0.3.14 Beta 18 - Re-find sources, and a 4K HDR seek-stutter fix

Install this over any earlier build. Beta 18 adds a Re-find sources control for when a title's links have gone stale, and fixes a Beta 17 issue where seeking on a very high-bitrate 4K HDR title could leave playback stuttering.

What's new

Re-find sources when a title's links have gone stale. A source list is cached per title, so an add-on that was offline when you opened a title, or whose configuration has since expired, could keep showing nothing or stale links until you navigated away and back. A new Re-find sources control on the details page, next to the Sources header and in the no-sources state, re-queries every stream add-on from scratch instead of re-serving the cached list, so expired sources are replaced with fresh ones. It also appears in the player when a source fails to load and every known source has already been tried: it re-queries the add-ons and, once fresh sources arrive, retries playback on the best one. It only ever runs on the details page or after playback has stopped, never mid-play, so a binge and its warmed next-episode source are never disturbed, and your remembered source pick still only breaks ties between near-identical releases. The whole control can be switched off from the backend with no app update. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

What's fixed

Seeking on a very high-bitrate 4K HDR title no longer leaves playback stuttering. In Beta 17, pressing a directional button on a 4K HDR title (which seeks) could drop the frame rate and keep it down until you skipped ahead again. The player builds a deep read-ahead buffer and eases it back when a burst of dropped frames looks like the fill is straining the picture; a seek re-decodes from a keyframe and briefly drops frames of its own while the picture rebuilds from the new point, and the player was mistaking those for strain and shrinking the buffer exactly when the seek needed it refilled. It now tells a seek's own brief drops apart from real strain and holds the buffer steady across a seek, so playback settles right after you move instead of stuttering. A genuine strain with no seek behind it still eases the buffer back as before. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Thanks to the person who reported this.

Android

Android is not attached to this build, but it is close. The trunk now carries roughly 85% of the Apple feature set: accounts and encrypted sync, profiles and who's-watching, debrid, catalogs and search, the details page with ratings and where-to-watch, both playback engines with the deep player-control set (chapters, HDR tone-mapping, aspect and seek-bar options, a skip-times editor, share and external-player handoff, background playback, Picture-in-Picture, and on-device scrub previews), live TV, torrent serving, offline downloads, Google Cast, Trakt and SIMKL, an Android TV cinematic home, poster and ratings artwork, list imports, and a signed fleet-config layer so fixes reach it without a store update. What is left is the remaining subtitle and audio depth, cross-device settings sync, some discovery and TV polish, and, most of all, real on-device playback proof and a stable signed install, which is why a preview APK is not attached yet. One-to-one parity with Apple stays the target and a preview APK returns in a later build.

Please test

• Open a title whose sources look stale or empty and use Re-find sources; confirm a fresh set of links appears.
• In the player, when a source fails and every source has already been tried, use the retry to re-find and resume on the best one.
• On a 4K HDR title, seek repeatedly with the remote and confirm playback stays smooth instead of stuttering. If it still hitches, share the Diagnostics log (Settings > Diagnostics).

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.18-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.