0.3.14 Beta 14 - a large stability, playback, and account-security release - KNOWN ISSUE: new Trakt sign-in is offline this build

The big one since Beta 12. Install this over any earlier build. This gathers a full week of work: the playback-stability campaign that fixes the Beta 12 constant-buffering regression and a long list of stalls, freezes, and crashes traced on real Apple TVs, plus a complete account and credential security pass, audio and Continue Watching fixes, and deeper diagnostics for the issues still open. It is source-complete and builds clean on every Apple target; several fixes still want on-device confirmation, so please test and share logs.

Playback stability

Apple TV playback is smooth and stops the constant buffering. The player was shrinking its own streaming buffer on every routine tvOS memory warning, mistaking that system-wide advisory for real pressure on this app; field logs showed hundreds of MB free the whole time while the buffer was cut sixty-plus times per film until it held only seconds of 4K and had to pause to refill. The player now checks how much memory this process actually has before touching the buffer, ignores a harmless warning, trims only when genuinely low and keeps a cushion even then, and starts with a larger read-ahead and grows it back once memory frees up. Apple TV.

Coming back to the app resumes your video instead of spinning forever. Returning after a while could strand playback in an endless "Recovering" loop on a stream that went stale while away. The player now checks its connection on return and refreshes it only when it did not survive, asking the debrid service for a fresh link when the old one expired, and a failure mid-play runs the full retry, re-resolve, then hop-to-next-source ladder instead of retrying one dead address forever. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

A dead source is skipped in seconds instead of half a minute. A source that never sent a byte used to burn about 36 seconds across two engines before moving on; the engine now tells a provably dead source from one merely warming up and hops immediately, while a slow-but-alive source keeps its patience. Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad.

Your source choice sticks for the whole series. Pick a release and the next episode now prefers that same add-on and release group instead of re-deciding from scratch, waits a moment for it to load and fetches it ahead during the current episode, and a provider that just failed is ranked down for ten minutes so the app stops auto-choosing a broken source. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

An episode that ends while its next source is still loading no longer freezes on the last frame. It now moves on to the next episode, or back to the details page, within a few seconds instead of hanging. Apple TV.

Long sessions keep their full streaming buffer. After a memory warning or a long pause the read-ahead cache used to stay clamped to its minimum for the rest of the title; it now steps back up once memory headroom genuinely recovers, keeping every protection that shrinks it under real pressure. Apple TV.

Watch progress keeps tracking after the app sleeps. A movie from a torrent-based debrid source could quietly stop recording progress after a suspend; its library entry is now always rebuilt, so Continue Watching and your resume point keep tracking through sleep and re-resolve. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

A wrong or placeholder stream is caught, and resume never jumps past the end. A resume position is now clamped inside the file actually playing, and a stream far shorter than the title should run (a short clip standing in for a feature) is recognised as the wrong asset and skipped instead of played. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

A paused Dolby Vision or HLS title stays paused. These stream as a live feed the built-in player would quietly resume after about a minute; it now catches the moment it drifts off a pause you asked for and re-asserts it, while an ordinary buffering wait is left alone. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Seeking far ahead shows you it is working, and gets there sooner. Jumping past what was prepared rebuilds the stream; that wait now shows the buffering indicator and play/pause respond instantly, and a first-segment margin fix removes a fixed six-second retry delay from the rebuild. Apple TV.

Rewinding goes back. The player held only a few seconds behind where it had downloaded to, which was often already ahead of you; it now holds two and a half minutes of playing time behind you. Apple TV.

Turning on the streaming cache buffers far ahead on disk for very large 4K files, with bounded memory. It now genuinely offloads the forward buffer to storage (the old option name never worked and the mis-sizing is what crashed 4K back in 0.2.11), bounded to a fixed span of viewing time. Off by default, now safe to turn on. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Performance

4K Dolby Vision playback drops far fewer frames. A cost-saving step meant to lighten 4K HDR processing was never taking effect, so the heaviest path ran every frame; it now works, and the thumbnail-strip capture no longer competes with the picture on 4K DV. Apple TV.

Huge series no longer crash the app. Opening a series with thousands of episodes (Doraemon was the reporter) built every row at once and re-sorted hundreds of times per press until tvOS killed the app; episode lists now build lazily, thumbnails decode at display size, and the sort runs once per page. Kitsu anime titles resolve their details too. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The player controls and Settings are lighter. The controls stopped walking thousands of loaded sources several times a second, Settings does its external-player lookups once on open instead of on every redraw, and the app stops waking every screen when the engine reports a no-op change. Apple TV.

The Home billboard is smooth and nearly free on Mac. The slow drifting zoom now runs on the graphics chip as its own animation instead of redrawing the whole hero on the main processor every frame, so Home stays cool and quiet. Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Dolby Vision

The Dolby Vision for MKV setting now tells the truth, and says what it costs. The row could read Off while DV was in fact playing; it now shows what playback will really do and says plainly that Off forces HDR10 for every DV MKV. A DV title playing as HDR10 because of that setting now says so once, and choosing the Apple player by hand attempts true DV. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

A Dolby Vision title that takes a moment to open no longer drops to HDR10. Opening a DV remux can legitimately take several seconds; the startup check now watches the source actually being read, so a slow-but-alive open keeps its patience and plays as true DV, while a genuinely dead source still steps aside within a bounded wait. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Audio

Audio now matches what your speakers actually render. The app read the audio route's top theoretical capability and mixed for that, so a route that reports more channels than it presents (some soundbars over HDMI) could come through thin or too quiet; it now uses the realized channel count after the session is live, Stereo sets a genuine stereo session, a live route change refreshes it, and stale forced sample-rate is cleared. No blanket gain or normalization was added. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Subtitles

Subtitle timing holds across switches, and adjusting it no longer stalls the video. Timing is now scoped to the exact content and episode and reapplied across eligible remounts, so a source or episode switch no longer leaks the old offset and a staged next episode cannot bleed its timing onto the one playing; and the progress reports that adjusting used to starve now travel on their own path, so nudging timing never freezes the picture. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Subtitles no longer pile up covering the screen. Identical overlapping lines are merged and at most three show at once, older yielding to newer. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Scrubbing previews no longer start on a black tile. Blank frames captured before the picture rendered are recognised by how little they weigh and dropped, so the preview strip stays real from the first tile. Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad.

Continue Watching

A finished season no longer drops the series from Continue Watching. Watching a season's last episode used to remove the whole series, so a show with a new season waiting could vanish; removal is now fail-closed, the series stays on anything short of proven finality and re-surfaces when the next season is available, and genuine final removal stays owned by the engine. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Coming back from an episode returns you to that episode. Pressing back now trusts the episode that was on screen rather than what Continue Watching had got round to saving. Apple TV.

Trailers and sources

Preview trailers stay inside VortX. A trailer could be handed to an external player such as Infuse instead of the built-in player (GitHub #192); trailers now always play in VortX. Apple TV.

Home-screen preview trailers play again after the app has been in the background. The small local helper that plays them now releases its network port on background and takes a fresh one on the next preview, healing itself if the port is lost. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

TorBox sources degrade gracefully when their search service is unavailable. VortX falls back to TorBox's own account search so sources still appear, stops hammering a dead service, and resumes on its own when it returns; switchable from the backend with no app update. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Search stops saying Searching when it is not. Idle now reads as idle, and clearing a search genuinely clears it everywhere. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Accounts and security

A full account and credential hardening pass. How VortX stores and hands off your account credentials was hardened end to end: durable keychain tombstones and owner fences, certified keychain transitions and migration fencing, authenticated transport, ordered restore and adopt of ownership, and provider-session fences so an in-flight request cannot retarget after an account change. Sign-out and cancellation now acknowledge durably. QR add-on pairing was hardened with a body-signed relay and replay fences, and Picture-in-Picture item rollover and HLS cancellation now have proper lifecycle barriers. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Diagnostics for the issues still open

Honest, bounded receipts were added around Dolby Vision timeline origin, frame-output drops (now reported as total plus per-minute in Playback info), player teardown, and cache-flush seeks, so the next round of device logs can separate a real fault from a false alarm. The 3-to-4-minute automatic rewinds were tied to duplicate memory-warning cache flushes re-anchoring to a transient seek position, and that flush is now single-flight per load so a second warning cannot re-anchor. These sharpen the next report; the underlying frame-drop and post-exit memory questions are not yet closed (see below).

Known issues, please read

• New Trakt sign-in does not work in this build. The client points at the new oauth.vortx.tv broker, which is not deployed yet, so a fresh Trakt connect will fail. It is being deployed; existing Trakt sessions may still work. Do not report new-Trakt-connect failures for this build.
• Dropped frames on 4K Dolby Vision may still occur. This build adds honest instrumentation, not a cure; the presentation-path cause is still being traced.
• Post-exit memory (RSS) growth has diagnostic receipts only, no behavior change yet.

Please test

• Opening and long playback on Apple TV: watch 20+ minutes of a heavy 4K remux, seek a few times, background and return; report any rebuffering, "Recovering" loops, auto-rewinds, stalls, or dropped-frame bursts, and share the diagnostics log (Settings > Diagnostics) after any failure.
• Audio on your setup, especially through a soundbar: compare the same title in Auto vs Stereo, and soundbar vs direct-to-TV; tell us which is quiet.
• Continue Watching across a season boundary, and pressing back after an episode.
• Subtitle timing across a source or episode switch.
• Dolby Vision on capable hardware: confirm true DV, not an HDR10 fallback.

Android

Android is not attached to this build. It is roughly 45% of the way to the Apple apps, with about 55% remaining. The spine is real and substantial: accounts, sync, debrid, the phone and TV shells, playback engines, downloads, IPTV, torrent serving, source ranking, Picture-in-Picture, and MediaSession are all in. What remains is feature breadth against the parity plan (player panels and controls, search, discover, home, settings, add-on management, backup/import, accessibility, and track completeness), real on-device playback proof on phone and Android TV, a stable release-signing identity, and signed-install verification. Full parity with the Apple apps stays the target, and a preview APK will return in a later build.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.14-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. For one-tap updates, add the VortX source to AltStore / SideStore or your sideloading service so new builds appear automatically: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VortXTV/VortX/main/altstore/source.json. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each Apple 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.