A player whose predecessor had not released the shared native channel
within three seconds skipped its own native dispose and chained its
release onto that predecessor. If the predecessor's teardown never
completed - one hung 4K session was enough - every later player waited
on the chain, failed to initialize, and playback stayed broken with
"Playback could not be started" until the app was killed.
Initialize and dispose now carry the creating instance's token. The
Android plugins remember which token created the current core and
acknowledge a dispose from any other token without touching the core,
so a dispose that lost the ownership race is provably stale and safe to
send. With that guard, a timed-out ownership wait force-disposes
instead of skipping, settles its release unchained, and frees the
channel for the next session; a dispose watchdog answers Dart even if
a native teardown hangs, leaking that one core instead of wedging all
future playback. Commands wait eight seconds (was three) so a slow but
healthy teardown delays the next session instead of failing it.
Verified on a Shield Pro: 38 back-to-back session races at 0.8-2.2s
gaps with zero failures and balanced teardowns, and a deep-link-over-
playback collision whose stale dispose is ignored, after which Back
returns to the still-playing session and Retry starts the new one.
Apple and desktop handlers ignore the token and keep the historical
skip semantics until they gain the guard.
The in-app FFmpeg container demuxer classified every DTS variant as
plain DTS (profile-blind MIME mapping at the demux boundary), so
DTS-HD MA lost its lossless identity downstream, and it ignored
container display-aspect-ratio overrides. media3's extractors get both
right.
Delete the FFmpeg demuxer (JNI, extractor, and its setting); ExoPlayer
direct play demuxes with media3's DefaultExtractorsFactory again, and
mpv - the Android default - reads container display dimensions itself.
close#2124close#2115
Android mpv drew every frame through vo=gpu: an ImageReader/GLES copy
pinned to 8-bit RGB0 with a 100 ms timed wait per frame, which
truncated 10-bit and HDR output, raced acquireLatestImage, and
performed badly on low-end TVs.
Video now scans out on a SurfaceFlinger video plane through the fork's
vo=mediacodec: decoder buffers are queued to the surface at their
target PTS (av_mediacodec_release_buffer_at_time), so 10-bit and HDR
dataspaces reach the display untouched and frame pacing no longer
depends on GL vsync. Subtitles and OSD render on a sibling transparent
surface presented for the same PTS, frame-locked by construction.
The plane takes decoder buffers only, so software-decoded video stays
on a GL vo, with a chain-failure watchdog re-initializing the output
when the plane refuses a stream mid-session. The GL fallback is vo=gpu
- gpu-next breaks the Tegra GLES linker (#2010) - and GpuVoPolicy
selects gpu-next only when Dolby Vision RPU reshaping needs
libplacebo. AV1 film grain is applied in the decoder
(vd-lavc-film-grain=cpu) because the GL raster grain fallback is not
available on this path.
Pins libmpv-android v1.1.3, which carries the fork patches this path
rides on: the vo itself, BT2020-PQ EGL window surfaces, GLES direct
rendering treated as slow (H.264 Hi10P software decode on Tegra went
from 0.3x realtime with wrong colors to 1.0x with correct 10-bit
output), and multichannel IEC61937 for ao_audiotrack.
Verified on Shield Pro (Tegra/GLES), Pixel 7 (Mali), Box R 4K Plus
(Amlogic armv7), and Galaxy Z Fold3 (Adreno): 520 play/teardown cycles
and 3 hours of continuous 4K HDR playback; HDR engagement confirmed
via SurfaceFlinger dataspace BT2020_ITU_PQ.
Non-English users saw English text in a dozen places and blank labels in
sixteen more.
The English came from sites that produce their copy away from the widget
that renders it, which is what the structural hardcoded-string check
cannot see: picture-in-picture refused with a raw literal instead of the
pipErrors.notSupported key that already existed; the two Jellyfin/Emby
auth throws missing display: rendered their developer message on the
add-server form; ServerParsingException.toString() fed its English into
the localized "Failed to load servers" wrapper; Watch Together
interpolated the whole PeerError, so a failed create read "Failed to
create session: PeerError(PeerErrorType.timeout): Timed out creating
session" and join printed its prefix twice; the hub and playlist
continuation footers rendered exception.toString(); shader rows showed an
English title over an already translated subtitle; the player queue fell
back to the raw Dart enum name; a Plex home user with no title showed
"Unknown"; a failed player start showed "Exception: Failed to initialize
player"; and the tvOS top-shelf header was hardcoded in an extension that
has no Flutter engine.
The blanks came from three recent features that added English keys
without translations. clean_translations.py filled all 21 siblings with
empty strings, so the Android TV resolution switch, every Jellyfin/Emby
recording-rule field, the demuxer row, the Companion Remote address
caption and the Seerr blocklist pill rendered nothing at all.
Two fixes are structural rather than key swaps. ContinuationStatusSliver
now takes an errorContext and calls a new non-logging
localizedLoadErrorText, so no future throw can leak through it. lib/mpv
stays free of user-facing copy: it raises a PlayerInitializationException
sentinel and a PlayerError.playerInitFailed cause tag that the player
screen resolves to localized text. The tvOS section title travels in the
shelf payload, additively, so an older cache still renders.
Sub-4K content on a 4K TV was always upscaled by the playback device, so the TV's own (usually better) upscaler never received the native signal and could not apply resolution-specific processing.
Adds a Match Content Resolution setting on Android TV: playback picks the smallest display mode that still contains the video — never downscaling it — and rate-matches within that resolution when frame rate matching is also enabled. A resolution-only switch keeps the refresh rate as close to the current one as possible, and the settle watchdog now verifies the requested mode id so such switches still trigger the Android MPV decoder refresh. Transcodes get their target from decoded dimensions on the post-first-frame path. Mode selection is extracted into a pure, JVM-tested DisplayModeSelector.
close#2073
The Auto demuxer mode routed only media3's weak container families
(AVI, ASF/WMV, MPEG-PS, Matroska/WebM) through FFmpeg and kept MP4/TS
on media3's extractors, with a second any-container FFmpeg instance
behind media3's list. With the goal of fully switching to the ffmpeg
demuxer, the split served no purpose and the catch-all could never add
coverage once the primary accepts everything.
Collapse the preference to two modes: FFmpeg (default), which demuxes
every progressive container ahead of media3's list, and media3 only as
the user-facing escape hatch in case a file misbehaves. media3's
extractors stay behind FFmpeg, so anything FFmpeg cannot sniff still
reaches them. The catch-all role and the Auto container list are
removed; unknown persisted wire values (including the retired "auto")
resolve to FFmpeg.
Verified on a Pixel 7: MP4, TS, and MKV all demux through FFmpeg under
the default ("sniff accepted mov,mp4 / mpegts / matroska,webm") with
forward and backward seeks landing; JVM suites and analyzer pass.
Direct play on Android kept accumulating container patches: AVI with
XviD packed-bitstream timestamps and missing VOL csd played broken,
ASF/WMV and MPEG-PS/VOB had no media3 extractor at all, and MKV needed
a custom extractor stack for zlib-compressed subtitles, LOAS/LATM
audio, cueless seeking, and font attachments.
Demux progressive containers with libavformat behind media3's
extractor API. An AVIO bridge serves libavformat from the
ExtractorInput: every position divergence defers into a RESULT_SEEK
round trip, header reads replay from a block cache while
avformat_open_input restarts, and avformat_seek_file executes seeks
with bounded loader round trips. Packets feed media3's TrackOutputs,
so decoders, passthrough carriers, Dolby Vision RPU/EL conversion
(dvh1 codecs string surfaced from DOVI side data), and the subtitle
pipeline are untouched: embedded fonts feed AssHandler over JNI, ASS
reaches libass as per-sample dialogue, SRT/VTT render as cues, VobSub
maps through media3's VobsubParser, and LOAS/LATM AAC unwraps via
LatmTrackOutput.
Under the default Auto preference FFmpeg demuxes AVI, ASF/WMV,
MPEG-PS, and Matroska/WebM and sits behind media3's list as an
any-container fallback; MP4/TS keep media3's extractors. A playback
setting exposes auto / FFmpeg first / media3 only, and the JNI
load-failure path falls back to stock media3. The custom Matroska
extractor stack and its reflection keeps are retired.
Verified on Pixel 7 (API 36), Box R 4K Plus TV (API 34), and SHIELD
TV (API 30): instrumentation playback suites, the minified R8
reachability gate, and an on-device container matrix with forward and
backward seek landings plus visual subtitle checks.
close#2052
On the default Android ExoPlayer backend the native core never emits a speed property, so PlayerState.rate stayed at 1.0 forever: the speed sheet checkmark, keyboard speed stepping, long-press 2x restore, and media-session rate all computed from a stale 1.0. setRate now mirrors its value into state like setVolume already did.
On mpv backends, a selected --secondary-sid subtitle later in track-list order overwrote the primary selection because parsing ignored main-selection; the track sheet then badged the secondary as primary and replaced the user's primary on tap. parseTrackList now treats main-selection 0/absent as primary and 1 as the secondary selection.
PlayerAndroid.command() emulated four mpv commands ('loadfile', 'seek', 'stop', 'sub-add') that no caller ever sends through the interface, while the commands actually dispatched ('change-list', 'drop-buffers', 'sub-seek', 'screenshot') fell into the default branch and vanished. The override is now a documented no-op, which is what every dispatched command already observed.
The playback data resolve — the one network request that must land
before open() — was kicked off only after the SharedPreferences load,
the Windows display-mode sync, the music-session teardown in
claimVideo(), Player construction, and (Android/Exo) a native
setLogLevel, so none of that setup overlapped the round trip.
Move the kickoff to immediately after the settings reads; the resolve
depends only on settings and provider lookups, so display sync, player
construction, and the whole mpv property chain now hide behind the
network latency instead of preceding it.
Also remove redundant work elsewhere on the start path: memoize
PlayerAndroid.getHeapSize (asked again on every open for an immutable
device value), skip the ten subtitle-style settings reads on mpv
backends where setSubtitleStyle is a no-op, and stop navigateToVideoPlayer
awaiting SettingsService.getInstance twice per launch — the external-player
read now sits behind the supportsExternalPlayers guard.
Video on Linux went through a Flutter texture: 8-bit sRGB, which cannot carry
HDR at all, and which forced a whole-window Flutter recomposite for every video
frame. This moves it onto a wl_subsurface stacked below the Flutter surface, with
mpv rendering into an EGL window surface on it through the libmpv render API. The
subsurface is desynchronized, so video and UI now present independently.
With the plane in place HDR follows: the surface is described to the compositor
through wp_color_manager_v1 as the source's own curve and gamut - PQ or HLG,
BT.2020 - carrying whatever HDR10 static metadata the stream actually declares.
The description and the buffer it describes land on the same commit, staged and
validated before mpv is switched, so a PQ frame is never presented labelled sRGB.
A five-second watchdog bounds the one wait a compositor could otherwise leave
hanging. A session that cannot host the plane - X11, or a compositor without
wl_subcompositor - fails initialize with VIDEO_PLANE_UNSUPPORTED naming the
reason: the texture path is gone, and refusing by name beats degrading to
something the user cannot see. An SDR output, a missing capability or an 8-bit
config keep the plane and simply leave it undescribed.
The output's colour state is trusted only when it has been earned. Every landed
property step records itself as it lands; a reset or sequence that cannot
finish downgrades its result to unknown and marks the applied-output cache
untrusted until a clean apply earns it back. A plane whose output state cannot
be named is quarantined - hidden, its description withdrawn - and the
quarantine is recorded state: an unrelated visibility change cannot put a
mislabelled plane back on screen, and only a commit that resolves to a nameable
outcome lifts it. A rect collapsing to zero detaches the buffer exactly as
hiding does, a refused setVideoRect drops the Dart-side sent-rect cache so the
next layout pass retries for free, and a refused tone-mapping pick tells the
user instead of dying in a log.
NVIDIA's Wayland EGL (through at least 610.xx) offers no 10-bit unorm window
configs, so the plane takes half-float as the tier between 10-bit unorm and
8-bit, declares the whole surface opaque so the compositor never reads the
alpha those configs carry, and states GL_RGBA16F rather than a 10-bit lie.
Whether the output is in HDR is read from luminance headroom above its own
reference white rather than from the preferred transfer function, which current
KWin no longer answers PQ for; the margin is half a stop, because KWin reports
an undimmed maximum over a software-dimmed SDR white. Validated on an RTX 4090
(driver 610.57.04) under KWin 6.7.4 with locked-exposure photographs.
Who tone-maps is a user choice. The default is the compositor: photographed on a
400-nit HDR output against a PQ chart it keeps 400 -> 1000 nits monotonic and
separated where the player leg flattens them, because the player path drives
mpv's legacy vo_gpu, whose own standalone output scores the same. The gap is the
renderer, not the wiring.
The decision itself - what the source carries, what the output supports, what to
tell mpv and what to tell the compositor - lives in hdr_metadata.h, free of
Wayland and GTK so its luminance validation can be tested without a display
server. Sending an incoherent luminance set is a protocol error that disconnects
the client, so the rules are worth a unit test.
The deb, rpm and pacman packages now declare wayland-client, wayland-egl and EGL:
the plane links them directly and bundle-libs.sh deliberately never bundles them,
since they are coupled to the running compositor and GPU driver.
lib/dev/harness_main.dart is a second entrypoint for measuring this on hardware -
it drives one clip with scripted mpv properties and reports the colour state mpv
actually settled on. Nothing imports it, so it is tree-shaken out of the app.
Verified on a Steam Deck against an external 400-nit HDR display: the compositor
reports PQ / BT.2020, the connector carries HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA, and against mpv
vo=gpu-next on the same frame the shipped build sits 4.90 counts away overall -
closer to the reference HDR player than to its own SDR fallback.
Adds an "Anchor to Screen" toggle under Subtitle Styling (Android +
ExoPlayer only, default off). When enabled, the text SubtitleView is
sized to the full container instead of the letterboxed video rect, so
SRT/VTT/mov_text cues render in the black bars below widescreen video
and font size and the position setting become relative to the physical
screen height. Bitmap (PGS/VOB) and ASS/libass rendering are unchanged;
mpv already places plaintext subtitles in the margins by default.
close#1730
ExoPlayer's DefaultLoadControl was built with hard-coded durations picked from
one memory tier, so read-ahead stopped at 50s on any device reporting 2GB or
less free, with no way to raise it. On hardware where mpv cannot render at all
that ceiling is the whole buffer budget.
Playback Buffer offers Auto, Large and Extra Large. The durations are taken
from jellyfin-androidtv and jellyfin-android so the same words mean the same
thing across Jellyfin clients; Auto keeps the memory-tiered values that
shipped. Named tiers rather than a duration because a duration would be a
promise the load control cannot keep: prioritizeTimeOverSizeThresholds is
disabled, so targetBufferBytes stops the loader even below minBufferMs and the
byte cap binds first above roughly 23 Mbit/s.
The tier crosses the method channel as a string and resolves in the core,
where an unrecognised name falls back to Auto. LoadControlPolicy clamps the
resulting pair: media3 validates the ordering with Guava Preconditions, an
unconditional throw R8 does not elide, so a bad pair would be an
IllegalArgumentException out of player construction rather than a bad buffer.
The two play-start thresholds stay fixed even though the Jellyfin tiers move
them. BufferingStallPolicy.MIN_BUFFER_AHEAD_MS is a const derived from
BUFFER_FOR_PLAYBACK_AFTER_REBUFFER_MS, so a runtime value there would make the
stall watchdog indict a player that is obeying its own load control.
That leaves the byte target as a second, often smaller ceiling, and nothing
surfaced either. The resolved values now reach getStats, and the overlay's
Buffer section gains a Cache Limit row reading "120s / 128MB" next to the
buffered-ahead duration, so a tier that appears to do nothing on a
high-bitrate file explains itself.
close#1816
Tunneled playback on an AFTMM judders continuously through 23.976p direct play.
The #1802 reporter isolated it: turning off Tunneled Playback with every other
setting unchanged makes it smooth, and their log shows tunneling active for the
whole session with E-AC3 bitstreamed and the decoded-PCM guard never firing.
Audio Passthrough looked like the trigger only because it is the one user-facing
switch that decides it. Passthrough off, or Downmix to Stereo on, both force the
Dolby track to decode to PCM, which trips the #1458 guard and takes tunneling
down with it. Passthrough on with downmix off is the only combination that keeps
a bitstreamed track, so it is the only one that stays tunneled.
Withdraw tunneling on that model for content at or below 30fps. The cut-off
keeps 4K50/60 tunneled, which is the workload Amazon documents the feature for.
The mechanism stays unconfirmed: tunneling fires no VideoFrameMetadataListener
and stops media3 counting frames in the codec, so nothing app-side can measure
the cadence. Only the trigger is established, and the quirk is scoped to it.
That needs a frame rate the app did not have. Neither MatroskaExtractor nor
Mp4Extractor populates Format.frameRate, and a tunneled session renders no
frames back for the native detector, so the server's rate now rides on the open
call. It is sent only for direct play, matching _primeDisplayCriteria: a
transcode's metadata describes the source, not what the server is about to send.
Also move Audio Passthrough out of the in-player settings sheet. It configures
the audio output route rather than the current playback, and applying it
mid-stream bounces the audio renderer and re-decides tunneling. Settings > Video
Playback already owns it, next to Tunneled Playback, which is applied the same
way. That description now mentions stutter, not only black HDR video, so the
workaround is findable on hardware this quirk does not cover.
The mpv backend failing to start the same 4K file is a separate defect and is
not addressed here; its uploaded log is no longer retrievable.
Episode navigation carries the subtitle choice this screen has committed, so
a way of turning subtitles off that the screen never sees is undone by the
next episode.
ExoPlayer has no renderer-level visibility switch, so the player's hide
toggle is emulated by deselecting the track. That emulation lasted until the
next selection: the automatic pass after an episode change put subtitles
straight back on screen while the toggle still read "hidden", and un-hiding
then restored a track id belonging to the episode that had already ended.
Hiding is now sticky across media opens the way mpv's global sub-visibility
is, selections made while hidden become what un-hiding restores, and the
toggle no longer refuses to restore because the hidden track reads as Off.
Cycling subtitles over the native track list — downloads, and items whose
server exposes no subtitle rows — went straight to the track manager, which
owns the player selection and the server write-back but not the committed
choice. The screen records the cycled track now.
On Auto, Dart derives a buffer size for mpv's demuxer from the device heap and
sets it as `demuxer-max-bytes`. The Android player forwarded that same number to
`DefaultLoadControl.setTargetBufferBytes`, so ExoPlayer's sample allocator was
sized by a tier table written for a different consumer: 64MB on any device whose
large heap is 512MB or less, which every Shield is.
`targetBufferBytes` is a byte cap, so the media it represents collapses as
bitrate rises — 64MB is 53s of a 10 Mbit/s stream but 5.2s of a 103 Mbit/s UHD
remux. With `prioritizeTimeOverSizeThresholds` false the cap is hard:
`shouldContinueLoading` returns false the moment the allocator reaches it no
matter how little media that is, and `shouldStartPlayback` reports READY off the
same byte term. Read-ahead that short starves the audio sink in bursts, and on a
passthrough route that is enough to keep the AudioTrack from ever starting — the
track initializes, accepts one access unit and never renders a frame. Because an
enabled audio renderer owns the MediaClock, the whole player freezes and the
black-screen watchdog then blames the video decoder and drops the session to
mpv.
Size the LoadControl target natively instead, from what actually bounds
`DefaultAllocator`: the Java heap. `min(media3's own default for a video+audio
selection, largeMemoryClass/4, availMem/4)` with a 32MB floor, the lowest tier
that has already shipped. The quarter matches the threshold the Buffer Size
setting already warns at, and the media3 default is a ceiling — this is not
"buffer more than upstream", it is "stop buffering less". Deliberately not
bitrate-aware, because the LoadControl is built during initialize, before any
media is opened. `bufferSizeAuto` carries the distinction over the channel;
`bufferSizeBytes` still travels with it because the plugin's mpv fallback
replays it as a real demuxer property, and an explicit Buffer Size choice is
still honoured verbatim.
Confirmed against the hardware in the 2.9.1 passthrough report. That reporter's
own log is a natural A/B: three runs at 64MB fail with `0 frames rendered after
8002ms`, spanning both DV conversion modes and both tunneling states, while the
single run after he manually selected 128MB logs `Position advancing` and
renders. Reproduced on the same Shield model with codec and bitrate held fixed
and only the cap varied — 6s of audio demand stalls at 64MiB and plays at
128MiB, 4 of 4 predictions, with read-ahead measured off an injected
DefaultAllocator at 65 664 and 131 776 KiB. That device reports
`dalvik.vm.heapsize` 512m, so the heap term binds first at every free-memory
level in his log and Auto now derives exactly the 128MB he had to pick by hand;
the shipped path logs `Buffer: 128MB limit (auto, heap=512MB, available=568MB)`
where it previously logged 64MB.
Audio passthrough defaults on for Android TV, scoped to ExoPlayer because
mpv force-passes through every codec named in audio-spdif and has no
decode fallback. That scoping did not survive the ExoPlayer to mpv
handoff: PlayerAndroid queued the raw ac3,eac3,dts,dts-hd,truehd list as
a pending mpv property and prepareMpvFallback replayed it verbatim, so a
sink that bitstreams only Dolby formats was told to force TrueHD and
DTS-HD anyway. mpv selected spdif_truehd, the audio output never
initialised, and playback froze at its start position while still showing
a first frame — the stop timeline reported the position it opened with.
Treat passthrough as a request and resolve the codec list against the
route when mpv actually starts, so an HDMI or AVR change between
ExoPlayer startup and the handoff cannot replay codecs from the old sink.
Gate each codec on the exact advertised encoding rather than media3's
passthrough probe: that probe answers DTS-HD by downgrading to the DTS
core, and mpv reads "dts,dts-hd" as "dts-hd" alone, so accepting the
downgrade would name DTS-HD MA to a core-only receiver and lose DTS too.
Focus chrome was implemented twice, once in the focusable wrapper and once
in the focus builders; both now go through FocusChrome. TvColorPicker's
channel row was a copy of TvNumberSpinner and is now that widget in compact
density.
Also trims unused helpers and fields and simplifies the Jellyfin browse
paths.
Remove avoidable per-RPU allocations and copies during DV fallback conversion, and add debug controls to force conversion modes while profiling playback.