0.3.14 Beta 15 - playback reliability wave (never-recovers stall, dead-source hop, watch history, Dolby Vision colour)

A focused reliability release. Install this over any earlier build. This build comes out of a full audit of a real diagnostic log and fixes the most severe playback failures behind it: streams that spun forever and never recovered, sources that took half a minute to give up, watch-history marks that did not show, and an unsafe Dolby Vision colour fallback. It builds clean on every Apple target; several of these are behavioural fixes best confirmed on your own hardware, so please test and share logs.

What's fixed

Playback no longer spins forever and never recovers. A stream that froze mid-play while the picture still read as buffering could sit on a spinner indefinitely: the Apple TV recovery watchdog treated that buffering state as normal and never stepped in, even though the same freeze on iPhone and Mac already recovered. The watchdog now observes through a buffering freeze (the shared mid-play stall policy the touch players already use): a genuine wait keeps its full patience, but a stuck stream is recovered on its own instead of stranding you. Apple TV.

Marking something watched shows up right away. Marking a movie or episode watched from its detail page could leave the checkmark on its old value even though the mark was recorded, because the page only refreshed when a few specific fields changed and the watched flag was not one of them. It now refreshes on the watched change itself. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

A dead source is dropped in a couple of seconds, not half a minute. A source that opens but delivers no actual video (an empty, truncated, or expired link) was handed to the backup player, which also got nothing, wasting about thirty seconds. Such a source is now recognised as genuinely dead from its very first failed read and the app jumps straight to your next source. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Rewinding keeps working on long streams. The stream can build minutes of video ahead of where you are watching, and that lead used to eat into the window kept behind you, so a rewind a little way back could be refused as out of range. The producer now paces itself, pausing when it runs far ahead, so it never collapses your rewind history. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Dolby Vision fallback no longer risks the wrong colours. When a Dolby Vision title has to fall back to the plain player, the app used to force a Dolby Vision colour space purely because the title was labelled Dolby Vision, which is not safe for every Dolby Vision variant and could tint the picture. It now applies that only when the format's own signalling proves it is HDR10 compatible, protects the incompatible variant, and otherwise waits for real decoded colour information before deciding. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Seeking no longer visibly jumps backward before it starts. A seek lands on the nearest earlier keyframe for decoder correctness, and that earlier point (up to about two seconds before where you asked) used to be shown before catching up. The player now decodes from the keyframe silently and only reveals the picture at the point you actually requested. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fewer dropped frames, and a provider that is down is not hammered. Frame-drop measurement no longer counts the transient drops around a display-mode switch, a fresh render start, or a seek, and thumbnail capture is kept off the picture's critical path; and a source provider that is failing (for example a debrid service having a bad moment) now gets a single probe after a cooldown instead of being retried on every screen refresh. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Known issues, please read

• Watch history beyond the marker still wants a real-device check. The detail-page marker fix is in and confirmed; a full round trip of a live watch tick updating your resume point and the title appearing in Continue Watching was traced as intact but could not be verified end to end without hardware. If a real play does not show up in Continue Watching, please share a diagnostic.
• Dropped frames on 4K Dolby Vision are measured more honestly and the worst bursts are avoided, but the underlying presentation-path cause is not fully cured.
• Trakt sign-in now works again (the OAuth broker went live between betas), no app update needed.

Please test

• A long play on Apple TV: watch 20+ minutes of a heavy 4K stream; if it ever freezes on a spinner it should now recover on its own. Share the diagnostics log (Settings > Diagnostics) after any failure.
• Mark a movie or episode watched from its detail page and confirm the checkmark moves immediately; then play something, exit, and confirm it appears in Continue Watching.
• A source that will not play: confirm it moves on within a couple of seconds instead of a long reconnect.
• Rewind a good way back during a long stream; it should not be refused.
• Dolby Vision on capable hardware: confirm true DV, and no colour tint if a title falls back to the plain player.

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 (accounts, sync, debrid, phone and TV shells, playback engines, downloads, IPTV, torrent serving, source ranking, Picture-in-Picture, MediaSession) is in, and what remains is feature breadth against the parity plan, real on-device playback proof, a stable signing identity, and signed-install verification. Full parity stays the target; a preview APK returns in a later build.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.15-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.