Fixed
External subtitles: late auto-attach no longer reloads the stream mid-scene
If the subtitle servers were slow when playback started, your remembered subtitle would arrive late and attach itself by silently reloading the stream at the current position — a transition that can knock audio/video out of sync on some devices. A late-arriving remembered subtitle now waits and applies at your next pause instead. Picking a subtitle manually still applies immediately, and subtitles that arrive on time behave exactly as before.
External subtitles: rare silent loss for a whole session
A startup race could make the player believe addon subtitles were disabled for the rest of the session — no error, no retry, embedded tracks only. Both fetch paths now double-check the actual setting before giving up.
Improved
Stats panel: an honest "Request" row
On direct-file (remux) playback the whole stream is one continuous read that only "finishes" when you seek or stop — and the panel was reporting that read's running time as if a request had taken that long (e.g. "Request 606,014 ms" after ten minutes of unbroken playback). The row now reports only genuinely completed media requests, so on direct-file playback it's simply absent rather than misleading.
Stats panel: new "Clamp" row
When a CDN rate-limits the parallel downloader (HTTP 429), the session clamps to a single connection and recovers after a quiet cooldown (the nt4 fix). That state was invisible — collapsed speeds looked like a mystery. The panel now shows a Clamp row from the moment the clamp first trips: amber with a live cooldown countdown while clamped, a plain "recovered" note afterwards, and absent if it never tripped.
Stats panel: new "Route" row
Shows which output device audio is actually routed to (HDMI, HDMI ARC/eARC, and so on) and how many times that route has changed mid-playback. Some devices briefly re-route audio when a system sound or screen capture fires — which can burst static on a passthrough bitstream — and until now the only way to see it was watching your AVR's front panel. A change count ticking up while the Buffer row stays healthy tells you the interruption came from the system's audio routing, not from the stream.
For testers chasing static or stutter: open the stats panel when it happens and screenshot it. The Buffer, Clamp and Route rows together now classify the fault on sight — that one capture tells the whole story.
Changed
Device assessment: DV5 conversion and HDR10+ strip are now advise-only
Both recommendations depend on what your display chain reports about itself, and with a soundbar in the HDMI path that report can be confidently wrong — one tester's box was destabilised by exactly this combination. The assessment still shows its reasoning for both rows, but one-tap Apply no longer changes them; flip them yourself in settings if you want them. The DV7 handling → Auto recommendation is unaffected.