0.3.14 Beta 16 - resume no longer blanks the screen, Still watching pauses and is yours to tune, smoother big-file buffering

Install this over any earlier build. The headline fix: resuming a show, jumping to a previous episode, or switching source mid-title no longer strands you on a blank screen with a frozen timer. Plus the Still watching prompt now pauses the video and is fully in your hands, and large 4K files buffer ahead more gently so they stay smooth. 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

Resuming a show no longer leaves a blank screen. Continue Watching, jumping to a previous episode, or switching source mid-title resumes at your saved position, and on some streams that jump used to leave a black screen with a frozen timer and only sound, if anything, until you backed out and started over. A mid-file resume was being applied as a jump issued before the picture had begun; on a cold pipeline that emptied the buffer the app had just filled and stalled on a re-read that never resynced, and nothing recovered it. The player now reaches its first frame before making that jump, exactly the way an ordinary scrub already does, so a resume plays and lands at your spot. If a stream still cannot start there within a few seconds it falls back to playing from the beginning with your progress kept, rather than stranding you. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The Still watching prompt pauses the video, and you choose when it asks. When the app checks whether you are still watching it now pauses playback while it waits, instead of letting the episode keep playing behind the question. You can turn the prompt off entirely in Settings, and choose how many back-to-back auto-played episodes go by before it asks (2 to 10). Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Big files stay smoother while they buffer ahead. On a fast source the player used to pull up to fifteen minutes of a large 4K file ahead of you all at once, and that heavy read could drop a frame or two a second while it filled. It now keeps a still-generous five-minute lead, so the buffering burst is shorter and the picture stays steady, with the same protection against a network dip. This depth is tunable from our side with no app update, so it can be adjusted further from what real devices report. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Known issues, being worked on next

• Seamless next episode. The next-episode prewarm still does not always make the jump instant on a series; a deeper fix to the prepare-then-mount handoff is in progress.
• Scrub previews. The thumbnail that pops up while you drag can still read "preview unavailable" some of the time; the capture side is healthy, the display side is being fixed.
• Scrubbing back and forth can still stall on some sources while the buffer refills; the same cold-pipeline work behind the resume fix continues here.
• Source picking. After you pick a source by hand for a show, it can stick to that choice over a better debrid or usenet source on later episodes; a smarter policy is coming.
• Frame drops on very large files are improved by the shorter read-ahead but not fully cured; device-reported tuning continues.

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.

Please test

• Resume anything on Apple TV: open a title from Continue Watching, jump to a previous episode, or switch source mid-play, and confirm it plays and lands at your position instead of a blank screen. Share the diagnostics log (Settings > Diagnostics) after any failure.
• Still watching: in Settings, confirm the prompt pauses the video when it appears, that turning it off stops it asking, and that the "ask after this many episodes" setting takes effect.
• A long 4K play: watch a large file and confirm it stays smooth as it buffers ahead.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.16-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.