots is a set, one signed op replaces it whole), a single album-grid view with no third-party matching step, and per-photo info read from the file's own EXIF at index time — no metadata service, no credential, no outbound network call at all. Protocol (meshbay-common, MNP 0.10 -> 0.11, additive): `taken_at`/`camera` on IndexEntry; `photo_roots`/`photo_roots_ack`; `OP_PHOTO_ROOTS`. Node: roster.py stores photo_roots as a group_settings entry (JSON list, same shape as enabled_apps); ops.py/webrtc_server.py validate and sign the whole set in one op, same pattern as apps_enabled; a new PhotoEnricher (indexer/enrich_photo.py) runs Pillow in its own small bounded pool, separate from the video/audio pools, producing a resized thumbnail plus the two EXIF fields — never GPS, checked by a grep-based regression test. Client: photos-app.js — one album card per directory containing images, a per-album photo grid, and a lightbox with next/previous (keyboard and buttons), zoom in/out/fit/100% starting from the actual on-screen fit percentage, and a "zip this album" button reusing files-app.js's own zip mechanism (lifted into file-utils.js's downloadDirectory so both call the same implementation). group-settings.js gets an add/remove multi-root picker, distinct from Videos/Music's single-value one. Bugs found and fixed before this ever shipped, worth keeping the story of: - enrich_photo.py read width/height from the raw image *before* applying EXIF orientation correction, and read DateTimeOriginal off the plain 0th-IFD Exif object — a real camera stores it in the Exif sub-IFD, which Pillow only exposes via get_ifd(Exif). A flat, hand-built EXIF dict round-trips through Pillow either way, which is exactly what would have hidden both bugs; the regression test builds EXIF with piexif instead, matching what real hardware produces. - photos-app.js's album grouping stripped a trailing path segment from entry.path under the assumption it still carried a filename — it doesn't (files-app.js's own convention: e.path is already the containing directory), so every album collapsed one level into its parent. Found live against a real multi-folder library. - transport.js's ADMIN_OP_TYPES allowlist (already the fix for an identical bug on video_root/apps_enabled, see 4783d81) was missing photo_roots: its admin_challenge matched no pending request and was silently dropped, so saving a photo root just timed out after 30s with no error. - daemon.py pruned a thumbnail when its file left the index (root removed or reconfigured) but never forgot the content hash was "already attempted" — the same bytes reappearing under a renamed/relocated root (an operator's real workflow) were then permanently skipped, forever, with nothing to indicate why. Discarding the attempt alongside the cache entry on prune is what makes pruning actually reversible. - packages/meshbay-client's app:// protocol handler served every file with no Cache-Control header, so Chromium was free to serve a stale cached copy indefinitely — none of several `npm run sync-ui` + reload cycles during development actually picked up the new code until the renderer's disk cache was cleared by hand. Now sends Cache-Control: no-store. - the lightbox's zoomed image used flex centering (align-items/ justify-content: center) combined with overflow: auto — a well-known trap where the browser centers overflowing content by shifting it, and the leading half of that overflow (here, the top of a zoomed photo) sits outside what the scrollport can actually reach. Reported live as "unusable". Fixed by switching to top/left alignment once zoomed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TiZG4AuSnxHohQMpwTHTyL

docs(musicbay): note the audio_root amendment in the design doc

2026-08-24T20:45:07Z

Records why the original no-root call was wrong (mixing, not cost) and points at the new §4.3b protocol section — same treatment already given to the WMA/Musepack transcode amendment above it.

feat(music): transcode WMA/Musepack to AAC so they actually play

2026-08-24T19:08:34Z

Tagging and covers for these two formats landed already, but neither one decodes in any mainstream browser's element at all — a real library scan turned up 273 such files that would show up correctly in the Music app and then simply fail on click. This closes that gap: the node transcodes to AAC/M4A on request (a one-shot whole-file conversion, not live-piped like video's fMP4 segments — an audio file is small enough that streaming it buys nothing), caches the result under its own content hash the same way a TMDB poster or a MusicBrainz cover is cached, and serves it back through the ordinary file_req/chunk path. That path used to assume anything in the media cache was thumbnail-sized (single chunk, always); generalized it to slice a cached blob the same way a real file on disk gets sliced, since a transcoded track can be several MB. New MNP pair (`audio_transcode_req`/`_resp`, version bump to 0.9), shares its concurrency cap with video's transcode pool rather than getting its own — both are real ffmpeg processes on the same node. Every other audio format is untouched: this only fires for .wma/.mpc, the two extensions that need it.

docs: plan the Music group app (musicbay.md)

2026-08-24T14:43:18Z

Proposal only, not implemented. Same plug-in mechanism as Videos (apps.md), but no new streaming path — a track is downloaded and decrypted like any other file, not transcoded/remuxed like a film. Metadata: local tags first (mutagen), MusicBrainz/Cover Art Archive as node-side fallback enrichment, no API key needed (unlike TMDB) — just a rate-limited, self-identifying client. Player state (queue, shuffle, repeat) moves up into the group-page shell so playback survives a tab switch, mirroring how the video/preview modal is already shell-owned.

fix(node,hub): HEVC transcode fallback, live-add progress, per-group TMDB toggle

2026-08-24T13:57:41Z

Three bugs found live testing the Videos app against a real HEVC/EAC3 show, plus a design change requested afterward: - Streaming always did "-c:v copy", which faithfully reports a source's real hev1 codec string but is unplayable in a browser with no HEVC decoder (most Chrome/Linux builds). The node now transcodes to H264 whenever the probed codec is browser-incompatible (media_probe.py's new BROWSER_INCOMPATIBLE_VIDEO_CODECS), with a `transcode_incompatible_video` node.toml opt-out for operators who know their viewers already decode it. - Dropping a whole season into an already-watched folder gave no scanning indicator and no progress bar: IndexProgress was only ever updated by the two bulk scan paths, never by the real-time per-file watchdog path (_schedule_update/_debounce/_update_entry). That path now accounts a "burst" the same way, without double-counting a file rewritten mid-debounce. - A stray literal "0" rendered in the video detail modal when there was no TMDB match (`meta.confidence` is 0, and `0 && x` renders "0" in JSX/htm, not nothing) — `confident` is now a real boolean. - Whether TMDB is used at all moves from a node-wide setting to per-group (OP_TMDB_ENABLED/tmdb_enabled/tmdb_enabled_ack, scoped like OP_VIDEO_ROOT): an operator running a real media-library group alongside test/demo groups on one node wants outbound TMDB traffic for the one that needs it, not all of them. The custom API token and query language stay node-wide, one shared credential/cache (tmdb_config/OP_TMDB_CONFIG, unchanged reasoning). MNP_VERSION 0.6 -> 0.7, additive. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LAmyXtc6dAADsH23ydXQpY

feat(node,hub): season-specific overviews, manual TMDB match correction, and wizard polish

2026-08-24T12:33:20Z

Two operator-facing fixes for a real 3-season show whose automatic TMDB match was wrong at the show level: per-season overview/air_date tabs in the detail modal (falling back to the show-level text when a season's own is empty), and a "Fix match…" search-and-correct affordance that re-resolves every file sharing the corrected show's display_title. New signed op OP_TMDB_OVERRIDE and two read-only pairs (season_meta_req/resp, tmdb_search_req/resp), MNP_VERSION 0.5 -> 0.6. Also: the create-group wizard gets a spinning indexing indicator and an app-selection step, group settings default the TMDB language to the operator's own locale (never as a global default), and a file renamed mid-session now re-triggers title parsing instead of being silently skipped by the enrichment dedup guard. Fixes two bugs found during this work: the search overlay's z-index lost to the base video-overlay class and rendered invisibly, and season_meta's own empty overview didn't fall back to the show-level one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LAmyXtc6dAADsH23ydXQpY

feat(node,hub): add Videos group app (poster grid, flat list, TMDB metadata)

2026-08-24T08:04:46Z

Implements docs/mediacenter.md: a "Videos" group application built on the existing files index rather than a separate catalogue. On the node side, new indexer enrichment (technical probe, filename/season parsing, thumbnail generation) runs per-file once an operator has chosen a video_root for the group, plus a TMDB client for on-demand poster/metadata lookups (never client-side, thumbnails delivered over the existing chunk path). On the hub side, a new video-app.js renders a lazily-mounted poster grid or a thumbnail-only flat list, with TMDB entirely optional per group. Along the way: the global apps registry now drives Settings' default-tab picker instead of a hardcoded list, and the video_root is configured from group Settings (like uploads) rather than from Files, with the node refusing to run any TMDB/thumbnail work until one is set. Fixes several bugs found via live testing against a real library, notably a race between two effects writing the same "image ready" state that could leave a poster grid spinning forever on a same-tab revisit — see mediacenter.md §5.4 for the full account of each one.

docs: add Videos app design (mediacenter.md)

2026-08-23T21:35:21Z

Design for a poster-grid / flat-thumbnail group video browser: TMDB enrichment and plain-folder modes, filename parsing validated against a real ~1950-file library (guessit, >95% target), and a revision of desktop-client-v1.md's O12 decision to centralize TMDB metadata and thumbnail caching on the node (data_dir, not the shared roots).

feat(hub): split the group UI into a pluggable "applications" architecture

2026-08-23T13:15:35Z

GroupPage's 6620-line app.js carried Chat and Files wedged in directly, with no way to add another group-level app without touching the shell itself. It is now app.js (routing, non-group pages) plus nine focused files — apps.js (the registry), chat-app.js, files-app.js, video-player.js, group-page.js (the shell), group-settings.js, hub-client.js, icon.js and file-utils.js — with docs/apps.md as the checklist for adding one (Videos/Music/Photos are sketched there, not built). Node side gained the matching enablement mechanism, mirroring member_upload exactly: a roster setting, a signed apps_enabled op enforced by _has_admin_authority, exposed in the handshake ack. Operators toggle applications per group from Settings, which also gained a small reorder: Invite, Pairing, Applications, Shared directories, Uploads, danger zone, Your devices, Members. Two bugs surfaced during the split, both missing an import across the new file boundary and invisible to node --check or a module-load probe since they only throw when the code path actually runs: - group-page.js called onRefreshAuth on a stale-token handshake rejection, but app.js never imported refreshAccessToken from hub-client.js — so a brand new member (including a group's own creator) hit "Not a member of this group" and the retry silently failed, throwing before it could refresh the token. - chat-app.js called getLocale() for message timestamps without importing it from i18n.js. Opening Chat on a group with real messages threw mid- render; uncaught, that appears to wedge Preact's render scheduler, so every button on the page stopped responding until reload. Caught the second class of bug with a proper no-undef audit across all split files (a temporarily installed ESLint 9, since the system one is too old to parse this codebase's syntax) rather than trusting grep. 827 tests pass; 6 new ones cover the apps_enabled policy. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016SF6RKNBKg9qejmoMJ9ybA

feat: LAN Wi-Fi casting to Chromecast via local HTTP relay

2026-08-21T11:52:11Z

Re-serve decrypted fMP4 video over HTTP on the LAN so a Chromecast can play the stream. The relay runs in the Electron main process — same trust boundary as downloads and MSE playback. - cast-relay.js: HTTP server with BoxAccumulator (reassembles WebRTC chunks into moof+mdat pairs), ring buffer, backpressure, finish() for clean end-of-stream, fixed port range 19550-19553 - cast-chromecast.js: mDNS discovery (bonjour-service) + CASTV2 protocol (castv2-client), connect/reload/disconnect lifecycle - Seek-aware: relay restarts on every seek, Chromecast reloads new URL; generation counter prevents stale async errors from killing active restarts; landingPlayheadRef suppresses programmatic seeking events - Device picker in video top bar with scan, device selection, copy-URL fallback, and cast status indicator - IPC bridge (main/preload/platform) for start/push/stop/finish/status/ discover/chromecastConnect/chromecastReload/chromecastDisconnect - Phase 3 design doc for DLNA/Smart TV in docs/cast-smart-tv.md Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6