Cabinet + tube geometry
The theme PNG alpha channel became the only screen shape.
FIVE PARTS / THIRTY DAYS / ONE LOCKED BASELINE
The machinery
behind the magic.
CableBox looks like an old television because several modern systems agree to disappear. This is the documented architecture, the failed paths, the measurements, and the rules that keep the illusion intact.
30DAYS OF ITERATION
2NATIVE + WEB RUNTIMES
10HIDDEN SYSTEMS
N=128SAMPLES PER ENGINE
8/8SHIP GATES
PART I / CASE STUDY
Five arcs.
Five invariants.
Each phase ended by locking one rule the next phase was not allowed to casually reopen. That discipline is what turned a month of experiments into a coherent object.Mask pipeline
Screen apertures moved offline into permanent baked assets.
CRT baseline
The approved picture constants were measured, recorded, and locked.
Playback recovery
Fresh sessions, cache discipline, and watchdog recovery replaced dead screens.
Ship discipline
Engine shootout, stress proof, frozen baselines, and browser parity closed the build.
The mask became the truth.
Instead of computing a screen shape while the app is running, CableBox bakes each aperture into the cabinet artwork. The alpha channel is permanent, reviewable, and deterministic.
The picture stayed rectangular.
The video intentionally overshoots the aperture while the cabinet sits above it. That single layering doctrine eliminated black rims, bezel bleed, and competing geometry systems.
Opinion lost to measurement.
Playback engines, boot paths, channel changes, mask quality, and stress behavior each received a harness. The shipping choices are attached to numbers, not folklore.
PART II / ARCHITECTURE
The image stays raw.
The cabinet owns the shape.
CableBox does not clip the video into a guessed television curve. It places an oversized live rectangle behind transparent cabinet artwork. One source of geometry. One believable object.LAYER 02 / CABINETTransparent PNG + authored alpha apertureAlways above · owns the visible screen shape
TRANSPARENT PIXELS REVEAL THE SIGNAL
LAYER 01 / SIGNALRaw video rectangle, intentionally oversizedNever clipped · never trusted to define the bezel
NATIVE WINDOWS
Two cooperating windows
Video owner below. Per-pixel transparent cabinet overlay above. Activation repairs their order.≍
BROWSER EDITION
One stacked cabinet
Video and CRT canvas below. Transparent cabinet image above. The same authored apertures survive the port.PART III / HIDDEN OPERATIONS
Ten systems.
Open only what interests you.
The details are intentionally collapsed. The page stays calm; the depth is still here when an engineer, curator, or curious visitor asks for it.01Theme aperture geometryA 1536 × 1024 authored canvas, one source rectangle, and a 3% safety overshoot.+
Every cabinet carries its own aperture coordinates. CableBox finds the center, expands width and height by 3%, then scales the result with the cabinet. The video extends roughly 1.5% beyond every edge so resize, DPI, and sub-pixel movement cannot expose a black ring.
02Baked mask pipelineSegmentation happens before release; runtime only draws approved transparent artwork.+
A box-prompted segmentation pass produces the aperture, a single feather pass softens the edge, and a fill-ratio audit rejects accidental rectangles. The shipped themes therefore carry their screen shapes inside the PNG rather than recomputing them on each machine.
03Five-layer CRT rendererGamma, scanlines, phosphor, halation, and fitted glass form one picture system.+
The locked baseline lifts midtones, protects highlights with a soft shoulder, warms the white point, alternates display-space scanlines, overlays restrained RGB triads, and blooms only the bright tail. The browser edition collapses the same visual logic into a WebGL2 shader.
04Live-session assemblySession, guide, and stream information are assembled into a playable signal.+
The app creates a temporary live session, loads the current guide, constructs the selected stream, and renews the session when it becomes stale. The browser and native editions follow the same three-stage shape without making the visitor manage credentials or configuration.
05Curated daily dialA constrained pool, fixed movie block, favorites, anchors, and a seeded lottery.+
The dial begins with a hand-curated eligible pool, removes duplicates and blocked categories, fixes three movie positions, promotes up to three favorites, seats cultural anchors, then fills the remaining slots with a daily seeded shuffle. The same day stays recognizable; tomorrow changes.
06Warm-boot cacheA ten-minute memory of the last healthy channel saves roughly two seconds.+
After a verified playing event, CableBox records the channel and current stream state. A fresh entry can start immediately while the guide refreshes in parallel. If a frame does not arrive inside the watchdog window, the cache is discarded and normal boot resumes.
07Recovery state machineTerminal errors, silent freezes, and never-locked tunes produce different recovery actions.+
A one-second watchdog watches playback state, frame-time movement, and tune lock. CableBox can request a fresh session, replay the current channel, advance the dial, or bridge a prolonged failure with an in-world local break instead of exposing a blank software screen.
08Museum modeThe cabinet yields to a two-screen exhibit while mute remains a hard invariant.+
Museum mode suppresses the normal cabinet stack, reveals two separately authored exhibit apertures, and reasserts mute whenever playback changes state. It is not a modal dialog; it is another physical scene inside the object.
09Window compositionTwo native windows move together, share lock state, and continually repair their z-order.+
The video owner and transparent cabinet overlay are independent top-level windows. Fullscreen or operator lock moves every participating window into the same topmost band, while activation reasserts the cabinet above its own video. Native DWM corners replace aliased hand-cut regions.
10Instrumentation + ship guardrailsSix investigation modes, frozen assets, idempotent packaging, and a receipt chain.+
Smoke, stress, engine, aperture, museum, and dial-coverage harnesses expose specific failure surfaces. Frozen release trees are hash-checked before packaging, packagers are re-runnable, and every meaningful ship event is recorded in an append-only operational ledger.
PART IV / MEASUREMENTS
Proof before preference.
The final engine, cache, and recovery decisions are tied to bounded runs on the target machine.MEDIAN FIRST FRAME241 msSHIPPING ENGINE / N=128
ALTERNATIVE ENGINE2,620 msSAME CHANNEL SET / N=128
MEASURED ADVANTAGE10.9×MEDIAN / TARGET HARDWARE
| Engine | Mean | P50 | P99 | Stalls | Errors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LibVLC | 375 ms | 241 ms | 1,437 ms | 0 | 0 |
| libmpv | 2,695 ms | 2,620 ms | 3,927 ms | 0 | 0 |
Normal warm path to first live frame on the target N150 system.
Last healthy channel begins while the current guide refreshes in parallel.
Measured recovery latency in the last bounded stress-harness run.
Five channels across the recorded stress window.
PART V / OPERATIONS
The release can
explain itself.
Every important visual or playback surface has a bounded way to inspect it. The public source manual carries the complete file map, variables, flags, key parity, and receipt sequence.Investigation harnesses
--smokeGuide and first-frame liveness--stressUptime, rapid switching, recovery--engine-shootoutPlayback engine measurement--aperture-debugEvery cabinet rendered offline--museum-previewExhibit proof render--dial-coverageSixty-day rotation simulation
Key source surfaces
MainForm.csDial state, boot, watchdog, inputTvShellOverlayForm.csCabinet overlay + CRT paintDialChannelBuilder.csAnchors, lottery, favoritesPlutoGuideClient.csLive session + guide clientLastChannelCache.csTen-minute warm pathwebapp/src/main.jsBrowser orchestration + aperturewebapp/src/dial.jsBrowser dial paritywebapp/src/crt.jsWebGL2 CRT shader
Frozen baseline
Approved native and browser trees are hash-anchored before packaging.
Idempotent packagers
The release scripts can rebuild the same package without a manual maze.
Receipt chain
Meaningful ship events join an append-only operational ledger.