release: 0.84.0 — the owner's sixteen-item bug hunt

Sixteen items written from real use: eleven fixed, one measured and closed without a code change
(the micro-stutter is a 23.976 fps film on a 120.0148 Hz display, reproduced identically outside
Siftlode), two parked for a reproducible case, one scoped out to its own sprint. Two of the eleven
were destroying user state — a YouTube video that rewound itself on reopen, and a "clear resume
point" that told Plex nothing about an in-progress item.

Then seven deep-review rounds over the fixes and over each other's fixes: 32 → 24 → 43 → 31 → 22 →
26 → 18 raised. Minor, not patch: item 14 added an admin knob, item 10 a sort control, and items
2/4/5/7 are features.

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -7,6 +7,40 @@ edit the release notes and re-run the generator.
 
 Upgrading, pinning a version and rolling back: [docs/self-hosting.md](docs/self-hosting.md#upgrading).
 
+## 0.84.0 — 2026-09-12
+
+A bug-fix release, from a list you wrote while using Siftlode. Two of these were destroying your own data: a YouTube video rewound itself when you reopened it, and clearing a resume point on a half-watched Plex item told Plex nothing. Subtitles now appear in seconds instead of minutes, the Plex player's bitrate is a real measurement rather than a guess, and a channel you turn full history on for fills in front of you instead of looking frozen.
+
+### Features
+
+- Subtitles arrive in seconds. Picking an embedded subtitle track used to take about two and a half minutes on a large film, and switching from Hungarian to English cost the same again — because the cost was never the conversion, it was reading the whole file. It now reads a window around where you are, shows that first, and finishes the rest behind it; every text track rides the SAME read, so switching tracks is instant. On a 17 GB film: 154 s before, 8 s for the window now. Nothing blocks while it works, there is a “Preparing subtitles” pill instead of a frozen player, and a track that can never be shown finally says so.
+- The Plex player's info panel tells you the truth. Bitrate is measured from the bytes actually arriving, not copied off the manifest — and it shows a dash until there is something to measure rather than a confident wrong number. It also lists the audio and the subtitle track you are on, which it never did.
+- A new admin switch: loudness normalisation for Plex playback (Configuration → Plex). Off by default, because it makes a film markedly louder and narrows its dynamic range — that is a taste call, not a fix. On a 5.1 film it moved the measured loudness from −35.2 to −17.2 LUFS, and it does not touch A/V sync.
+- Collections can be sorted. The collection page had no sort control at all and always ordered by release year — it now carries the same Sort control as the library grid, with the same options, and your choice survives a reload without re-sorting the library behind it. A collection opened from a shared link also shows its real name instead of a raw id.
+- Remove a video from a playlist without leaving the player, and the player steps to whatever followed instead of closing. Above the move-to submenu there is now a one-click “move to the list you last moved to”.
+- Live YouTube search results can be sorted — by views, date or length, over the results already on screen, so sorting rearranges what you are looking at instead of running a different search.
+- The channel name in the player is a real link again: middle-click and Ctrl-click open it in a new tab, the way the YouTube icon beside it always did, while a plain click still takes the in-app route.
+
+### Fixes
+
+- A YouTube video no longer rewinds when you reopen it. Closing at 13:50 and coming back put you at 12:31 — the checkpoint reached the server but not the page's own cache, so the stale position won. It now goes forward: 811 → 816 → 825 s across reopens.
+- “Clear resume point” works on a half-watched Plex item. The push to Plex was skipped for exactly the case you would use it on, so Plex kept the old offset and handed it straight back on the next import. Verified against the real server, including a full 44,885-item re-import.
+- Turning full history on for a channel fills the page in front of you. The grid and the item count stayed frozen for the best part of a minute while the header counted up, because the request that starts the backfill returns before anything is stored. Measured: the count now moves 54 → 139 within about twelve seconds, no reload.
+- Starting or seeking a Plex film is about eight seconds faster. Every session start and every seek waited out a dead eight-second timer for a file the transcoder never writes — on a film with more than one audio track, which is most of them. A multi-audio session now starts in 0.9 s cold and 0.7 s on a seek.
+- A Plex session the server no longer has now recovers or says so, instead of spinning forever. A stream that kept being lost could restart itself indefinitely behind a spinner that never became an error.
+- A Plex stream request for something that cannot exist answers immediately rather than holding the server for 20–30 seconds. Enough of those at once could stall the whole app.
+- The Plex player no longer counts one viewing twice, and a failed “watched” mark no longer half-happens: it used to leave the item looking watched in the app while the server disagreed, or quietly mark it watched anyway a few seconds after telling you it had failed.
+- Dragging a Plex playlist into a new order sticks. Leaving and coming straight back showed the old order, and the next drag saved that.
+- A refused action says WHY, in the language you are reading. Several places showed a generic “couldn't do that” — or nothing at all — where the server had explained itself, including the Plex “Add to playlist” dialog, the collection editor and the upload dialog. The demo account gets its reason back too.
+- Dialogs behave for the keyboard. Opening one puts the cursor where you would expect (the jump-to box opens on its search field, not its close button), closing one hands the focus back to what you opened it from, and a dialog that closes underneath another one no longer steals the focus out of the one still on screen.
+- The regular micro-stutter in the Plex player is NOT Siftlode's, and this release does not pretend to fix it. Measured per frame: the player delivers every source frame with nothing dropped; the hold comes from a 23.976 fps film on a 120.0148 Hz display, and it reproduces identically outside Siftlode. Setting the display to 119.88 Hz removes it for every application, not just this one.
+
+### Internal
+
+- The round started from sixteen items written from real use, not from an audit. Eleven were fixed, one was measured and closed without a code change (the display cadence above), two are parked for a reproducible case, and one — playlist multi-select and bulk actions — was scoped out to its own sprint. The measurements are the point: item 8's “35 s” turned out to be one file's number, and the real law is bytes-ffmpeg-must-read divided by ~140 MB/s, which is why the fix is a window rather than a faster conversion.
+- Seven deep-review rounds followed, each reviewing the previous round's own fix commits: 32 → 24 → 43 → 31 → 22 → 26 → 18 raised. Round 7 was run TARGETED rather than full — four reviewers on the six surfaces round 6 had changed, and adversarial verification spent only where a wrong fix could re-break the previous round's — which is seven agents instead of about thirty-six for two HIGH findings. Every regression test added in a fix round was mutation-checked: reverted, run, and confirmed red for the defect it is named after. Thirteen of round 7's mutations were, and two were instructive — one guard no test could drive, and one round-6 test whose mock modelled a server that accepts a write and then serves the pre-write state.
+- What the eight-lane gate structurally cannot catch, and what this round taught about it: every real defect of the last three rounds was a wrong belief about an external system, not broken logic. ffmpeg substitutes the VARIANT before the sequence in its segment filenames, so a guard written the other way round was inert on every multi-audio file and a warm-up waited eight seconds for a name that is never written. A reclaim budget's window was anchored at the first failure rather than the last, so any failure cadence between one and two minutes reset it forever — invisible to two tests that spaced their cases at zero and ten minutes. jsdom performs no default Tab, so a focus test can be green with no focus trap installed at all. The conclusion carried forward is to measure the boundary when writing the code, not when reviewing it: one ffmpeg run costs pennies, a review round costs a session.
+
 ## 0.83.0 — 2026-09-09
 
 Siftlode now opens on a page that answers one question: what should I watch right now. You say how much time you have — ten minutes, half an hour, a whole evening — and it gives you one suggestion, from YouTube or from Plex, with a button that picks up where you left off. Under it sits a shelf of the things you always come back to, which you fill yourself.

VERSION

@@ -1 +1 @@
-0.83.0
+0.84.0

frontend/src/lib/releaseNotes.ts

@@ -14,6 +14,39 @@ export interface ReleaseEntry {
 }
 
 export const RELEASE_NOTES: ReleaseEntry[] = [
+  {
+    version: "0.84.0",
+    date: "2026-09-12",
+    summary:
+      "A bug-fix release, from a list you wrote while using Siftlode. Two of these were destroying your own data: a YouTube video rewound itself when you reopened it, and clearing a resume point on a half-watched Plex item told Plex nothing. Subtitles now appear in seconds instead of minutes, the Plex player's bitrate is a real measurement rather than a guess, and a channel you turn full history on for fills in front of you instead of looking frozen.",
+    features: [
+      "Subtitles arrive in seconds. Picking an embedded subtitle track used to take about two and a half minutes on a large film, and switching from Hungarian to English cost the same again \u2014 because the cost was never the conversion, it was reading the whole file. It now reads a window around where you are, shows that first, and finishes the rest behind it; every text track rides the SAME read, so switching tracks is instant. On a 17 GB film: 154 s before, 8 s for the window now. Nothing blocks while it works, there is a \u201cPreparing subtitles\u201d pill instead of a frozen player, and a track that can never be shown finally says so.",
+      "The Plex player's info panel tells you the truth. Bitrate is measured from the bytes actually arriving, not copied off the manifest \u2014 and it shows a dash until there is something to measure rather than a confident wrong number. It also lists the audio and the subtitle track you are on, which it never did.",
+      "A new admin switch: loudness normalisation for Plex playback (Configuration \u2192 Plex). Off by default, because it makes a film markedly louder and narrows its dynamic range \u2014 that is a taste call, not a fix. On a 5.1 film it moved the measured loudness from \u221235.2 to \u221217.2 LUFS, and it does not touch A/V sync.",
+      "Collections can be sorted. The collection page had no sort control at all and always ordered by release year \u2014 it now carries the same Sort control as the library grid, with the same options, and your choice survives a reload without re-sorting the library behind it. A collection opened from a shared link also shows its real name instead of a raw id.",
+      "Remove a video from a playlist without leaving the player, and the player steps to whatever followed instead of closing. Above the move-to submenu there is now a one-click \u201cmove to the list you last moved to\u201d.",
+      "Live YouTube search results can be sorted \u2014 by views, date or length, over the results already on screen, so sorting rearranges what you are looking at instead of running a different search.",
+      "The channel name in the player is a real link again: middle-click and Ctrl-click open it in a new tab, the way the YouTube icon beside it always did, while a plain click still takes the in-app route.",
+    ],
+    fixes: [
+      "A YouTube video no longer rewinds when you reopen it. Closing at 13:50 and coming back put you at 12:31 \u2014 the checkpoint reached the server but not the page's own cache, so the stale position won. It now goes forward: 811 \u2192 816 \u2192 825 s across reopens.",
+      "\u201cClear resume point\u201d works on a half-watched Plex item. The push to Plex was skipped for exactly the case you would use it on, so Plex kept the old offset and handed it straight back on the next import. Verified against the real server, including a full 44,885-item re-import.",
+      "Turning full history on for a channel fills the page in front of you. The grid and the item count stayed frozen for the best part of a minute while the header counted up, because the request that starts the backfill returns before anything is stored. Measured: the count now moves 54 \u2192 139 within about twelve seconds, no reload.",
+      "Starting or seeking a Plex film is about eight seconds faster. Every session start and every seek waited out a dead eight-second timer for a file the transcoder never writes \u2014 on a film with more than one audio track, which is most of them. A multi-audio session now starts in 0.9 s cold and 0.7 s on a seek.",
+      "A Plex session the server no longer has now recovers or says so, instead of spinning forever. A stream that kept being lost could restart itself indefinitely behind a spinner that never became an error.",
+      "A Plex stream request for something that cannot exist answers immediately rather than holding the server for 20\u201330 seconds. Enough of those at once could stall the whole app.",
+      "The Plex player no longer counts one viewing twice, and a failed \u201cwatched\u201d mark no longer half-happens: it used to leave the item looking watched in the app while the server disagreed, or quietly mark it watched anyway a few seconds after telling you it had failed.",
+      "Dragging a Plex playlist into a new order sticks. Leaving and coming straight back showed the old order, and the next drag saved that.",
+      "A refused action says WHY, in the language you are reading. Several places showed a generic \u201ccouldn't do that\u201d \u2014 or nothing at all \u2014 where the server had explained itself, including the Plex \u201cAdd to playlist\u201d dialog, the collection editor and the upload dialog. The demo account gets its reason back too.",
+      "Dialogs behave for the keyboard. Opening one puts the cursor where you would expect (the jump-to box opens on its search field, not its close button), closing one hands the focus back to what you opened it from, and a dialog that closes underneath another one no longer steals the focus out of the one still on screen.",
+      "The regular micro-stutter in the Plex player is NOT Siftlode's, and this release does not pretend to fix it. Measured per frame: the player delivers every source frame with nothing dropped; the hold comes from a 23.976 fps film on a 120.0148 Hz display, and it reproduces identically outside Siftlode. Setting the display to 119.88 Hz removes it for every application, not just this one.",
+    ],
+    chores: [
+      "The round started from sixteen items written from real use, not from an audit. Eleven were fixed, one was measured and closed without a code change (the display cadence above), two are parked for a reproducible case, and one \u2014 playlist multi-select and bulk actions \u2014 was scoped out to its own sprint. The measurements are the point: item 8's \u201c35 s\u201d turned out to be one file's number, and the real law is bytes-ffmpeg-must-read divided by ~140 MB/s, which is why the fix is a window rather than a faster conversion.",
+      "Seven deep-review rounds followed, each reviewing the previous round's own fix commits: 32 \u2192 24 \u2192 43 \u2192 31 \u2192 22 \u2192 26 \u2192 18 raised. Round 7 was run TARGETED rather than full \u2014 four reviewers on the six surfaces round 6 had changed, and adversarial verification spent only where a wrong fix could re-break the previous round's \u2014 which is seven agents instead of about thirty-six for two HIGH findings. Every regression test added in a fix round was mutation-checked: reverted, run, and confirmed red for the defect it is named after. Thirteen of round 7's mutations were, and two were instructive \u2014 one guard no test could drive, and one round-6 test whose mock modelled a server that accepts a write and then serves the pre-write state.",
+      "What the eight-lane gate structurally cannot catch, and what this round taught about it: every real defect of the last three rounds was a wrong belief about an external system, not broken logic. ffmpeg substitutes the VARIANT before the sequence in its segment filenames, so a guard written the other way round was inert on every multi-audio file and a warm-up waited eight seconds for a name that is never written. A reclaim budget's window was anchored at the first failure rather than the last, so any failure cadence between one and two minutes reset it forever \u2014 invisible to two tests that spaced their cases at zero and ten minutes. jsdom performs no default Tab, so a focus test can be green with no focus trap installed at all. The conclusion carried forward is to measure the boundary when writing the code, not when reviewing it: one ffmpeg run costs pennies, a review round costs a session.",
+    ],
+  },
   {
     version: "0.83.0",
     date: "2026-09-09",