VortXTV/VortX v0.3.13

VortX 0.3.13

on GitHub

VortX 0.3.13 is the community release. It rolls up the whole 0.3.12 test line, builds 167 to 174, and its headline is a player reliability series contributed by jbecker-it, his second contribution to VortX and his biggest yet, every fix root-caused and verified on real hardware. The pause-shortly-after-start crash is gone, watch progress now saves on streams that never report a length, heavy scrubbing can no longer lose your place or falsely mark an episode watched, audio stays clean after big seeks and track changes, and Continue Watching updates the moment you stop watching. Alongside it, fixes for community reports (add-on HTTP and HLS streams now appear, a removed add-on no longer ghosts the Home customize list, the diagnostic log saves without a QR code, stream rows fit narrow iPhones, where-to-watch logos are legible everywhere) and the full builds 167 to 173 line: the Dolby Vision recovery series, Siri Remote Back fixed, watched badges, the launch profile picker on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Liquid Glass. In-place update, nothing resets. This is the complete list; every change in the line is below. This release went out on build-and-review verification, so the Please test section matters more than usual.

Fixed in build 174

• Pausing a video shortly after starting it no longer crashes the app. The player keeps filling its read-ahead buffer while paused, so a pause right after start parked the app at its peak memory use, and minutes later the tvOS screensaver started its own 4K pipeline on top and the system quit the app. After a minute of continuous pause the player now trims its read-ahead and hands the memory back, restores the full buffer the moment you resume, and answers the system's low-memory warning on both player lanes, with every step recorded in the exportable diagnostics log. The freed buffer is re-anchored with an exact seek, so the paused picture never moves. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad.
• Watch progress now saves on every stream, including files that never report a length. Many debrid direct-play MKVs never announce their duration, and resume, the periodic progress save, marked-as-watched, and Up Next all quietly sat out on them, so exactly those titles always restarted from the beginning. The player now reads the duration itself as soon as playback ticks. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Heavy scrubbing can no longer save a stale position, wipe an episode's progress, or falsely mark it watched. Committed scrubs now hold their target until the player actually lands there (position ticks from before the seek are ignored), the end of the timeline is held a few seconds short of the credits so only real playback finishes an episode, and the watched mark needs a few settled seconds near the end instead of a fly-by. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV.
• A watched or unwatched toggle can no longer resurrect an ancient playback position. The engine's own progress copy is now kept in step at pause and at scrub commits, so an engine-side push can never carry a stale position over newer saves. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Audio no longer distorts, with playback lagging, after a big seek or an audio or subtitle change. Resuming instantly on an emptied buffer made the audio engine underrun repeatedly; the player now takes one short honest buffering pause scoped to exactly those seeks, so playback resumes once and cleanly while ordinary starts stay as fast as before. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV.
• Continue Watching updates right after you exit, and an immediate reopen resumes at the right place. The Home card used to keep its old position until something else refreshed the library, and a quick reopen could restart from the beginning and then overwrite the real position. The exit now completes the final save and refreshes the library in order, and a resume the engine cannot answer consults the account record, which matches the exact episode. Contributed by jbecker-it in #123. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Add-ons that serve plain HTTP or HLS streams now show their sources. A whole class of add-ons, most live-TV style catalogs among them, embeds its streams inside the catalog entry itself rather than answering a separate stream request, and the app only ever read the separate answer, so those add-ons listed nothing. Both surfaces are now read and merged, so their sources appear and play like any other. Fixes #122. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• A removed add-on no longer haunts the Home customization list. Removing an add-on kept its catalogs registered under the hood, so its rows still appeared in the customize list, and could still render on Home, with no way to clear them. Removed add-ons' catalogs now disappear everywhere immediately, and reinstalling the add-on brings your old arrangement back. Catalog rows sitting behind a profile-disabled add-on also always load now. Fixes #121. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Stream rows no longer run off the edge on smaller iPhones; the quality and add-on badges scroll instead, and wide layouts are unchanged. Fixes #118. iPhone.
• Where-to-watch service logos are legible everywhere now, sitting on a light plate instead of vanishing into the dark background, on the same shared inset as the browse tiles. Part of #95. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Added in build 174

• Save or share the diagnostic log directly, no QR code or second device needed. Settings on iPhone, iPad, and Mac gained a Save or share log control next to the QR export: straight to Files, AirDrop, or Mail, and it works whenever the log has content, even after Diagnostic logging is switched back off. Apple TV keeps the QR flow. Fixes #113.
• Signed-out sessions skip the exit library sync, so a device without an account no longer issues a dead sync request after every playback.

Added in build 173

• Who's watching, the launch profile picker, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple TV already asked which profile to use at cold launch; iPhone, iPad, and Mac opened straight into whoever was last active. The same picker now presents at launch (full-screen on iPhone and iPad, a centered sheet on Mac) when you keep more than one profile, the rest of the app stays hidden until a profile settles so no one's Continue Watching flashes first, and the owner and overlay profile history rules are exactly the Apple TV ones. Switch Profile in Settings re-presents it.
• Liquid Glass on the floating controls, on the systems that support it. The player transport buttons, the hero back and options discs, and the in-player pills take on Apple's translucent glass material, falling back to the current frosted look on earlier systems and whenever Reduce Transparency is on. Glass is applied only to chrome that floats over content, never to posters, cards, or backgrounds. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fixed in build 172

• Streaming brands show their full catalog, and you can choose which services appear. A brand can be listed under several ids (regional variants and paid tiers), and only one was queried, so a brand like Paramount+ returned stragglers or dropped out of a region entirely. Each brand now queries its whole id family, the Home streaming rails use the same family, and a new list in the streaming section lets you pick and reorder exactly which services appear. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Continue Watching advances the right title after you play a download or a pasted link. Those plays never load the engine's playback model, and progress ticks landed on the previous title you still had open. Closing one of those players now unloads the model, so each title keeps its own place. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• A removed title or add-on is even less likely to come back after an update or on a long-offline device. Removals carry a per-item timestamp so the most recent action wins by the clock, installed add-ons are stamped present before stale web-side removals fold in, and a fresh install is no longer undone by an old removal. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Sources are ordered more accurately. A release advertising only foreign subtitles (korsub, vostfr, legendado) is no longer demoted as foreign audio, a title containing a word like Instant no longer shows a false Cached badge, and a trailer no longer leaks into the quality picker. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Switching source in the player now plays the source you switched to. A Dolby Vision source that mounted but could not frame was reloading the originally opened title instead of the selected source; it now reloads the right one at your position. Exiting a from-the-beginning Dolby Vision resume no longer moves your saved point backward, automatic source hops no longer reset the recovery time limit, double-pressing Next can no longer start two episode loads, and a bad add-on runtime value can no longer overflow. Apple TV.
• Dolby Vision holds its stream on long plays. The in-memory window of delivered video is held to at least two full segments and captured once at start, so a long title can no longer evict a segment the player is still reading and drop to HDR10 partway through. The display-mode step also settles immediately when the TV is already in the right mode. Apple TV.
• Smaller fixes. iPhone Home refreshes on real Continue Watching and library changes instead of background-sync churn, browse posters load through the shared image pipeline, the tvOS browse spinner no longer strands after a switch, an iPhone hero image no longer holds on after leaving a category, and Mac can remove a service from the chosen list. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fixed in build 171

• Opening a title with several thousand sources no longer freezes or closes the app. The text cache under the ranking cleared and refilled on every pass past 4096 unique sources, saturating the main thread until the watchdog closed the app. It now matches the score cache at 32768, and debrid-cached sources memoise both scoring variants. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• More Dolby Vision MKVs play as true Dolby Vision: large hybrid Atmos remuxes, and links that error on the very first open. A rebuilt header that outgrew its buffer shipped with an unwritten length and never started; the muxer now has a real seek-and-patch path so header size is no longer a ceiling. A debrid link answering the first open with a transient HTTP 400 now gets the same single warm-up retry a first-open timeout already had. Apple TV.
• Crashes write their own report into the exportable diagnostic log, captured with crash-safe operations and folded into the next launch's log with the signal and backtrace, so a crash can be diagnosed without a Mac or a cable. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Community (Singularity) sources reliably appear. Fetched community sources are kept for the whole app session keyed to their exact title, so the screen actually on display receives them and reopening a title paints them instantly. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• The Watch button holds one position on every movie, and focus always reaches the top bar from it. The synopsis is held to a fixed three-line height so a long one can no longer push the Watch band into a focus-trapped region. Apple TV.
• Ratings show on the Apple TV details page with no setup, and Metacritic is new on every surface. Apple TV now reads the keyless ratings service first (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, TMDB) with an MDBList key only filling gaps. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• A title removed from Continue Watching stays gone after an update. Removals live in a durable list that syncs with your account, are pushed right away with a grace window when backgrounding, and are subtracted when the account rebuilds your library. Adding the title again clears its removal. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fixed in build 170

• True Dolby Vision plays instead of always falling back to HDR10. The local stream listed a single video option tagged with an explicit Dolby Vision range, and Apple's player drops an explicitly-HDR option whenever it cannot yet prove the output is in an HDR mode, leaving zero playable options and failing the stream. Pinned down with a byte-exact off-device reproduction. The stream now also offers a plain untagged option pointing at the identical video, so a playable option always survives, while the true Dolby Vision picture and mode switch still drive what you see. Apple TV.

Fixed in build 169

• The next episode auto-plays again after resuming from Continue Watching. The episode list is fetched before the player starts (as iPhone, iPad, and Mac already did), a last-chance re-check covers a slow list, and a season-and-episode match covers a stale saved id, so a mid-season episode no longer exits to Home at the end. Apple TV.
• Add-on and community subtitles auto-select in your language, including on titles opened from the VortX catalogs. Those titles are keyed by a tmdb: id that subtitle add-ons cannot answer; they are now resolved to their tt identity first, community subtitles take the language chain too, and a manual subtitle choice (or Off) is never overridden by a late-arriving list. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fixed in build 168

• Back on the Siri Remote steps back one screen at a time, instead of jumping to Home from any depth. Back now pops exactly one level when the active tab has a page pushed, returns to Home only from a tab's first screen, and still leaves the app at the Home root. Fixes #112. Apple TV.
• Watched titles show it on their poster in your Library: a check badge and a dimmed cover, matching the episode list, per profile, with overlay profiles never touching the account library. Fixes #111. Apple TV.
• Back dismisses the Skip Intro pill instead of exiting the player. A visible Skip Intro, Skip Recap, or Skip Credits pill is dismissed and playback continues; a second Back with no pill up exits as before. Apple TV.

Fixed in build 167

• Dolby Vision from an MKV actually reaches the screen as true Dolby Vision. The local HLS advertised a codec tier Apple's player rejects for Dolby Vision, and on some files the rebuilt header outgrew a buffer and shipped invalid; both fixed. Apple TV.
• The streaming server no longer strands your session Offline after a fast relaunch. The app discovers and follows the server's real port when the previous instance was still shutting down, heals a stuck session on its own, and raises its open-file limit so heavy torrent sessions no longer hit instant load-failed errors. Apple TV.
• Lower memory use during playback. Apple's player was keeping an unbounded read-ahead of the Dolby Vision stream; it is now capped. Apple TV.

Please test on your Apple TV

This release shipped on build-gate and code-review verification, so real-hardware reports matter more than usual. If anything is off, export the diagnostic log (Settings; on iPhone, iPad, and Mac you can now save it straight to Files) and open an issue:

• Pause and leave it. Start a stream, pause it, let the screensaver come on, come back after 10+ minutes: the app should still be there and resume from the exact frame. The paused picture should never move on its own.
• Scrub hard and quit. Scrub back and forth on a big 4K file, exit right after: Continue Watching should show where you actually were. Reopen straight away: it should resume there, not at 0:00.
• Finish an episode naturally: it should mark watched and advance. Scrub past 90 percent and back: it should NOT mark watched.
• Big seeks and track changes: audio should come back clean after one short buffering pause, no crackle, no lag. Ordinary playback starts should feel as fast as before; a resumed title takes one short hold at its resume seek.
• Live-TV style add-ons: an add-on that lists HTTP or HLS streams should now show its sources, and they should play.
• Dolby Vision, still owed from the test line: Match Dynamic Range ON (Settings, Video and Audio, Match Content), play a 4K Dolby Vision MKV: the TV should read DOLBY VISION, the receiver Dolby Atmos, and it should survive past the five-minute mark. If it drops to HDR10, export the log and send it.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.13-ci.dmg, drag VortX into Applications, then clear Apple's one-time quarantine: open it once, click Done, then System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway (or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/VortX.app). Full guide: Install on Mac.

iPhone, iPad, Apple TV (sideload the IPA). The IPAs are unsigned, because VortX is open-source and distributed outside the App Store with no Apple Developer ID yet, so you re-sign them yourself with Sideloadly, AltStore / SideStore, or Signulous. No jailbreak. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum (SHA256SUMS-ci.txt) so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.