FPP 10.0

• Debian 12 → Debian 13 “Trixie” — newer libraries top to bottom
• A new Linux kernel on every platform, with current Wi-Fi drivers, performance work and hardware fixes
• Native arm64 images for Pi 3, 4, 5, Zero 2 W and CM4 / CM5
• PocketBeagle 2 and PocketBeagle 2 Industrial supported
• 32-bit images still built for older and 32-bit-only boards

More headroom for bigger shows

• fppd starts about 8 seconds sooner on a single-core BeagleBone — several services taken off the critical path to fppd and the web UI
• DHCP no longer drags in polkit and hostnamed just to set a hostname FPP already wrote itself
• rsyslog deferred off the boot path; atd and ufw no longer ship enabled
• Twelve unused PHP extensions dropped — 1.6 MB back per web worker
• The new kernel reaches the network seconds earlier
• The spoken IP announcement yields to fppd and the web server instead of fighting them for the core

Power on, show on

• PipeWire + GStreamer replace the VLC and SDL backends
• Simple mode for one speaker, Advanced mode for everything else
• Multi-zone audio — group outputs and route media to all of them
• Real-time volume and EQ, per output
• Routing Matrix, plus a live pipeline Graph Visualizer
• Friendly sound-card aliases that survive a reboot or a re-plug

One graph, every speaker

• AES67 audio-over-IP output — PTP-synced and standards-compliant
• Opus RTP streaming, unicast and multicast
• Per-output delay compensation across zones
• USB bandwidth checks, before you find out the hard way
• Sound-card presence monitoring, with warnings that name the problem
• A null sink for boards with no audio hardware at all

The whole yard is the speaker

• Playback rebuilt on GStreamer / KMS — HDMI and DSI
• Video output regions — one video can span two displays
• Play Media can target any video output, not just the first
• Video straight into a Pixel Overlay model, from any stream
• yt-dlp support: hand it a YouTube URL and press play
• Overlay Model Effect can draw and scroll images on a model, not just colours and patterns

More screens, more ways to fill them

• Per-port protocols now actually apply — the setting was saved but never read
• SK6812, WS2812B, WS2815 and the rest of the 800 kHz family, listed by name
• TM18xx support, including TM1814’s constant-current preamble
• 400 kHz parts — TM1803, TM1804, UCS1903 — now driveable
• Parts that would be driven wrong are deliberately left off the list
• Pixel string “Reverse” is saved again

Stop guessing which WS2811 you bought

• 4.6× faster panel frame prep — precomputed lookup tables and NEON accumulation
• Pixel string prep tiled and fused — faster again on the same board
• More pixels per controller before you run out of frame time
• CPU handed back to the web UI — pages and test controls stay responsive while the show runs
• Idle outputs park the PRUs instead of burning a core
• DPIPixels replaces rpi_ws281x on every Pi string output, with variable frame rate per sequence and no reboot
• Full string length on every port for latch-chip capes, plus Falcon V4 / V5 smart receivers

Same board, more pixels

• Four new self-PWM chips: DP3364S, ICND1065L, SM16380SH, ICND2153
• 1/64 scan register tables — no more stretching a 1/32 table to fit
• Full-height layout uses both RGB lanes on one row — 128×64 and 64×64
• Several independent matrices on one cape — a two-sided display no longer needs two controllers
• 16 outputs, higher refresh rates, panels and strings sharing a cape

Two-sided? One controller

• mDNS / Avahi discovery — players find each other with no setup
• MultiSync defaults to unicast on new installs
• E1.31 sync universes, input and output, with priority on bridged data
• Per-controller UDP pacing and DSCP marking
• WLED-Native discovery, audio-reactive networking, more ported FX
• Bulk pixel data API — push a whole frame to an overlay model in one request instead of one call per pixel
• Sort and save the display order of your systems

One show, many boxes

• If / Set Variable commands, plus Variables and Recurring Tasks
• Every command logs its source — UI, MQTT, schedule, plugin or API
• FSEQ effects gain run-if-not-running, and restart-in-place instead of stacking
• Reboot and Shutdown are ordinary commands now
• Calendar view of your schedule
• Companion media that lives and dies with its playlist entry

Say it once, it happens

• Load and unload plugins at runtime — fppd keeps playing
• Plugin API 6: plugins register their own HTTP routes and shut down cleanly
• Dependencies install themselves — apt packages and Python via pipx / uv
• Redesigned manager: categories, icons, grid view, popularity, one plugin log
• Open issue and PR counts shown on the card
• Official, community or unknown — tracked and surfaced in the health check

Find it, install it, use it

• Dark mode across the entire interface
• Basic / Advanced / Experimental levels — plus a temporary 15-minute Advanced
• Status pushed over WebSocket instead of polled
• Playlist editor redesigned: sections, inline help, mass select, missing-file badges
• True 3D Virtual Display with transform controls
• Channel Fader, RGB / RGBW test, color fades, DMX sine generator

Simple until you need it not to be

• Main-loop watchdog with phase tracking and stall recovery
• Crash reports resolve to file and line on the device
• Keep crash reports local, or send them — your call
• One-click support bundle for when you do need to ask
• Health check, fan monitoring and adjustable thermal trip points
• Warnings that say what to actually do about it

Show night shouldn’t be a surprise

• Command injection in the web UI and in crash handling — fixed
• Buffer overflows in MultiSync ping and SetSetting — fixed
• Heap overflow and out-of-bounds read in DDP bridging — fixed
• Protected backups no longer leak the encryption password in plaintext
• Outputs can no longer be freed while the output thread is walking them
• Ports stay powered on across a config reload

The boring work that matters

• HTTP layer moved from libhttpserver to drogon
• chrony replaces ntpsec for time sync, with LAN gateway fallback
• Full OpenAPI docs, including the C++ command APIs and plugin routes
• Playwright UI tests, a Dev Container, amd64 / arm64 Docker builds
• Distributed compilation via distcc and nocc; asan and tsan targets
• One flash tool for Pi, BeagleBone and BeagleBone 64 — NVMe, eMMC and SSD

Built to keep being built