Kyber 0.26!

Kyber 0.26 is out.

This release notably brings OIDC authentication support, major encoding improvements, clipboard improvements across platforms, new grabbing backends on Linux, and a long list of stability fixes throughout the desktop stack.

Here are the highlights.

OIDC support

Kyber now supports OpenID Connect (OIDC) for authentication, available in both kycontroller and the desktop client. You can integrate Kyber into your existing identity provider setup, whether that's Keycloak, Auth0, Authelia, or any other standards-compliant SSO system.

This is a big step for organisations running Kyber in multi-user or enterprise environments, where centralised identity management is a hard requirement.

Clipboard improvements

Clipboard handling takes a significant step forward in this release. Linux X11 hosts now support clipboard sharing, and Windows adds full HTML clipboard support alongside the plain-text clipboard introduced earlier. Rich content — styled text, links, and formatted data — can now be copied and pasted across machines on Windows just as it would locally.

Video encoding improvements

kymedia has been bumped to FFmpeg 8.1, bringing the latest codec improvements, bug fixes, and performance gains from upstream.

AMF (AMD) and VAAPI encode settings have been significantly improved, with a real impact on latency. AMD users in particular will notice the difference: encoding latency now comes close to what you would expect from Nvidia.

On Windows, kymedia/vlc now uses the standard Microsoft GUID for HEVC 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, replacing the Intel-specific one. This targets a broader range of hardware devices and is more reliable in practice.

New screen capture backends on Linux

kymedia gains two new grab_backend options: xcb and wlroots. Linux users now have native capture support for both the X11 and wlroots (Wayland) ecosystems, expanding compatibility with different desktop environments.

WebSocket controller now uses kycom

controller/ws now uses kycom to interact with kyavserver and kynput, replacing the previous direct communication approach. This makes it consistent with the rest of the stack.

Stability fixes

Several fixes address edge cases that could cause crashes, restart loops, or confusing failure modes:

kycontroller/win32 : Tray icon initialization is now non-fatal. Kyber recovers gracefully when the TaskbarCreated message is received, so it works correctly even when Explorer restarts or the taskbar is slow to appear.

kyservice/win32 : The service no longer loops indefinitely when it encounters an invalid configuration.

kycontroller : The tray client count now updates correctly when a session times out.

kycontroller : The watchdog is now optional.

kycontroller : The RTP backend has been fixed. It had silently stopped working after IPv6 support was added in 0.25.0.

Scancode conversion helpers now exported on all platforms

kynput now exports scancode conversion helpers for all platforms. This is useful for integrators who need consistent scancode handling regardless of the target OS.

Web: new branding and AV player refactor

The web UI ships with the new Kyber branding. On the kyctl side, AV players have been extracted into separate crates, making the codebase easier to maintain and extend going forward.

Upgrade

Kyber 0.26 is available now. Head to the downloads page to get the latest version, or pull the updated packages through your usual channel.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome.