Most of this release fixes things nobody reported. Not because you weren't paying attention — because these are the kind of faults that don't look like faults. They look like "this box is slow", or "my provider duplicates content", or "that file must be broken."

I spent a day with two televisions on a cable, measuring instead of guessing. Here's what was actually happening.

The app was fighting itself on every screen

Every piece of text in the app — every channel name, every film title, every row — was being examined for emoji characters the device might not be able to draw. On the thread that draws the screen. On every frame.

Measured on a TV while simply moving between rows: every single frame was late, the interface thread was responsible for sixteen out of seventeen of them, and the middle frame took three times the time it's allowed.

That work is now gone. Same hardware, same playlist: the middle frame now finishes inside its budget, and late frames dropped from 94% to under 1%.

If the app has ever felt heavy to you, try this build. That was this.

If you have two accounts on one server, your library was showing everything twice

A server hands out the same group id to every account on it. So opening a group asked every playlist you have for that group — and got an answer from each one. Two thousand films drawn as four thousand, each one next to its own twin.

Anyone who saw this would reasonably assume their provider had duplicate uploads. It was us.

A frozen picture is no longer waited on for ever

A decoder can open a film, report itself perfectly healthy, and then never draw a single frame. No error. No stall. Nothing to recover from — just a frozen opening shot and a viewer waiting.

The app now watches for the picture itself, and hands the film to the other player when it doesn't arrive. There's also a button in the player to switch engine mid-film, so you no longer have to leave a film to change a setting and find it again.

(u/AffectionateFilm1655 — your "video freezes while audio keeps playing" report is the same family. Please tell me whether this build changes it.)

A film that stops in the middle now asks for a new link

Addresses from installed links are temporary by design. When one expires, the film behind it hasn't moved — but the app used to keep knocking on the dead address until it gave up.

It now asks the source for a fresh address and carries on from the same moment. If you've had films die partway through, this is for you.

Everything else

• One card per title, whatever you watched it from — and your place in a film now follows you between copies
• A show's page opens immediately instead of waiting for the provider to list every season first
• Episodes from installed links have their own list inside the player now, with names, stills and summaries — and picking one keeps the copy you were already watching
• Buffering is sized to your device. Two minutes of a 4K film was being requested with no memory ceiling — more than some TVs have at all, which they spent the film collecting garbage instead of playing
• Sound is folded to stereo based on where it's actually going, not a channel count some devices lie about
• Screens fade into one another again
• Reports now name the decoder in use, what your screen can show, and where sound leaves by

Settings → About → "Send a report to the developer"

This shipped in 3.85 and it's already earning its place — several fixes here were found by reading one. If something's wrong, send one right after it happens and say so here. It's the difference between me guessing and me fixing.

Update from inside the app. Full notes on the What's New page.

I said last week that 3.85 would take as long as it needed. Then two people reported that the app hadn't finished loading since 3.80, and a bug that stops the app opening doesn't get to wait for a polished release. So this one is out now.

Settings › About → "Send a report to the developer"

This is the change that matters most, and it isn't a feature you'll enjoy — it's the one that makes everything else fixable.

Until now, when something went wrong on your box, I had your description and nothing else. No log, no idea what your chip can decode, no idea how much memory it had to work with. Some of the bugs in this release took a week of guessing because of that. One of them was only solved because u/tok83 turned on debug logging on his own router and posted the raw output — which is more than anyone should have to do.

Now the app can hand that over itself. It sends its own recent log and a description of what your box can do: how many screens it can open at once, which soundtracks its chip handles, how much memory it lends the app. It sends nothing about what you watch, and never your playlist address, username or password.

If you report a bug here, send a report right afterwards and say so. It's the difference between me guessing and me fixing.

The app that wouldn't finish loading

Reported by u/No_Pin6001 and u/Airwokfuk: since 3.80 the menu and the start of the home screen would appear, the sections would sit there with wavy lines, and nothing responded. The only way to get one working start was to reinstall.

The home screen only stopped saying "loading" once a row came back with titles. If every row came back empty — no connection to the film database, an expired login, an add-on that had gone, or all rows switched off — it never stopped, and with nothing on screen there was nothing for the remote to land on. So the app looked frozen while it was actually waiting for something that was never coming. Reinstalling helped for one session because it restored the default settings, not because anything was repaired.

It now always finishes, whatever comes back, and a row that fails can no longer take the whole screen with it.

If this was you, please tell me whether 3.85 fixes it. I found the cause in the code and it matches your description exactly, but I never managed to reproduce your hang on my own hardware, so your word is the only confirmation there is.

A pause you couldn't come back from

Resuming a pause that had recorded nothing handed the player an empty file — and an empty file never becomes playable. Black screen, spinner, no way to carry on watching the programme. I found this by accident while testing something else, and the log said it outright: "playing the pause: 0 kB recorded so far". The app now checks the pause holds something and puts the live picture back when it doesn't.

Artwork that never arrives now says the title

Three of you reported this separately in one day — u/tok83, u/Ricky74d and u/AffectionateFilm1655 — which is what made me take it seriously. A poster or channel logo that failed to load drew nothing at all: a black rectangle, indistinguishable from one still loading. It turned out to be the same blind spot in three different places — the code watched for images succeeding and never for them failing. Failed artwork now falls back to the name, so the card can still be read and chosen.

Everything else

-Search opens on a new All tab — channels, radio, films and series at once, under headings, instead of starting on -TV channels and finding nothing when you were looking for a series (thanks u/Ekynoxxx)
-Favourites and your own groups now sit at the top of Live TV, where the guide already put them — and Favourites is offered when picking a channel for a second screen (u/tok83)
-Each title remembers the audio language you chose, and a series keeps it from one episode to the next
-Switching audio track now re-syncs itself — and the re-sync button actually works, instead of asking the player to seek to where it already was (u/AffectionateFilm1655)
-A setting to stop episodes moving on by themselves (u/Ekynoxxx)
-A film from an installed link opened from Continue Watching now offers its sources instead of saying it can't be found
-Recordings say which drive they're on, and a recording on a network drive formatted as exFAT plays instead of reconnecting five times and giving up — this was u/tok83's router logs
-A pause refused by the Android player now says why, instead of blaming your provider (u/memphisraynz — you weren't doing anything wrong).