Release Notes

v4.2.0More regulated, more secure October 2026

Built toward the security baseline of the EU Cyber Resilience Act — individual credentials, access the operator grants and can see, a documented recovery path, masked secrets, a firewall the operator can read, security updates that install on their own — around package installs from a URL, scans as jobs, an encrypted built-in HLS output, SRT link figures, forms that follow the operator’s choice, the operator’s own brand on the portal, and AM, FM and DAB+ radio reception. Proven in the field before publication: 55 units of one operator were upgraded remotely in one afternoon, thanks to the management API v2 and Kylone’s support-access framework.

• Built toward the EU Cyber Resilience Act: the Act’s security baseline, and ETSI EN 303 645 for single-board devices, as the yardstick — credentials individual to the unit, remote access the operator grants for a period and can revoke, no way into the unit without a login, secrets masked on every page, security updates that do not wait for a release. The licence agreement (v1.3) and the privacy page were revised with it.
• An administrator password of its own on every unit: the installer generates one, shows it once and has it typed back; firmware images for single-board devices use the device’s hardware address from the label until the first login. The first login must replace it, every password set for someone else is a first-login password as well, and one policy applies everywhere. Existing units keep their passwords.
• Support access granted by the operator: the Remote Support section of System Settings holds the support connection switch and a grant, “Support Access (SSH)”, for 24 hours, 3 or 7 days, or until revoked; support engineers work through that grant and nothing else, and every grant and revocation is logged and notified.
• SSH keys on a page: System › Users › SSH Access lists the shell keys with type, fingerprint and last use, adds a pasted key, removes one, switches password login off once a key is present, and can limit the service to one interface. New installs start with an empty list.
• Console recovery by the book: the physical console offers no session without a login and the boot loader password is random and held by nobody; recovery is a documented “Kylone Recovery” boot-menu entry with exactly three actions, each logged and notified — a new administrator password shown once, a temporary DHCP address for that boot, or the installer’s firewall openings — after which the normal boot continues. It can be disabled in System Settings; then a reinstall is the only way back.
• Secrets stay masked: passphrases, passwords and keys on every page — SRT, RTSP, RTMP, BISS, SNMPv3, Sharing, set-top box Wi-Fi, client secrets, the API key — show masked with Show and Copy buttons; the management API answers them unchanged.
• A firewall the operator can read: System › Firewall › Policies lists what the firewall actually holds, every rule removable, and adds policies by action, source, protocol, port or service, optionally on one interface. The Firewall page computes the openings this unit needs from its licence, its switches and its sources, lists them present or missing with their reason and adds the missing ones on Add Missing or when a service is turned on; the Apply page says when one is missing. New installs open the web UI and SSH only.
• Security updates on their own: one switch installs the distribution’s security updates once a day, kernel excluded, without a reboot, and reports every run by email.
• What a unit tells Kylone: licence activation and licence validation with branding, nothing else — no statistics, no logs, no credentials, independent of the remote support switch; a unit keeps working when it cannot reach Kylone. The “Send Usage Statistics” switch is gone because there is nothing to send.
• Install from a URL, update modules in place: under System › Tools the unit downloads a package itself, with live progress and an optional hash check — modules, module updates, system upgrades and OS updates alike; a partial package updates only the files it carries while the module’s settings and data stay in place.
• Scans as jobs: the Configure Programs scan runs detached under the operation feed, one job per tuner input and concurrent across inputs, with its live log in the web UI and in the management API; blind-scan runs on different adapters execute at the same time.
• Delivery: the built-in HLS output has the AES-128 option with key store, key endpoint and rotation without restart; the delivery settings page separates the listeners from the stream outputs; every SRT socket reports its own round-trip time, loss, retransmissions, drops, bandwidth and buffer on the status page, in the metrics and in the MIB.
• Forms that follow your choice: record forms show only the fields that apply to what is selected and change with the selection, with no intermediate save; required checks apply to visible fields only, and the management API reports the rule behind every dependent field.
• Your brand on the portal: a unit managed by the central management can carry the operator’s own company name, logo, favicon and links, set on the central for a distributor, a customer or a single unit; a unit without a brand looks exactly as before.
• Monitoring: the SNMP subtree answers from one resident process, a full walk in a fraction of a second, with the new KYLONE-MIB on unchanged object identifiers and new groups for the engine, the processing nodes, stand-ins, interfaces and storage; a host name per unit; bit error ratio and uncorrected blocks beside signal and carrier-to-noise where the card provides them; a Prometheus metrics endpoint.
• AM, FM and DAB+ radio: with the radio receiver card, stations are carried as channels like any other input — same status page, same audit, same delivery paths — with a Receivers page for the cards and a Stations page for what the scans found or a frequency added by hand.
• Housekeeping: “Apply” replaces “Commit” everywhere; long sidebar sections fold; every page has a short name, an explanatory title and a one-line definition in all three languages; the About page shows the provider, the version and the licensed features; product names follow the licence; scheduled stand-in scenarios and ad insertion are the Broadcast licence option, every product keeps the automatic backups; a lock-file fault that could freeze the status figures for days is fixed.
• Upgrading from v4.1.x: the upgrade keeps passwords and settings and brings the unit to the new baseline once — vendor access moves under Remote Support (where remote support is allowed, the maintainer’s web access appears as a visible user named support on the Users page, to keep or remove), the console session gives way to the recovery entry, and the firewall openings are rewritten in the form the Firewall page understands. The firewall’s running state is never changed by an upgrade.

v4.1.1Management API v2 and the DVB Carrier Monitor September 2026

Integrations get a signed, self-describing API; a new appliance hunts satellite carriers on its own; and the headend starts auditing its own outputs.

• Management API v2: integrations authenticate with an API key and a signed request instead of a user session, address fields by name, discover the actions of every record from the response itself and get a reason code with every failure. Version 1 keeps working unchanged; guides, addenda and reference clients are published openly.
• DVB Carrier Monitor: a new product — an appliance fitted with DVB-S/S2 cards that acquires the spectrum of an input, blind-tunes every carrier it finds and reports the tuning parameters and programme tables of each transponder. Scans are saved as tasks, run on a nightly cycle or on demand, and every run is compared with the previous one, so the morning answer is three numbers: new, lost, changed. Nothing is written into the channel configuration unless an operator decides so.
• Encrypted HLS as a source: the headend’s own HLS input plays AES-128 encrypted playlists with key rotation, so an encrypted output of one headend can feed another.
• Output audit: for every output, one minute of per-second figures — bitrate, PCR interval and accuracy, delivery timing, null packets and continuity — as sparklines on the status page, flagged when a figure leaves its limits, and exported for integrations.
• Smoother transcoded outputs: a “Module Buffering” setting gives transcoded and pre-processed outputs their own delivery buffer, 500 ms by default, so they leave the headend as evenly as relayed streams.
• Runaway protection: a memory limit per external module process, 2 GB by default, restarts a module that outgrows it and logs the event, so one misbehaving source can no longer exhaust the unit.
• Direct playback in the media portal: transcoded outputs play directly as MPEG-TS in a desktop or Android browser with one to two seconds of latency, and the whole list opens in VLC with one button.
• Status page for the road: Full Details, Output Audit, Live Feed and a refresh interval as buttons on the streaming dashboard — a brief view for small screens, a paused feed for a tab left open on a phone, a slower pace for weak links.

v4.1Hospitality ready September 2026

Built for properties and the integrators who serve them: everything a hospitality TV application needs, published by the headend itself.

• Integration feeds: a discoverable feeds tree — channel lists as M3U for multicast, HTTP-TS and HLS with stable channel identifiers, numbers, logos and categories; the programme guide as XMLTV over a seven-day window; a JSON manifest that says what is published and when. Categories are also carried in the SAP announcements.
• HLS for hospitality: multi-audio publishing modes (muxed, per-language renditions, or both), independent segments, keyframe-aligned chunks from two seconds up, and a “Hospitality TV” template that sets the codec, GOP and audio parameters TVs and HTML5 players expect.
• Subtitles on HLS: broadcaster teletext subtitles and closed captions become WebVTT renditions, one per page or track, with language and name in the playlist — while DVB bitmap subtitles can still be burnt in.
• Captions module: a new pre-processing module gives a channel a text subtitle page from two sources — the broadcaster’s DVB bitmap subtitles read with OCR, or the speech on the audio track recognised by a neural model, in the spoken language, translated to English, or both on two pages. The page reaches every output, from set-top boxes to HLS, and is announced with its language like any broadcaster page. See the captions module and the integration guide.
• Encrypted HLS: a third protection layer beside BISS and SRT — any HLS output can be AES-128 encrypted with keys the headend serves itself, with no DRM contract. Keys go only to devices the headend’s peer policy allows, or to applications presenting an HLS API key; they rotate from the web UI or on a schedule without interrupting viewers, and every HLS player, from hospitality TVs to phones, plays the result unchanged.
• HTTPS-TS: the unicast HTTP-TS service can run over TLS with the same certificate the web UI uses, so previews, players and integrations reach the headend encrypted on the link as well. Output URLs, channel lists and the built-in preview follow the setting.
• Operations: every tier and protocol of a channel opens in VLC from the Output URLs page with one click, for the streams a browser cannot decode. The video wall now heals a stuck tile by itself instead of leaving it dark. A viewer limit applies across HTTP-TS and every SRT worker together, and a request for a stream that is not on air is refused in a second instead of holding a viewer slot.
• Playout fixes: looping file channels that carry subtitle or teletext tracks now play out at a steady rate through the loop; stand-in channels publish the multicast address their receivers actually use.

v4.0A channel never goes dark 2026

The fourth generation is built around one promise: a channel never goes dark, and receivers never notice a switch.

• Stand-In protection suite: instant backup switching (one-to-one, or one source protecting many channels), a fallback layer so even a failed backup cannot leave the channel dark, a guard that keeps watching after every switch, scheduled parking windows with automatic return, and audio-only substitution for alternate-language feeds. Throughout every switch the channel keeps its on-air identity — set-top boxes and DVB-C receivers never re-scan.
• SCTE-35 digital program insertion for ad-marker workflows.
• RTSP server with authentication and full monitoring integration.
• High-capacity SRT with multi-core listener workers, configurable from the web UI.
• Seamless looping playout — file-based channels loop with a perfectly continuous timeline, eliminating player glitches at the loop point.
• Video Wall resilience — the mosaic keeps running smoothly through source interruptions and recoveries.

v3.9Hardened core 2026

• Deep reliability work in the streaming core, with graceful handling of unstable input sources.
• Built-in no-signal generator; regional channel-numbering (LCN) refinements; subtitle rendering fixes; QuickSync support extended to older GPU generations.

v3.8Video Wall 2026

• Video Wall (tiled mosaic): compose many live channels into a single hardware-accelerated mosaic output — ideal for monitoring rooms and multi-channel showcases — with automated profile setup.
• Refreshed platform foundation: latest enterprise Linux, current GPU acceleration stacks for both NVIDIA and Intel, and a modernized media framework.

v3.5–v3.7Hospitality and operations 2023 – 2025

• Timeshift across headend and set-top boxes.
• Hospitality TV: dedicated support for major hospitality TV brands and modern Android TV platforms, offline content support, and a dedicated hospitality theme.
• HDMI encoder family: compact encoder appliances with web management, profiles and monitoring.
• Modern HLS output (independent chunks, caching), GPU-accelerated subtitle overlay, watermark positioning, and a web media portal.
• Operations at scale: per-stream live logs, remote syslog, driver updates from the web UI, and diagnostic tooling for multicast networks.

v3.6Consistent identity 2024 – 2025

• Stable, consistent service identity across every configuration — receivers see the same channel layout no matter how the headend is reworked behind the scenes.
• Multiplexer robustness: fixed service ordering and clean handling of service outages.
• Mixed-GPU servers (NVIDIA and Intel side by side), high-bitrate SRT, and standards-compliant channel numbering for regional requirements.

v3.1–v3.4Broader, safer, faster 2022 – 2023

• Intel QuickSync transcoding joined NVIDIA acceleration; later also AMD GPUs — one platform, three acceleration families.
• Migration to enterprise Rocky Linux with a modern toolchain and media framework.
• Security hardening: two-factor authentication, account lockout policies, audited access, flexible web-service binding with certificate management.
• EPG carried through transcoding; alerting by email; channel-logo auto-detection; SNMP.

v3.0A new engine 2021 – 2022

The heart of the v3 generation: a rebuilt streaming engine with broadcast-grade timing.

• Broadcast-grade output timing aligned with ETSI measurement guidelines, and per-channel constant-bitrate output on every path.
• SRT input and output; HLS push; ATSC support; BISS encryption and decryption; DVB-CI (CAM) support with per-slot control.
• Multiplexer and modulator workflows with automatic bitrate management.
• Zero-downtime configuration: apply changes without restarting unaffected streams.
• Two-factor authentication, audit logging, digital signage and advertisement themes, and Raspberry Pi editions.

v2.0–v2.4From product to platform 2017 – 2021

• External module architecture: transcoding, pre-processing, post-processing and output functions became installable modules, including hardware-accelerated GPU transcoding.
• Multiplexer and DVB modulators, content encryption with client DRM, RTMP delivery, Simulcrypt decryption.
• Service packaging: fully customizable per-audience content and visuals.
• Emergency alerts and messaging to devices; auto-discovery of the server by set-top boxes; automatic client upgrades; a unified cross-platform look and feel.
• A matured client family across Amlogic, Rockchip and hospitality TV platforms.

v1The first shipping generation 2016 – 2017

• A complete compact headend: DVB reception, IP inputs, transcoding profiles, streaming server, and central management with licensing.
• Its own set-top-box line with over-the-air upgrades, themes, many languages, and early 4K playback.
• Remote management via a global VPN gateway network; API, SNMP and access control from the first year.