Anthias is a digital signage platform for Raspberry Pi devices and PCs. Formerly known as Screenly OSE, it was rebranded to clear up the confusion between Screenly (the paid version) and Anthias. More details can be found in this blog post.
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See this page for options on how to install Anthias.
Note
See this page for instructions on how to install Anthias on balenaOS. You can either use the images from balenaHub or download the images from the releases.
See the supported hardware section on the website for the full list of supported devices.
The installer recognizes any 64-bit ARM host that isn't a Raspberry Pi as arm64 and runs the same Anthias stack on it — Armbian on Rock Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi and similar boards. The dashboard, scheduler, and asset library all work as on a Pi.
Anthias only supports Debian-based Armbian images (Bookworm / Trixie). The installer wires up the Docker apt repository under download.docker.com/linux/debian, so Ubuntu-based Armbian downloads (Jammy / Noble) will fail at the apt update step. Pick the Debian build of the image for your board on the Armbian site.
Things to know before you pick a board:
- Videos decode in software — fine for casual 720p, stutter-prone at 1080p on slower SoCs, not suitable for 4K. If your content is mostly video, prefer a Pi 4 / 5 or x86.
- Images and web pages run smoothly across the supported boards.
- Tested boards: Rock Pi 4, Rock 5, Orange Pi 5, Banana Pi M5. Allwinner H616 / H618 boards (e.g. Orange Pi Zero 3) currently have weaker mainline display support and are best limited to non-video content.
- The Plymouth boot splash is wired up but typically does not display on non-Pi boards (their U-Boot bootloaders don't hand the kernel an early DRM device for Plymouth to draw to). The kernel boot log scrolls on the screen until the viewer takes over and renders your first asset — functionally fine, just less polished than the Pi or x86 boot.
Per-SoC hardware video decode (Rockchip rkmpp, Allwinner cedrus, Amlogic meson-vdec) is the planned follow-up; see issue #2849.
Note
We are still in the process of knocking out some bugs. You can track the known issues here. You can also check the discussions in the Anthias forums.
- Forum
- Website (hosted on GitHub and the source is available here)
- General documentation
- Developer documentation
- Migrating assets from Anthias to Screenly
- WebView