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Open letter to SHADOW SAS

Alexandre ARNOUD

• 2 min read
Open letter to SHADOW SAS

Shadow Ghost is an amazing product made by Shadow and is due to be abandoned by the end of 2023. Based on the official communication from the Shadow support website, it's only customer support that is affected, not software maintenance but in fact there's a visible lack of man power and testing to fix remaining bugs to ensure it remains in a stable state.

This device is powered by the RK3399 / Mali T860 MP4 chip which is perfectly capable of running Shadow for many years and with upstream kernel changes / mesa; even if Shadow relies on Rockchip MPP software stack which is bound to the vendors kernel, improvements could be done here or research put into possible decoding stack alternatives.

What does that mean ?

It means that Ghost device is being left in an unstable state with increasing issues with no visible improvement on the Linux ARM64 app to support a possible migration to a minimal desktop experience on a still maintained application.

Supporting RPi4+ is great but very limited compared to Ghost or even third-party modern ARM64 Mali based hardware.

I've reached a point, even as a strong supporter and contributor of the product to need to post this message before this perfectly capable device may end-up as more e-waste.

Identified Issues

  • Tearing after idle timer (this is linked to refresh rate being set to minimal refresh rate the local screen can support)
  • No proper handling of the Shadow slot queue (unbranded legacy launcher)
  • No IPv6 support (related to L2TP LanOverIP feature and USB3.0 USBoverIP legacy IPv4 only scripts, the streaming client works properly in IPv6)
  • No LanOverIP (L2TP) over wifi
  • Can't start streaming if IPv6 hasn’t been disabled with LanOverIP feature enabled
  • Refresh rate issue at boot time (Ex: 60Hz instead of 144Hz) which requires a few reboots of the device to workaround the issue
  • No splash screen for some users
  • Cached configuration issues
  • Returning to launcher doesn't properly reconfigure back resolution and refresh rate to native screen EDID configuration, leading to issues if starting the stream again
  • Can't use extra-screen feature with other devices, apart from Ghost / ShadowBox, as they’re not on the same branch
  • Branch Freeze without any option for the user to choose his fate and forcing updates each time any other devices/apps is used
  • [LATEST] USB 3.0 (USBoverIP feature) issues (errors in device manager since latest virtualisation stack update; the workaround is to plug keyboard and mouse in USB2.0 and disable ICH9 USB controller and enable it again

Feature Parity

  • [Minor] No branded launcher
  • [Critical] No QuickMenu or Alternative to help users diagnose issues

Now Shadow, what can you do about it ?

  • Fix the issues
  • Provide a way for users to fix the issues, make evolutions and improvements (OpenSource or NDA some community members willing to help) which could benefit the Shadow Linux app too
  • Provide MPP/Wayland support based on ARM64 Raspberry Linux client
  • Contact me to talk about it; most of your staff knows where to find me, maybe even support some of my side projects related to Shadow :)