VortX 0.3.14 Beta 26 (build 228)

Apple-first reliability release. The headline is the end of the repeating mid-playback stutter Apple TV owners were hitting under memory pressure. It also completes the zero-stall playback lane (the Beta 25 remux work, finished and merged), tightens debrid cached-source ranking and sync, gives the release feed proper HTTP caching, and lands the Android usenet + community-JavaScript-provider stacks in source. Android remains absent from this Apple sideload release.

What's new

The memory-pressure stutter is fixed. On the Apple TV 4K, the device parks its available headroom at roughly 400-420 MiB — inside the band the app treats as "pressured but recoverable" — and tvOS posts an advisory memory warning every minute or two. The destructive cache-shed (drop buffers plus re-anchor seek) was fire-and-forget, so each warning ran it again: a burst of dropped frames and a visible stutter on a metronome, all episode long. That shed is now edge-triggered: it fires once when the app first enters the advisory band, then holds until headroom genuinely recovers above the restore bar (or you change title). Genuine low headroom never waits — the flush that keeps the app alive against memory pressure is untouched — and the ample-headroom regime behaves exactly as before. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Playback reliability (the Beta 25 remux work, now complete). The zero-stall lane lands: the AVPlayer steady-state buffer is coupled to the remux producer's byte budget; the producer-lead park gate gets byte-level hysteresis; local-remux startup buffer rises to 8 s with a 12 s readiness floor; a seek-nudge tier and buffered-retirement gate run before any engine demote; a single same-engine playlist reload answers an otherwise-fatal mid-play CoreMedia -1008; and a proactive read-liveness soft-interrupt drives the remux input so playback does not drain into a stall. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Keep the prepared next episode across an engine demote. Switching from AVPlayer to the mpv fallback used to drop the prepared next-episode source; it is now carried across, so auto-advance does not re-search cold. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Debrid cached sources rank and resolve faster. A cached-source race is rank-sorted with an instant-URL short circuit, and the debrid-cache snapshot is threaded into the player's cached re-rank, so the right cached source surfaces first. Non-wanted add-on request budget is raised to avoid a false stall. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Last-stream memory is device-local on sync. A watched position held in memory no longer bleeds across profile or device because it no longer rides into the account sync, so one device's in-progress title cannot overwrite another's. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

TorBox circuits stop hammering a read-only cooldown. A TorBox source that hits its quota now enters a cooldown fast-path and logs one suppression line per episode instead of re-asking on a loop. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Feed and update behavior. Update eligibility is build-number-only (strict ordering, no legacy prerelease override); the release feed answers HEAD and honors If-None-Match with 304; and a prior-exit termination receipt is captured with MetricKit so a feed worker or app that died is recorded. All devices.

Android (in this build's source, not the Apple release). Community JavaScript providers run again through a new QuickJS runtime and provider stack, and a usenet provider stack is wired into the debrid coordinator. These are the Android line; the Apple sideload release does not include them.

Please test

• On the Apple TV, start a title and let it play for ten minutes or more, especially a 4K Dolby Vision or high-bitrate stream; confirm the repeated every-few-seconds stutter is gone.
• Play sources from TorBox, AIOStreams, or AllDebrid that failed before and confirm they play.
• With Dolby Vision or MKV remux enabled, play for several minutes and confirm no repeating stall-and-jump.
• Auto-advance between episodes and confirm the next episode starts without a cold search.
• On a second profile or device, confirm a watched position is not written across.

If anything still fails, share the Diagnostics log (Settings > Diagnostics).

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.26-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.