What changed, release by release

• Torrent search works from the desktop app again. Python's process pool crashed when nova2 was launched through Zig's child runtime, so every installed torrent source appeared to return zero results. Opal's bounded search path now uses network threads, while the qBittorrent-compatible CLI keeps its process pool. A dedicated CI job executes this exact Zig-to-Python seam so it cannot silently regress.
• Torrent files selected by hand start sooner and keep working. A chosen episode now gets the same head-first priority as the automatic pick, old buffer gates are released when switching files, and mpv no longer adds a second three-second startup buffer on top of Opal's readiness gate.
• Startup and shutdown are safer. Background services and process watchers now have explicit lifetimes, responsive stop paths, and one owner for each child-process handle instead of detached workers racing teardown.
• Windows title-bar behaviour is native again. Double-click maximizes and restores, maximize respects the current monitor's work area instead of covering the taskbar, and normal PowerShell builds locate their MSYS2 shell and toolchain without hand-editing PATH.
• Windows releases can sign the whole payload. When Azure Artifact Signing is enabled, the pipeline signs every executable and DLL, verifies that none were missed, then signs the MSI itself—covering the modules Windows 11 Smart App Control evaluates, not only opal.exe.
• Opal Connect 0.4 has a real setup flow and a useful side panel. It finds a local Opal, signs in or creates the first account without asking users to find a token file, and adds live torrents, downloads, recent searches, casting and watch-party controls, keyboard shortcuts, and the real Opal logo.
• The new Opal website makes releases easier to install. The download flow exposes every published format, detects the visitor's platform, retains no-JavaScript links, and adds install help, screenshots, comparisons, search metadata, and a proper project home at opal.palash.dev.
• Browser transcoding no longer takes Opal down. ffmpeg's stdout now has one close owner, eliminating the double-close that could panic the app or close an unrelated client socket during "Play here".

• Torrents play a second time. The metadata cache rebuilt the info dict on write, which changed the info-hash, so every replay of an already-cached torrent stalled at 0%. It now stores the original bencoded info dict byte-for-byte.
• An unlimited download rate means unlimited. The setting wrote -1 to libtorrent, which reaches the bandwidth manager as a negative quota; and the rate field mixed KB/s with bytes/s, so a 4096 typed in Settings became 4 KB/s. Both fixed, with the conversion behind a tested pure function.
• "Play here" in the browser transcodes instead of refusing. MKV, AVI, TS and H.265-in-MP4 releases now stream through ffmpeg as fragmented MP4. Only what nothing can play (a disc image) is still turned away.
• The Watching page got its Play and Remove buttons back. They had been drawn past the bottom edge of their own card and clipped away — a card that carries both a progress bar and an action row is now sized for both.
• Remove watched items one at a time, from Watching and from the Home "Jump back in" row.
• Double-tap F for real fullscreen. It used to expand the player inside the window only; nothing had ever called SDL_SetWindowFullscreen.
• The releases calendar backfills yesterday by paging the EZTV API, and buckets into three days instead of one.
• Windows: the headless build compiles again.

• Re-cut of v0.6.2 so Windows users get a build: v0.6.2's own ISA gate rejected the Windows exe over a single isolated instruction, which turned out to be a PE misdecode rather than real AVX-512 contamination. Same code otherwise.

• Storage page: see what Opal actually stores and reclaim it.
• Fixed the two bugs reported against the shipped release (#21, #22).
• Windows and Linux portability: /tmp writes were silently dead on Windows, and every sidecar (Suwayomi included) now starts on both. Added a Windows CI smoke run so this stops regressing.
• Upcoming sorts by popularity rather than release date.
• Danger buttons no longer float over the Storage rows.

• Windows: fixed the four bugs behind "crashes on almost anything" (#21).
• Every HTTPS fetch works again — the HTTP client never loaded a CA bundle, so seeding the clock alone left TLS broken.
• The arm64 Docker image builds and runs; IPTV reconnect was half-disabled.

• Movies and TV work out of the box — default TMDB/OMDb keys ship with the release, no sign-up before the first search.
• Accounts for the headless/web build: register and sign in from the web UI, with a session-aware bearer gate replacing the old pairing screen.
• Web UI parity, tier 2: Comics, Novels, Drama, VNDB, Audiobookshelf, OPDS, Plex, Music, Radio, Live TV, YouTube, the AI copilot, and the Logs tab.
• Headless deployment: Caddy TLS and Tailscale access profiles.
• The browser extension is now Opal Connect, with cross-browser builds.

• Live TV (iptv-org) as a first-class source in the Video group.
• DPI-bypass proxy sidecar with a Settings toggle — reaches sources that a filtering ISP blocks; enabled on Windows too.
• Browse's 15 sources fold into collapsible groups.
• YouTube search and channel paging.

• Windows: DPI scaling, the console window, plugins, and the custom title bar all fixed; the formula builds from source there.
• Plex: a restored session loads its library again.
• Loading a .torrent file no longer dead-ends in the web browser.

• Comics, manga and novels at scale: Madara (~332 sites), MangaThemesia (~143), plus lightnovelwp/readwn engines (~120) — one framework per site family rather than one scraper per site.
• Anime video extractors (MegaCloud/HiAnime, StreamWish, Dood, Mp4Upload …) hand off straight to mpv.
• Anti-block fetching: source scrapers route through an anti-detect browser when they hit Cloudflare or a captcha.
• Encrypted persistent content cache with stale-while-revalidate — cold start shows content immediately, then refreshes.
• Opal Connect, a cross-browser extension: play/read/download/scrape into the local app, and add the site you are on as a source.
• Infinite scroll across drama/vndb/novels/jellyfin/plex/opds/audiobookshelf/radio.

• Watching library — what you are part-way through, in one place.
• Full-duplex voice mode with live partial transcripts.
• Winamp-style audio visualizers, including mirrored gradient bars.
• Torrent streaming starts in seconds instead of hanging.
• The three download tabs merged into one list.
• Paged onboarding tour, replayable from Settings.
• The installer no longer needs Xcode.

• Podcasts as a new media class — search, browse, stream, with cover art and now-playing metadata.
• Internet radio via RadioBrowser, also a new media class.
• More sources: Stremio addon pack, Knaben aggregator, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive audio.
• OMDb ratings (IMDb / Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic) on the detail view.
• Keyless subtitle providers extended (Subdl, Stremio OpenSubtitles-v3).
• Broad performance pass: virtualized grids, poster failure latches, cheaper per-frame polling.
• Persisted Settings toggles now actually take effect.

• Packaging and installer fixes on top of v0.1.1.

• Keyless subtitles, end to end: several public engines, no API key, with a browsable UI and auto-download when a video has none.
• Fixed the launch crash on opening a file (SQLite is now opened serialized).
• Windows: resolved the issue #3 launch failure (MINGW64 CRT + DLL harvest).
• macOS: the bundle is user-writable, so the Gatekeeper workaround no longer needs sudo.

First public release. A pure-Zig desktop media browser and AI copilot: chat-first home, search across many sources, TMDB-backed Movies & TV, an mpv-based player with resume, a voice-driven agentic console, and a one-command installer with checksums. Experimental Windows build (exe/zip/msi) alongside macOS and Linux.