MeowChan 1.0.2 — reliable startup, downloads and viewing

What improves

• Improved media features. Usually open your downloads in VLC or a separate image viewer? Try the gallery for images, GIFs, WebM and MP4, with remembered looping, media focus and mixed slideshows. Feedback from gooners and /gif/ power users is especially welcome.
• Remembered viewing choices. Repeat, media focus and layout survive restart. Manual, Repeat and mixed Slideshow keep looping separate from navigation. Slideshow starts explicitly, never just because its mode was saved; images use their display period and videos advance at their actual end. GIFs animate with pause/resume and zoom.
• More predictable controls. Autoplay governs first/manual video playback without starting automatic next. Seeking, volume and panel interaction preserve play/pause intent. Paired overlay/auto-hide reveals controls at the bottom edge and post context at the right, with brief borderless chevrons and a docked fallback. Hidden controls do not consume the first navigation key. After video-to-image transitions, the first arrow also navigates when native focus is briefly empty instead of moving focus to unrelated shell controls; text fields and native dialogs retain their own keys.
• Safer native viewing and reading. Windows overlay clipping and stop/close handling are tightened. Moving controls between the video overlay and the main window now drains pending layout work in the old window before reattaching them, preventing the native LayoutManager crash when switching overlay/docked controls. The separate video overlay is hidden on image/Reader transitions. macOS fullscreen restoration preserves observed entry frames while respecting new user resizes. The narrow Reader keeps its full height, last posts remain reachable, and pagination no longer intercepts gallery clicks. Reading post context stops automatic navigation until explicitly restarted, not the video itself.
• Less disruptive errors. Gallery errors use central, dismissible feedback rather than pinning transport controls. Acknowledgement suppresses matching session repeats without deleting diagnostics; integrity, codec and cleanup failures still fail closed.
• No bundled-plugin confirmation loop after a compatible rebuild. Known, verified in-place app/development rebuilds—including dotnet run and a proven new selection rebuilt before its first activation—retain exact settings, enabled/disabled choices and rollback history without another confirmation/restart cycle. Missing provenance, changed declarations, pins, special rights and ambiguous candidates remain protected. General live activation of explicitly changed plugin selections still requires restart.
• Dependable startup and downloads. Preference saves wait for readiness and preserve newer field changes. Known local titles return after restart, with a cleaned opening-post fallback when needed. Startup resumes only after proven initial admission that sent no request; genuine HTTP, body and transport failures retain their history.
• Bounded scheduling. Defaults stay 1 MiB/s and 5 parallel transfers, with 256 pending jobs. Effective concurrency is capped at 32, without rewriting larger saved settings. Multiple High watches fairly share next whole-file slots; under contention, Normal gets a slot after at most three High reservations. Priority does not interrupt active files or resume paused watches. This is not a universal throughput promise.

No new Chans/sources or unselected CSV extras are included.

Downloads

All desktop variants include .NET. Choose the package for your platform.

SHA256 checksums · Original CI inventory

Linux system-VLC archives require compatible LibVLC 3 ≥ 3.0.20 plus media/output plugins. The bundled-VLC variants include the private runtime.

Download folders

• Windows: extract the complete Windows x64 ZIP and start MeowChan.exe.
• macOS: Apple Silicon and Intel DMGs; ad-hoc signed, not notarized.
• Linux: x64/ARM64 AppImages and bundled/system-VLC tar alternatives.
• Sources: exact application tag archives and corresponding third-party video sources. The shared 0.9.0 source base is still required despite its older filename.
• SDK: library, Plugin SDK and Plugin Host NuGet packages.

Upgrade safely

Stop the application and back up your entire profile and referenced media before upgrading. Plugin-state snapshots are not full-profile backups.

For missing old bundled-plugin candidates, open Plugins → review → NEW selection → preview → explicit confirmation → restart. Select only supported, unambiguous currently delivered bundles and confirm their exact schema-valid settings. This is a new choice, not recovery of an unproven former origin or silent name/path remapping. Pins, rights/owner conflicts and ambiguous or unsupported rows still require your own action; attribution, pins, grants and ownership are not transferred.

Two safeguards remain distinct: the immutable original valid pre-v2 plugin-state backup, made before its first mutation, and a retained backup of the actual current state before the first confirmed new selection. The former does not replace the latter; later selections do not refresh that first snapshot. An already-v2 profile cannot manufacture missing v1 history.

Older executables cannot read the v2 plugin envelope. Do not downgrade against the upgraded profile. Revert using a separate full-profile backup compatible with the older version; changes since that backup are not automatically retained.

Validation boundaries

Release packages are bound to one exact-source stable-candidate / all / all run, with all 13 required jobs, 18 original same-run assets, and verification of source identity, upgrade/package evidence, inventory and checksums. The accepted source and run are recorded below under Build provenance. Public download hashes are checked separately after publication; focused checks and assets from earlier runs are not mixed into this release.

Decoded audio without output and functional native output are different checks. Neither proves audible physical-speaker output, every GPU/audio device, physical Windows/USB behavior or everyday-use acceptance. The manual Windows field test follows publication, without waiving pre-publication technical gates; bounded follow-up fixes may use 1.0.3.

See the user guide and platform requirements.

Build provenance

Source: eec6c0169f8d52f7481ea0bf7febfd20981e97c3. Successful stable-candidate / all / all run.

The unchanged candidate-inventory.json records original CI filenames. File bytes match the GitHub release; this mirror groups the downloads by platform. SHA256SUMS uses paths relative to this release directory and additionally covers the two application source archives, whose contents were checked against every Git blob of the accepted release commit. Automated runner checks do not establish physical Windows/USB or everyday-use acceptance.