punktfunk/docs/releases/v0.29.0.md

Wire-compatible with 0.28.x — everything you have already paired keeps working, and you can update one side at a time. An old client on a new host, or the other way round, streams exactly as it does today.

This release is about getting along: with the other streaming host on your machine, with the game that is hogging your processor, and with Windows itself. Punktfunk can now share a computer with Sunshine and its forks, Linux hosts keep the stream smooth while a game hammers the CPU, streaming from a Hyprland desktop finally works — and keeps working past the first session — and Windows downloads are now signed under a publicly verified publisher.

TL;DR

• Punktfunk and Sunshine (or Apollo, or another fork) can now live on the same machine. Move one port in Punktfunk's settings and you are done — every client finds the new port by itself.
• Linux hosts stop stuttering when a game hogs the processor. The streaming threads were supposed to run at high priority and never actually did, on any install to date.
• If your Windows client is the app package (the .msix download), this one update needs an uninstall first — see Before you update. The regular installer updates normally.
• Streaming from a Hyprland desktop actually works now — and keeps working. Before, the picture could refuse to appear at all, and at best the first session of a host's lifetime was also its last good one.
• A controller whose Select button reports itself as "Back" no longer quits your Android stream on one press.
• Mac clients can finally capture system shortcuts: ⌘Q reaches the host's desktop instead of closing the client.

Before you update

• Windows client installed as the app package (the .msix download): Windows will refuse to update it in place this one time, because the package's signing identity changed with the move to a verified certificate. Uninstall the old package, then install the new one. This does not apply to the regular installer, and future updates go back to normal.

New

• Share a machine with Sunshine, Apollo and friends. With Moonlight-compatible connections switched off, the two only ever fought over a single network port — and moving Punktfunk's was barely possible: the setting did not survive updates, and clients had no way to find the moved port unless local network discovery happened to be working. All of that is fixed. The port is now a real setting in the host's configuration file, it survives upgrades, the web console follows it, and every client learns it directly from the host the moment it connects — so it also works over a VPN or across subnets, where discovery has never worked. The connection port can be moved the same way.
• Capture system shortcuts, now on Mac too. The setting existed on every other client; on a Mac, ⌘Q quit the client itself and other ⌘ shortcuts went to the client's menus instead of your game. While your input is captured, ⌘ shortcuts are now sent to the host — with the escape shortcuts kept local, so there is always a way out. On by default, like everywhere else.

Improved

• Linux hosts keep the stream smooth under load. The threads that capture, encode and send your stream were meant to run ahead of ordinary programs and never did — the request was silently refused on every install channel. A game's shader-compilation storm could starve them, stutter the audio and drag the picture quality to the floor on a connection with nothing wrong. The host now asks the system's scheduling service the way audio apps do, the packages ship the needed headroom for machines without it, and — for the first time — the audio path itself is prioritized, which matters most because a late sound packet is directly audible.
• The host's volume boost is now trustworthy. It quietly did nothing on normal Punktfunk connections, and where it did work, turning it up clipped the sound into harsh distortion long before it got loud. It now applies everywhere, and levels above the safe range are rounded off gently instead of clipped — boosting a quiet desktop mix finally sounds like turning it up, not breaking it. It buys headroom for quiet sources; it is deliberately not a loudness compressor.
• Windows downloads are signed under a publicly verified certificate. The installer and the app package now carry a verified publisher signature instead of a self-signed one — what Windows shows when it asks "do you trust this?" is now an identity a certificate authority actually checked.

Fixed

• Streaming your desktop from Hyprland works now, and keeps working. Six separate faults, every one of them ours, stacked up on this route: the capture could fail to start at all because Punktfunk offered the picture in a format the desktop's screen-sharing service never accepts; when it did start, only the first session of the host's lifetime worked and every later one was black; ending a stream could wedge the screen-sharing service itself; a stalled start could quietly poison every session after it; your mouse pointer was aimed at the host's own monitor instead of the streamed one; and the host misread the service's normal behaviour as a lost pointer. All six are fixed — measured against a fully up-to-date Hyprland, where it now streams session after session.
• Your Playnite library now shows up on Windows. Playnite installs per-user by default, and the host — which runs as a system service — was looking in places where a per-user install can never be found, so syncing failed. Worse, the one tile it could not open took every game down with it. Both are fixed: a normal Playnite install is found, and a shortcut that cannot open on your machine is skipped with a note instead of emptying the library.
• One press of Select no longer ends your Android stream. Some controllers — especially the Android TV shape — report their Select button as the same "Back" every TV remote has. That press fell through to "leave the stream", and every shortcut built on Select (the emergency exit hold, mic mute, the stats overlay) was unreachable on exactly those pads. Select now works as Select on them; a remote's Back still exits, as the on-screen hint says.
• Streaming a game in its own full-screen session from a KDE desktop no longer leaves your monitor lit. With the host set to take the machine over exclusively, this one way of launching a game kept the physical monitor showing the idle desktop for the whole stream. It now goes dark, wakes when you touch the local mouse or keyboard, and never wakes from anything happening inside the stream.
• Mac keyboard edge cases in a stream: with Caps Lock on, the escape shortcuts were not recognized at all, and a shortcut's key could stay "stuck" until pressed again. Both fixed alongside the shortcut-capture work.

Thanks

The Linux priority fix exists because someone measured their stutter carefully enough — down to which seconds it happened in and what else the machine was doing — that the cause could be found in a place nobody was looking. The Select-button fix likewise arrived as a precise field report. Thank you; that detail is what makes a fault findable.

For developers

Protocol, ABI, driver and embedder detail — including the version table and the breaking-changes list — is in CHANGELOG.md.

Two things deserve a headline even here: the C ABI moves 19 → 20 by pure addition (one new accessor for the host's advertised management port), and the Windows MSIX package identity changed with the signing move — that is the uninstall note above, and it is one-time.