Stb-tester Blog

Stb-tester news, product announcements & testing topics.

Tags: Announcements × All Tags

04 Mar 2024.

Celebrating 10 years of Stb-tester

Last December our company turned 10 years old. Since founding our company 10 years ago, we have grown from a services-focused company in the first 2 years, to a primarily product-based company since 2016 with uninterrupted year-on-year sales growth and customers in 4 continents. In 2023 we had our best year yet, with sales up 50% compared to the previous year, and headcount up 25%. Read more...

29 Feb 2024.

Stb-tester's new "Smart Navigation" functions

Today we have released Stb-tester’s new “Smart Navigation” functions stbt.navigate_1d and stbt.navigate_grid. These functions will autonomously navigate your application’s UI, learning the structure of your menus to speed up future invocations. These are the first of many Machine Learning / AI features on Stb-tester’s roadmap; we think you’ll agree that these new APIs will greatly simplify and speed up your test development. Read more...

19 Jul 2023.

Stb-tester adds support for TP-Link "Kasa" smart plugs

Stb-tester now supports the TP-Link “Kasa” brand of smart plugs. This rounds out Stb-tester’s already impressive support for a wide range of network-controlled Power Distribution Unit (PDU) models from ATEN, Aviosys, Lindy, PDUeX, and Rittal, which allows you to power-cycle the device-under-test from your test scripts. Read more...

14 Jun 2023.

Stb-tester v34 released: Better motion detection, pytest, and more

Version 34 of Stb-tester’s “stbt” Python API is now available. This release makes important improvements to the motion-detection algorithm of stbt.wait_for_motion and stbt.press_and_wait, born from our personal experience of writing & maintaining tests for Apple TV, DirecTV, Fire TV, Sky, and Xfinity devices over the last 4 years. Read more...

08 Nov 2022.

New features in v33: BDD support

With the pytest support introduced in Stb-tester v33, you can use pytest-bdd to run Stb-tester from BDD specifications (also known as “Gherkin” syntax, or “Given/When/Then” acceptance criteria). Read more...

03 Nov 2022.

New features in v33: Pytest support

Stb-tester v33 supports running your tests with pytest, a popular Python test-runner. Pytest provides powerful functionality such as assertion introspection and fixtures. Read more...

14 Feb 2022.

Lint checks in pull requests

When you push a git commit, Stb-tester uses any idle Node in your test-farm to run a “lint” check using Pylint to catch common mistakes in your code before you even run a test. Read more...

13 Dec 2021.

New user role: Manual control only

The "manual control" role allows users to control devices-under-test remotely, and see live video from the devices, without access to the test scripts in the test-pack git repository. This allows you to grant access to a third party without letting them see the test scripts you have developed which are your own intellectual property. Read more...

01 Oct 2021.

SSL errors accessing Stb-tester REST API from RHEL/CentOS 7

If you started getting errors today when accessing the REST API on your Stb-tester Portal (either directly using curl or python requests, or using our stbt_rig.py command-line tool) then read on for the solution. Read more...

07 Sep 2021.

New features: Prometheus/Grafana integration; Bluetooth & RF4CE support; interactive log viewer

2021 has been a busy year for us, with major new features implemented to support specific customers’ requirements: Prometheus and Grafana dashboards for logging and reporting performance measurements and other real-time metrics; support for some Bluetooth and RF4CE remote controls via RedRat-X hardware; an interactive log viewer with frame-accurate synchronisation between each log line and the video recording of the test-run; and a new test-farm administration page. Read more...

24 Dec 2020.

Better latency in Stb-tester's live video (goodbye Flash, hello WebRTC)

The Stb-tester Portal shows live video from the device-under-test, right in your web browser. Previously, this video was streamed from your Stb-tester Nodes using RTMP (Flash’s video-streaming protocol). With our latest firmware release, Stb-tester Nodes now stream this live audio & video using WebRTC – the W3C standard protocol for low-latency, real-time communication. WebRTC allowed us to achieve much better latency when you are interacting manually with your device-under-test via the Stb-tester Portal. Read more...

02 Oct 2020.

Stb-tester v32 released: Better on-screen keyboard support, new API to find selections, and more.

Version 32 of the stb-tester core Python API is now available. We have re-architected stbt.Keyboard to easily test on-screen keyboards with multiple modes (such as lowercase, uppercase, and symbols modes). We have added a powerful new API called stbt.find_selection_from_background to easily detect the position of a “selection” or “highlight” on the screen. We have sped up stbt.ocr hugely by caching previous results for identical inputs — so now you can use OCR more freely in navigation code without worrying about slowing down your test scripts. Read more...

06 Feb 2020.

Announcing Stb-tester integration with GitHub Enterprise

Stb-tester now provides tight integration with your organisation’s own GitHub Enterprise instance. Read more...

19 Sep 2019.

Stb-tester v31 released: Python 3 support! On-screen-keyboard navigation! And more!

Version 31 of the Stb-tester core Python API is available, with support for test-scripts written in Python 3 (Python 2 is still supported, too). Read more...

25 Feb 2019.

Stb-tester v30 released: Transparency support, Ubuntu 18.04 and more!

Version 30 of the stb-tester core Python API is available. stbt.match now supports transparency: Transparent pixels in the reference image will be ignored when looking for a match within the video-frame. This is a huge usability improvement when looking for buttons, selections/highlights, and similar outlines that have dynamic content or non-rectangular shapes. Read more...

21 Aug 2018.

Meet Stb-tester at IBC 2018

The Stb-tester team will be at the IBC tradeshow in Amsterdam 14-18 September 2018. Read more...

22 Jun 2018.

Stb-tester v29 released: Audio support and more!

Version 29 of the stb-tester core Python API is now available. This is a significant release with major new APIs for testing audio. Read more...

23 Mar 2018.

Announcing Stb-tester integration with Atlassian Bamboo CI Server

The Stb-tester Platform now supports Atlassian's Bamboo Server for Continuous Integration (CI). Many of our customers already use Bamboo for continuous integration, deployment, and delivery. Now, it will only take a few minutes to get your Stb-tester end-to-end tests running from your Bamboo jobs. Read more...

06 Feb 2018.

Stb-tester v28 released: Multi-threading support, better OCR, better video recordings

Version 28 of the stb-tester core Python API is now available. Read more...

17 Jan 2018.

Announcing the Stb-tester Cloud Platform

Stb-tester’s cloud-based portal centralizes your test results and dashboards. It allows remote testing and live monitoring from anywhere in the world — your devices can be spread across multiple network locations, and your test team can be remote too. Read more...

18 Dec 2015.

New case study: stb-tester.com supports YouView’s launch on Sony Bravia TVs

In November 2015 YouView launched on a range of Sony Bravia televisions across the UK. The biggest technical challenges of the project were in the integration, with frequent releases from YouView, Sony, MediaTek, and Google. Read more...