Player overview

How the MenuPi player streams playlists, caches them offline, and reports health back to the dashboard.

Updated May 18, 2026·4 min read

How it works

The player is a lightweight native app available for Fire TV, Android TV, Chromebox, Tizen (Samsung), and webOS (LG). After pairing, it subscribes to a playlist over a WebSocket, downloads scenes + media to local storage, then plays them on a loop.

Sync behavior

  • New content downloads in the background and applies at the next playlist loop boundary — never mid-scene.
  • Failed media (404, slow CDN) falls back to the prior cached version.
  • A heartbeat ping every 30s reports player health to the dashboard.

Supported platforms

  • Fire TV (Stick, Cube, 4K Max)
  • Android TV / Google TV
  • Chromebox / Chromebit
  • Samsung Tizen (Smart Signage / commercial displays)
  • LG webOS (commercial displays)
  • Raspberry Pi 4 / 5 (community-supported)