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jarnedemeulemeester
Android TV
Hi,
I know you are planning ATV. Do you have any idea when this will be at lease on Schedule ? That original app is pain..
thx
I came to ask the same thing. I really can't stand the official Android tv app
To be honest, I don't care about Android phone app, Android TV app is all I need.
I am reworking the phone variant to compose. While I'm doing that I'm also bringing the TV version in line with the phone version. So progress is being made.
I expect to release the updated phone version in a month or so (hopefully sooner). When that's out I will take a look at what the blockers are for the TV version.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
It's been a while since I've used it. I mainly hated the way the libraries are layed out. The poster wall with no space between the media items is really unpleasant. I'll have to spin it up again to remember the specifics. Hopefully someone else can chime in too
I am reworking the phone variant to compose. While I'm doing that I'm also bringing the TV version in line with the phone version. So progress is being made.
I expect to release the updated phone version in a month or so (hopefully sooner). When that's out I will take a look at what the blockers are for the TV version.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
For me problem is for example how favorites work, search and own playlists are missing completely..
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
Main 3 things for me is:
- Layout of movies and series, there is just one option, which is not nice, just a big wall of posters. Coming from Kodi I had lots of ways to present the overview. I personally prefer to have a list of series/movies that I scroll through.
- Fast forward during playback. At the moment I still use Kodi as frontend for Jellyfin, just because I can fast forward in a movie. I have not seen this yet in any other client. Most offer the option to skip 5sec or 10 sec, but none offer a smooth fastforward like Kodi does.
- Be able to change the offset of subtitles while playing.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
The main issue with the official Android TV app is that it cannot direct play a large amount of media formats, so everything has to be transcoded. With mpv in this project everything just works without transcoding (well, everything but navigation etc.. in the tv version, but it is still a work in progress so totally understandable). The older version (glad I never updated my server) had libvlc, so this was not an issue but now if you have 10 bit x265 or ass/ssa subtitles or any number of audio formats you have to transcode. You would think that being able to play media would be a main focus of a media player, but with jellyfin-androidtv this is simpy not the case. The reason for removing libvlc was also nonsense (the 2 reasons given were that it was not being updated and that it was too hard to maintain, which are logically conflicting statements (nothing new to maintain)). Exoplayer is garbage and is not going to be getting better any time soon (and is also largely hardware dependent). So, findroid is basically our last hope at a working android tv client going forward unless they add back in an alternate player in the official client.
After the rewrite and the android tv implementation, I will be happy to test the implementation and look for any bugs that may exist (I have a vm for the newer version of the server and android studio ready to compile if the need arises). Anyway, thanks for all the hard work and looking forward to any future releases (if/when you have free time to work on it). That's my opinion of what is bad about the official app for better or worse.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
In addition to the layout is not beautiful enough and decoding problems, the most unaccustomed point is that after adjusting the playback progress with the left and right keys, you must press the confirm key again to play.
Hi @jarnedemeulemeester, any updates on this? Really looking forward to it.
I am reworking the phone variant to compose. While I'm doing that I'm also bringing the TV version in line with the phone version. So progress is being made.
I expect to release the updated phone version in a month or so (hopefully sooner). When that's out I will take a look at what the blockers are for the TV version.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
for me the problem of the jellyfin TV app is that It cannot use hardware decoding to play videos. I'm using Zidoo Z9x 8K.
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
There are a lot of playback problems, which they seem to be aware of considering they've spent years rewriting the playback code (see this issue: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/issues/1057). Using external players solves the playback issues for me but they're not seamlessly integrated into the app, making them awkward to use.
I'm not 100% sure your app would solve my issues, but considering you've integrated mpv I think the chances are high (and from the little testing I've done on my Android phone it's very nicely integrated too, well done!).
So put me in the list of people looking forward to an Android TV release. :)
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app? I have not tried it myself.
Also playback issues here. I have just started using Jellyfin and my primary use case is playback on Android tv. But I find that many of my movie files can't be played without transcoding, even though the tv hardware is perfectly capable of doing so. I'm currently evaluating the Kodi integration, which plays everything but is quite slow and a pain to setup. So really looking forward to this, I hope you can find the time!
Agreed, I have issues with 7.1 audio specifically, I'd love Findroid on Android/Google TV
Hey, so for all you guys commenting with regard to playback issues: Know that I actually don't have any of these issues currently because I still use libvlc. In order to not get these issues you just have to use the older version of the client/software. For server/applications I use:
jellyfin-server 10.8.13-1
jellyfin-web 10.8.13-1
jellyfin-ffmpeg5 5.1.4-3 - (newer jellyfin-ffmpeg may be compatible?)
and androidtv client version:
jellyfin-androidtv 0.16.6 (one of the last versions with libvlc, plays everything fine (10bit x265 hevc, ass/ssa subtitles, etc... (for srt external files are better)))
and plugin:
Intro Skipper 0.1.18.0 (may be a bit hard to find, works fine though for intros and credits)
Until we get a new working client, this works for me in the meantime. Hope that helps anyone else while we wait for better client support in the future. I know this is not a real solution for the future, but for now at least I can watch my shows without transcoding.
Hey, so for all you guys commenting with regard to playback issues: Know that I actually don't have any of these issues currently because I still use libvlc. In order to not get these issues you just have to use the older version of the client/software. For server/applications I use:
jellyfin-server 10.8.13-1 jellyfin-web 10.8.13-1 jellyfin-ffmpeg5 5.1.4-3 - (newer jellyfin-ffmpeg may be compatible?)and androidtv client version:
jellyfin-androidtv 0.16.6 (one of the last versions with libvlc, plays everything fine (10bit x265 hevc, ass/ssa subtitles, etc... (for srt external files are better)))and plugin:
Intro Skipper 0.1.18.0 (may be a bit hard to find, works fine though for intros and credits)Until we get a new working client, this works for me in the meantime. Hope that helps anyone else while we wait for better client support in the future. I know this is not a real solution for the future, but for now at least I can watch my shows without transcoding.
Yep, works with older client & server versions. But libVLC doesn't allow subtitle customization. We'd be stuck with the rather large default font size & style. And I believe libVLC is deprecated. That's why they removed it in newer version
The android tv client is visually really messy and hard to navigate, especially searching for content, and it struggles to play back a lot of my media without transcoding. Kodi works in a pinch but the UI is really bad and hard to understand for those less technically minded in my family. Really hoping for findroid on android tv as well.
Has anybody tried to sideload it on their telly?
I do want to ask, what exactly is so "bad" about the official Jellyfin TV app?
It's not bad...it is just not optimal. It is slowly getting better but I feel like a single native app would be much better than the 2 official apps and it needs to have the following, which the official Android TV app is missing.
- Library view customization
- Optional mpv support along with media3/exoplayer (so we don't have to use Kodi with Jellycon anymore)
- More subtitle options like making subs bold, moving subs, etc
- Better fast forwarding support
- UI modernization
- Speed improvements by modernizing the codebase.
Until we get a new working client, this works for me in the meantime. Hope that helps anyone else while we wait for better client support in the future. I know this is not a real solution for the future, but for now at least I can watch my shows without transcoding.
@adarshv90 Your "solution" is not ideal because it involves using all that old software. It would be easier for you to just use Kodi with Jellycon to decode all your videos until Findroid comes out.
Sync play missing on android TV is a big thing for me. It's available on the mobile android client, web browser, jellyfin media player and the custom compiled version for tizen os. However, the official jellyfin android TV version is missing Syncplay.
The android tv client is visually really messy and hard to navigate, especially searching for content, and it struggles to play back a lot of my media without transcoding. Kodi works in a pinch but the UI is really bad and hard to understand for those less technically minded in my family. Really hoping for findroid on android tv as well.
Has anybody tried to sideload it on their telly?
i did, seem to work until you play a video then it just don't want to, thats where something is blocking in the findroid code
i also agree, currently the official jellyfin android app is horrible, ever since they remove libvlc, its been wonky/unstable/transcoding on subs even when mpv works fine with it
i really hope findroid gets android tv support soon
The android tv client is visually really messy and hard to navigate, especially searching for content, and it struggles to play back a lot of my media without transcoding. Kodi works in a pinch but the UI is really bad and hard to understand for those less technically minded in my family. Really hoping for findroid on android tv as well.
Has anybody tried to sideload it on their telly?
I did sideload it on an Xiaomi TV Box S (3rd Gen), and it works well. After sideloading, it will not show in the apps menu (I think nothing sideloaded will show by default, or maybe only non-tv apps will not show), you need to generate some APK that will work like a shortcut for the Findroid app. I used this site to generate the shortcut https://atvlauncher.trekgonewild.de/index.php
Also this is a device issue, but I was expecting the arm64-v8a version to work but it didn't. Only armeabi-v7a worked on Xiaomi TV Box S (3rd Gen) - or maybe I am wrong about this?
The only (slight) issues I have are:
- The UI selection is hard to notice, when the selection is on buttons it's even harder to notice.
- When selecting media, the cursor jumps back on the "Home" button (instead of jumping on the "Play" button), and this issue combined with first issue, the user will press the "Home" button by mistake when they want to play media.
- After you start playing something, on mobile if you want to hide the UI you just tap the screen. But on TV with the remote you can't fast hide the UI, you have to wait a few seconds while the media still plays so you have to rewind back like 4-5 seconds and wait for the menu to hide. It would be useful if the "back" button on remote could hide the UI, but right now it will exit from the player back to the media info.
But the app works better than the official one. I'm hosting my server on a Raspberry Pi 4 so all transcoding is off. The issue I have with the official Jellyfin Android TV client is actually the subtitles. Some of them are .ASS and I think the official client doesnt play well with all .ASS subtitles, it will just restart the episode/movie if I select unsupported subtitle. And also on some media, in the subtitle selection menu some subtitles are unmatched. What I mean is like it shows "English - ASS" then "Romanian - SUBRIP" and if I select "Romanian" it will play the english subtitle, and if I select the English subtitle it will restart the player. I double checked on the Jellyfin Media Player app on Windows, and the "Romanian - SUBRIP" it's actually romanian and not english, the client just messes up something. This weird issues with unmatched subtitles are also present in their other Swiftfin client (maybe it's just a coincidence).
So basically, the sideloaded Findroid app works better than I expected. Only minor tweaks and it will make it the best Android TV client for Jellyfin. I'm really impressed by this dev.
A major missing feature for me on the official Android TV app is the ability to trust additional CA certificates (self-signed otherwise), it would be great if Findroid could add this for Android TV.
Most Android TV device implementations do not permit adding additional trusted CAs to the system trust store (probably because TV/device vendors don't want users intercepting SSL traffic), and the Jellyfin devs have indicated that they do not plan to add support for this at the app level: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/issues/4231 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/issues/4636 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/issues/3385
This would be a big help for homelab users (those of us that are security nuts, at least) that run their own CAs or use self-signed certs, as the official app is basically unusable in this configuration on most devices.
Is there any progress pls ? @jarnedemeulemeester
It seems to me atv is most wanted feature :)
The worst thing you can do if you want an open source project to add a feature is to repeatedly ping them about it
The worst thing you can do if you want an open source project to add a feature is to repeatedly ping them about it
No, the worst thing you can do is zero communication back to waiting users when this enhancement was promised in February. Even Open source has some rules and if users start using product and support that i don't think to ping creator is something i should be punished or jell for.
I do have maximum respect to developer, but more info about the progress is something what won't harm to anyone. I won't be writing any comments anymore.