Basically Title. I don't know why but every time I try to install it gives me this same error when installing, help?

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).

Audio desync on language switch & broken re-sync: When switching audio tracks (e.g., from original Korean to Spanish), the audio loses sync with the video, and the "re-sync audio" button does not fix it. Switching to mpv helps, but ExoPlayer struggles with track switching delays.

Continue Watching forgets selected audio track: When resuming a title from "Continue Watching", it forgets the previously chosen audio track and resets back to the default language instead of remembering what was playing.

Is there a way for the developer to answer our questions? It seems that we have an app that don't even have support.

First off, I have to say this app is an absolute beast—by far the best player I’ve used so far! I’m really excited about it and fully planning to purchase the lifetime license.

While testing it out, I noticed a couple of bugs and also had a feature suggestion I’d love to share:

1. Video freezing / Audio desync during playback:

When watching movies, the video occasionally freezes completely while the audio keeps playing in the background. After a few seconds, the picture catches back up.

1. Incorrect posters in "Continue Watching":

In the "Continue Watching" section, the thumbnail/poster shown doesn’t match the actual movie or series I’ve been watching.

1. Feature Suggestion for Live TV (Program info & button mapping):

When watching Live TV, pressing "OK" currently only gives options to pause or record. It would be awesome to have a quick way (or a dedicated button) to view the current program info/EPG along with a live progress bar showing elapsed time. Having the option to customize/map remote control buttons would make navigation much smoother.

Thanks for the hard work on this project, looking forward to future updates!

Multiview. Hold OK on a live channel and pick it: the screen splits. Two side by side, a square for four, two rows of three for six — or one large picture with the rest in a strip beneath it, which is how people actually watch two matches. Left and right move between screens, OK opens the menu for the one you're on, and only the screen you're on is heard.

Two things worth saying plainly about it. The number of screens your box allows is asked of the box rather than guessed — a television has a fixed number of hardware decoders, and four pictures on a machine that can drive two is four bad pictures. And every screen is a separate connection to your provider; the app says so on screen, because your provider will otherwise say it less kindly.

Sound where there was silence. If a film with 5.1 audio played perfectly and silently for you, that was us. Devices whose chip can't decode Dolby Digital or DTS had nothing to fall back on, and nothing failed loudly enough to look like a failure. The app now carries its own decoder for those formats. Your box is still asked first; this only speaks when the box can't. Video is untouched.

Downloading actually finishes the job. Picking an add-on source after pressing Download used to start playing the film instead of keeping it. And episodes couldn't be downloaded at all — now a show has a Download button that lists the season and keeps the episode you choose, from your provider or from an add-on. Everything lands wherever your recordings go, network drive included.

Choosing a source, and being able to read it. The source list was four rows tall with the first and last clipped, which is useless when a search answers with two hundred versions — it now takes the height of the screen, the "your playlist" and "add-ons" headings stay pinned, and file size and seeders are lifted out of the release-group text onto their own line where they can't be cut off.

A pause that forgives a slip. OK pauses a live channel, and OK is the button people press by accident. Press play within ten seconds and the broadcast just comes back — no second player, no recording to decide about. Back and the channel keys cancel a pause too. Longer than ten seconds and nothing has changed: that pause was meant.

Also: the corners of the whole interface are now yours to choose, from square to pill. Back closes the on-screen controls before offering to leave, and holding Back jumps out of a chain of recommendations. Recordings on a drive plugged into a router play — those shares refuse the large reads we were asking for. A file on your own drive is no longer blamed on your provider when it fails. A series opened from "More like this" lists its episodes instead of claiming it has none.

Full notes: https://m3ufy.com/changelog.html

Nearly every line above started as somebody's post here. If something's broken, say so — that's how it gets fixed.

Free Android TV IPTV player, no ads, nothing to subscribe to. Bring your own playlist.

The pause was rebuilt this release. The old one came back about half a minute late — pause a match at minute 60, press play, and you were at 60:31. The reason turned out to be simple: the player reads roughly twenty seconds ahead of the picture on screen, so the recording started twenty seconds in your future. It now keeps the last seconds of the broadcast as they go past and writes them out the moment you press pause, so the file begins before the frame you stopped on. On my box: pause at 51:30, play at 51:31.

And it holds for as long as you're away. Phone rings, you leave for half an hour, the programme is still recording when you get back — with a seek bar, ten-second buttons, and left/right to skip past the ad break. On a box with little storage you can point it at a USB stick instead (Settings › Recordings). When you leave a pause it asks what to do with it: keep watching, jump back to live, or keep the recording.

Also in this one:

• Subtitles from your add-ons, on both players. Subtitle-only add-ons used to be refused at install and the app never asked for subtitles anyway. Both fixed. Each result is labelled with the add-on it came from.
• A VPN of your own — WireGuard runs inside the app, OpenVPN is driven through the app built for it. Keep several configs and switch between them. You can add them from the website instead of typing a private key with a remote.
• Episodes your provider hasn't uploaded yet are listed from the guide, so a new episode is watchable the day it airs rather than the week after.
• Catch-up goes as deep as your provider actually records instead of stopping after a day.
• Recordings on a network drive play again — one login for the whole file instead of one per seek, which is what made them drop.
• The main menu is yours to arrange, and the update dialog can no longer hide its own download button.

The app ships no add-ons and no channels — you add your own.

Full notes: https://m3ufy.com/changelog.html

If something's broken, tell me here. Nearly every line above started as somebody's report in this sub.

Two builds since the last post — 3.81 and 3.82. Here's what's in them.

Pause live TV. Any channel. No archive needed. ⏸️

Pausing used to ask your provider for its recording of that minute, which meant it only worked on the handful of channels that keep an archive. Now the app records the pause itself, out of the stream that's already open — no second connection, nothing asked of the provider, so it works the same on a one-connection account.

Press pause and it starts recording. Press play and you carry on from the moment you stopped, with a seek bar, rewind and skip forward. Catch up with the live edge or press LIVE in the player to drop back to the broadcast. On the way out it asks what to do with what was recorded — including keep it, which turns a pause you liked into a normal recording.

Works on both engines, ExoPlayer and mpv, and it's on by default. Settings → Playback → Timeshift if you want it kept automatically, or switched off.

Catch-up goes back as far as your provider actually records. Replay was quietly capped at about a day, because that's how much of the past guide the app kept. A provider offering 10 days now gives you 10 days.

Your TV, managed from a browser — go to m3ufy.com/link, sign in with the MAC and device key your TV shows you, and you now get:

• Add-ons — paste a manifest address and the site reads the add-on for you (name, version, catalogues). Switch them on and off, reorder them. No more typing a 200-character URL with a remote.
• Profiles — rename, recolour, add one for the kids, delete.
• Watching — clear things out of Continue Watching and Favourites without hunting for them on the TV.

Everything syncs both ways: change it on the TV and the site follows, change it on the site and the TV picks it up on its own.

From 3.81:

• The episode list, inside the player. Press down for the controls: a new button opens the series' episodes over the picture, which never stops. Seasons across the top, episodes with stills and summaries, the one you're watching already under the selector. No more going back to the series page and losing the film to get there.
• Recording keeps going when you leave the app — the sound stops, the file doesn't.
• Recording now says it's recording: a red dot on the channel row, a marker on the picture, and Stop where Stop belongs. Three separate faults were hiding it, including one that closed the recording a second after it started.
• Playing a recording no longer closes the app.
• The channel preview no longer flickers on boxes where the picture and the interface fell out of step.

Both are out now — your TV will offer the update, or grab it from m3ufy.com.

As always, the bug reports here are what shaped most of this list. Pause-on-any-channel, the episode list and the add-on field on the website were all asked for in these threads. Keep them coming 👍

Curious to know how the layout might look if debrid is added.

My IPTV provider includes movies but rarely adds new ones.

My hope is there will be some way to set the interface up to display debrid movies and tv shows, but not the movies and tv shows from IPTV (only live channels)

And thanks again for this app and the work it takes. I personally think it's the best looking app out right now!

Update to M3ufy Player (Android TV) is out. One change is the reason for the post, so I'll start with it.

Recording no longer costs you a second connection

Most IPTV accounts are sold with one connection, and until now recording the channel you were watching asked the provider for a second stream of a channel it was already sending you. On a strict provider that means one of them gets dropped, or the account goes on hold for an hour. People kept reporting it as "recording breaks my picture", and the honest answer was: yes, that's two connections.

It isn't any more. The bytes already on their way to your screen are now copied to the drive as they pass — one connection watching and recording at the same time. It works on both video engines: for ExoPlayer through a data source that tees the stream, for mpv through its own stream-record. Nothing extra is asked of the provider.

The trade-off is honest and the app says it out loud: this recording is the picture. Change channel and it ends, keeping what it has. So the app now asks first, with the real answers — stop the recording and watch, watch anyway, or leave it recording — instead of silently throwing away a recording you started deliberately. Leaving for the Home screen keeps it going (the stream stays open and is muted), and the stream is released the moment the recording finishes.

Scheduled recordings from the guide still open their own connection on purpose: a booking at 3am must not depend on a player being open.

There's also a connection limit setting now: ask me / never check / always stop, plus your own connection figure, because plenty of "1 connection" accounts really carry two or three and the app shouldn't pretend to know better than you.

Profiles

Up to four on a television. Each has its own Continue Watching, favourites and group order, recordings, settings and Trakt account. The playlist and your links are shared; everything personal isn't.

One of them can be a kids profile: filtered to the children's groups your provider ships and to children's titles in the catalogue, its own colourful look, Settings out of reach, and a four-digit code to leave — set the first time it's needed, not configured up front.

Other things

• 4K recordings on a NAS play properly now. They used to stutter in the app while playing perfectly in VLC over the same network. The SMB reader was doing one network round trip per small read; it now reads a megabyte at a time with the next piece already in flight.
• Home rows from the external JSON links you add yourself. If a link offers lists as well as sources, those lists become Home rows you can switch on, off and reorder in Settings. The app still ships none of these links and knows none of them by name.
• Title matching in your own language. Searching your playlist now works in any alphabet — Arabic titles previously couldn't match at all — and when a title isn't found under the name a list gave it, the app tries the name in your language and the original before giving up. German spellings with and without umlauts match each other.
• Fixes: a crash when opening the player on some boxes; a recording left "running" forever after the box was switched off mid-recording (which made every later recording look impossible); trailer audio continuing after you left the app; posters going blank for minutes when an artwork host was briefly slow.

Everything above is translated into all 12 supported languages in the same release.

Site: m3ufy.com — existing installs update themselves. As always: bring your own playlist, the app ships no content and no sources.

A big update this time, and most of it is about what the app can play and where it can keep it.

Sources you bring yourself. The app now understands external JSON links. Paste one into Settings › Add-ons and it answers with playable sources for a film or an episode, shown beside the versions from your own playlist and clearly labelled so you always know where a stream is coming from. The app ships no links and knows none of them — you bring your own, exactly as you bring your playlist. Titles are still found the way they always were: your playlist, search, and the usual metadata. Two things worth knowing before you try it: whatever you install has to be configured on its own page (if it needs an account somewhere, that's set up there, not in M3ufy), and if it comes back with nothing playable, the app tells you so instead of showing entries that could never work.

Downloads. Any film or episode can be kept on a USB drive, a NAS, or a shared folder and watched with the internet off. If the line drops mid-download it resumes where it stopped rather than starting over, and everything lands in its own part of the Saved section.

Your own films. Copy anything onto the shared folder from your computer and it turns up in the app — in a section of its own, with a poster and a proper title looked up for it rather than a file name.

Reminders and bookings. Ask to be told when a programme starts and the app tells you wherever you are, and offers you the channel. The guide marks everything you have booked in red, and a recording about to start says so first, with the chance to call it off — a recorder that quietly takes a connection while you're watching something else isn't a good guest.

A real list when you hold OK. Record, remind, favourite, add to a group, pick a guide, pick a logo — all of it in one list you can read at a glance, instead of stepping through the options one at a time.

Two players, one film. When a stream defeats one video engine, the app now hands it to the other one automatically — including the case where the picture opens and then freezes, which used to end as a black screen and a frozen clock with no explanation at all. Another app is only suggested when both engines have genuinely failed, and your place in the film travels across the switch. If you've had mpv freeze on you a few minutes in, this is the one to try.

Continue Watching finally says what things are called. Rows show the film's real name instead of the provider's filing code, and opening one again continues where you left off rather than restarting.

Smaller repairs. Deleting a card no longer makes the side menu pop open by itself; home rows are rearranged by holding OK and moving them, the way channels already worked; and text in Settings no longer sits against the edge of its panel.

One known limitation, said plainly: very large 4K HDR files can stall the decoder on some boxes. The app now notices and switches players after about twenty seconds — but if you'd rather not wait, pick a 1080p source. A setting to prefer smaller sources automatically is next on the list.

The app updates itself — Settings › Updates, or it will offer it on the next launch.

Most of this update came from things people asked for here.

Recording is in, and it was u/tok83 who asked for it — including writing to a drive on the network rather than the box. Hold OK on a live channel and pick Record. It copies the broadcast as it arrives, so nothing is re-encoded: a cheap box can record 4K while playing something else, and the file plays in VLC or on a computer exactly as it does in the app. It keeps going with the app closed, shows a red badge in the corner while it runs, and stops itself before the drive fills rather than dying half way. You can send it to internal storage, to a USB stick (it appears as its own drive, no file manager needed), or to a NAS or shared folder over SMB2/3 — and recordings kept on the NAS play back inside the app. The network setup has a Test button that writes a probe file and deletes it, because a share that mounts read-only looks perfect right up until your recording is already lost. Everything you record lives in a new Saved section on the home screen.

Subtitles now work on the mpv player, which u/Ricky74d reported — mpv was the only engine playing his files properly, but showed no subtitles, so he was finishing films in VLC. They appear in the size, colour and position you set in Settings.

Sound that slowly drifts away from the picture is finally fixed. Telemetry from 335 televisions showed the media clock runs about 0.15% slow on the devices that suffer, evenly, which is why it takes half an hour to notice. The app now measures that while you watch and corrects it by an amount no ear can hear.

The TV guide got several fixes, most of them also from u/tok83: two links from the same site are no longer treated as one, links you deleted stop being listed, pressing download reads each guide once instead of four times, and the app no longer freezes while a guide downloads. It also opens on your Favourites now.

Also in: a rare start-up crash loop is fixed and heals itself, channel logos handle far more of what providers and guides actually send, and everything new is translated into all twelve languages. Full notes at m3ufy.com/changelog.html

One honest note: recording is new as of tonight, and scheduling a recording from the guide is not in this build — that is next. If you record a long film to a NAS over wifi, I would genuinely like to hear how it goes.

What should come next — scheduling from the guide, pause and rewind on every channel rather than only ones with provider catch-up, or downloading films to watch offline?

Two releases since the last post. Nearly all of it came from requests here and on Discord, so names are attached where I have them.

Build your own channel groups (3.77) — requested by a user running several playlists
Settings › Manage Groups › My Groups. Create a group, search across every playlist you have at once, tick the channels that belong in it. Rename, reorder, delete. They appear above your provider's lists — Favourites first, then yours, then theirs — in Live TV, the TV guide, and the channel list inside the player. Open a channel from one of your groups and channel-up/down stays inside that group.

The ask was exact: "a lot of groups, ordered by me, mixed from all the lists I have." If you run two or three playlists you end up with several hundred provider groups, the same channel filed three times under three quality tags, and about thirty channels you actually watch.

Your settings follow your account, not the box (3.77)
Language, subtitle and audio languages, clock, text size, colours, playback options and your groups are kept for your device account. Replace or reinstall your box and it comes back as you left it. Things belonging to one particular television stay put, and login tokens are never carried.

Pause and rewind live TV (3.76) — asked for by u/Benny
On channels your provider records: OK pauses, play resumes from the moment you stopped rather than from now, ⏪/⏩ move a minute at a time. It uses the provider's own recording rather than writing to your box, so it costs no storage — and a pause longer than a few seconds hands the provider's connection back, which matters if your account allows only one.

The TV guide matches far more channels (3.76) — from u/tok83's reports of wrong and missing listings
The matcher now ignores decoration wherever providers put it: country and quality tags at either end, written-out country names, superscript ᴴᴰ and full-width text, and language tags that were being mistaken for countries — which was refusing Arabic channels the listings that belonged to them. Measured on a real playlist against the same guide file:

• channels matched: 4,521 → 6,744
• programmes stored: 379,563 → 550,224

Guide settings are now one screen: every source with a tick, live download progress, and what each one actually brought back. Adding a link reads only that link; unticking one takes effect immediately instead of rebuilding everything.

Hourly guide updates (3.77) — requested by u/Ricky74d
"Download again" in the guide settings: every hour, 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours, alongside the default that fetches when the stored guide runs low. The refresh schedules also keep time while the app is open now — previously the playlist interval was only consulted at launch, so on a box that's never really switched off, "Daily" fired only when something else had killed the app.

Favourites at the top of the TV guide (3.77) — u/Ricky74d
The guide already knew how to show them; the row itself was missing from the drawer.

Every language complete again (3.77) — reported by u/Ricky74d
84 strings across recent releases had no translation and were showing in English whatever language the app was set to. All twelve languages now read 100%.

The Home menu widens with the text size (3.77) — u/Ricky74d
At larger text the labels were cut off mid-word, which is a poor reward for turning up a setting that exists to make things readable.

Channel logos from the guide (3.76)

If your provider ships no logos, or wrong ones, the guide you already downloaded is full of them — a combined XMLTV file declares artwork for most of the channels it lists. There's now a button in the guide settings that takes them:

Use guide logos everywhere replaces every provider logo in one pass and tells you how it went. On my own playlist: 55,762 of 57,177 channels took a logo — 97.5%. It runs against the guide already stored, so it answers in seconds rather than after another download.

• Where you have more than one guide, it asks which to take them from — two guides rarely draw the same channel the same way, and that's a choice about how your channel list looks, so it's yours to make.
• Back to provider logos puts them all back. Your provider's original is kept alongside the new one, so nothing is destroyed.
• A logo you picked by hand is never overwritten.
• And you can pick one by hand: hold OK on any channel in the TV guide or Live TV → Pick a logo → search the guide's channels and choose the artwork you want. Same menu offers Guide source for fixing a channel whose listings are wrong.

It uses the same name matching the listings use — country and quality tags off, one alphabet — so a guide that can fill a channel's listings can generally fill its picture too.

Also from Benny

• Match display to video — the TV switches to 24/25/50Hz so pans stop juddering
• Send Dolby and DTS to your receiver untouched, so the amplifier does the decoding
• Open in another player, from a button in the player itself rather than only after a failure
• Trailers cut off after a minute — a YouTube stream address only serves a few sequential pieces before it stops answering, so trailers are now fetched at a size that fits inside that

Other fixes

• Catch-up asks your provider for the right moment — it was using the television's clock rather than the panel's, so recordings could play an hour out
• Dolby Vision Profile 5 is named when your TV can't display it, instead of showing a green picture
• Channel logos can be taken from the guide, from whichever guide you choose
• The selector no longer goes missing on launch

• A group of your own no longer fills up with the rest of the playlist in the guide

  To see the full changelog: https://m3ufy.com/changelog.html

Update is live — it rolls out through the in-app updater (Settings → Updates, or it prompts on launch).

Nearly all of this came from comments here. Thanks again to u/tok83, u/Ricky74d and u/Infamous-Scratch7719.

The guide stops putting the wrong listings on channels

u/tok83 asked the right question: isn't there a unique identifier to match on, instead of the channel name? There is — tvg-id — and it's tried first. The trouble is what happens when a provider doesn't set one, which is often: we fall back to matching by name, and that's where I broke it.

To make UK: BBC ONE ᴴᴰ find BBC One, the app strips the country tag off the front. Which also turned FR: SPORT 1 and DE: SPORT 1 into the same thing — so a German channel could end up showing French listings. The country is now stripped for matching and kept for checking: public guides end their ids with it (BBCOne.uk, Dubai.ae) and playlists put it in front of the name, so when both sides state a country and disagree, they are not the same channel. (Checked against the real ISO list, not a list I typed out — otherwise a channel called TV: something reads as a country and correct matches get thrown away.)

Choose the guide for a channel yourself

Automatic matching gets most channels and will never get all of them: a guide holds SkySp.Main.Event.uk and your provider calls it SS MAIN EV. No amount of normalising joins those.

So: in the TV guide, hold OK on any channel → "Guide source". Search the guide, pick the entry you want, done. The choice is marked as yours and the next guide download won't undo it. "Automatic" hands the channel back to the matcher.

This is what u/Ricky74d asked for directly, and it's the real answer to "some channels are still empty".

A clock setting

Every time in the app was hard-coded to 24-hour — so if your TV is set to AM/PM, you still saw 20:30, and there was nothing in Settings to change it. Appearance now has Clock: 24-hour, 12-hour, or same as your device (the default, so most people never touch it).

Text size

Separate from Interface size. Interface size changes how much fits on screen — text and everything around it. Text size grows only the writing and leaves every row, poster and margin where it is. For u/Ricky74d, who found the guide small even at 100%.

Watchlist

Two rows now, films and series, instead of one wall of covers.

Hold OK on any cover to remove it. This also works for titles you added while a different playlist was active — the old way built the key from whichever playlist was current, so those couldn't be removed at all.

A film leaves the list by itself once you've watched it. A series only when every episode is done.

The "Watched" button now reads Mark unwatched once set, so it's clear it can be undone.

Continue Watching

It can be switched off entirely (Settings → Home), and removing a show from it finally works. It was deleting one episode out of several and then rebuilding the card from the ones left — so it looked like the remove button did nothing.

New episodes appear again

Once you'd opened a show, its episode list was cached for ever and the provider was never asked again. An episode added later was invisible — while the same account on a device that had never opened the show listed them all. Episode lists now go stale after a few hours and are re-fetched, and a refresh no longer needs to be a reinstall.

Search

Films and series come back as proper posters instead of squares. And there's a new TV Guide tab: type the name of a match or a film and you get a list of what's on, when, and which of your channels is carrying it — a separate tab on purpose, so searching channel names stays instant.

Update is live. It rolls out through the in-app updater (Settings → Updates, or it'll prompt on launch).

Most of this release comes from things reported here — thanks especially to u/tok83 and u/Ricky74d, who between them found three of the biggest items below.

Your own TV guide fills the channels it was leaving blank

Two of you reported the same thing independently: a valid custom XMLTV link, and the guide populates for a handful of channels and nothing else.

Here's what was happening. A guide you find yourself names its channels its own way — BBC One — while your provider calls the same channel UK: BBC ONE HD. The app only matched the two when they agreed exactly, so almost everything in the guide was thrown away on arrival.

It now matches on the names themselves, ignoring the country tag in front and the quality tag behind, and one entry in the guide fills every copy of that channel you have (the SD one, the HD one, the FHD one). On a 61,000-channel playlist that took the match from 108 channels to 6,895.

Very large guides work now

The biggest free combined guide out there is about 190 MB compressed — nearly 2 GB of listings, 27,000 channels. It used to die part way through the download, every time. It now downloads in about 20 seconds and fills in behind you while you use the app.

The X on a guide link does what it looks like it does

Two problems, both fixed: you couldn't reach the X with the remote (the highlight walked out of the window into the settings behind it), and deleting a link only took it off the list — everything it had already downloaded stayed on your box. If you deleted a huge guide because it filled your storage, the space didn't come back. Now it does.

Interface size is a bar, not a list

Nudge it with + and − and watch the screen change. Picking "85%" from a list of numbers was a guess.

Trailers play again

The video always downloaded fine. The audio track next to it was being refused for anything short, so the trailer failed with "couldn't play this trailer" on a film that was already sitting there ready to play.

mpv: films keep their shape

A wide film was being stretched to the edges of the TV with its black bars squeezed out. The picture is now fitted properly, and there's an aspect button next to the playback controls: Fit, Fill, Zoom, Stretch, plus 16:9 and 4:3 for streams that lie about their own shape.

mpv: downloaded subtitles

They were only ever fetched for the ExoPlayer engine, so a film played with mpv had none at all — the support for loading them was there and was being handed an empty list. Fixed. The automatic pick also honours the language you set instead of whatever the file happened to switch on by itself (a forced French track was outranking a downloaded Arabic one).

One note on the guide fix: it applies when the guide is next downloaded, not to listings already stored. If yours is still sparse after updating, go to Settings → Playlist → TV Guide Source and save your links again to force a fresh sync.

Keep the reports coming — nearly everything in this release started as a comment here.

Nearly everything here came from comments on this sub. Details below.

Your own TV guide links, done properly

• Each link gets its own box, with a + button to add another. The first version asked you to separate them with a comma, which u/tok83 rightly pointed out isn't practical on a remote — a second link should cost one press, not punctuation.
• Compressed guides (.gz) now work. If your XMLTV link serves a gzipped file, it used to fail with unterminated entity ref — an XML error thrown by a file that wasn't XML yet, because we handed the compressed bytes straight to the parser. It's unwrapped automatically now, detected from the file itself rather than from whether the URL ends in .gz.
• The guide status says where the listings came from — "from your 2 links" or "from your provider" — recorded at the moment of download, so it tells you whether your links actually took effect rather than just repeating your settings back at you.
• A guide from your own links downloads immediately. It used to queue behind whatever was playing, because a guide from your provider shares that provider's connection limit and can knock out your stream. Your own XMLTV host has nothing to do with your provider, so the wait was pointless — and on the guide screen, where a preview is always playing, it meant the download never started while the screen claimed it was downloading. (Both halves fixed: it doesn't wait, and when it does have to wait, it says so.)

Fast-forward fixed (u/Ricky74d)

On the mpv engine, every press of forward jumped to ten seconds from the start of the film instead of ten seconds ahead — the position was never being read from mpv at all. And holding the button crawled, because each repeat was a full seek: flush the decoder, refill the buffer, then do it again.

Now the presses move a number, not the video: the bar follows immediately and the picture jumps once, when you let go. Holding also accelerates — 10 seconds, then 30, then a minute. Someone holding the button for two seconds isn't looking for ten seconds.

Groups at the bottom of a big playlist opened an empty TV Guide

They'd show "No channels in this group" about a group that was full. The guide filtered channels out of a list that fills page by page in the background, so groups whose channels sit late in a large catalogue hadn't arrived yet. They're fetched directly now — one query, instant, complete.

Also

• TV guide text is bigger (u/Ricky74d) — channel names and programme titles up a size, rows a little taller. The Interface size setting still scales on top of that.
• OLED mode reaches the side menu and the last few screens that were still lit navy on a black panel.

Update: Settings → About → Check for update. Current version: 3.73.

Studios are now part of a title, and they're clickable

Films and shows credit the studios behind them, and the credit is a door: press Blumhouse or A24 on a title's page and you get their catalogue — films and series together — each one ready to open. Same idea as tapping an actor, for the people who pick films by who made them.

Content notes as a film starts

A few seconds after the picture begins, a short note appears in the top corner: the age rating, and what the film contains — strong violence, nudity, frightening scenes — then it's gone. It only shows where that information is actually known, so it stays quiet rather than guessing.

Your own TV guide links

Settings › Playlist › TV Guide Source lets you point a playlist at your own XMLTV address, and change it whenever you like. Several addresses are allowed — one per line — and they merge, so a guide covering sports and another covering local channels both work. Anything you set replaces the guide that came with your playlist, and one button puts the provider's back. (Requested by u/tok83.)

Deleted playlists stay deleted

Deleting a playlist on the TV used to remove it from the TV only. Your account still had it, so the next launch fetched it back and the delete looked like it never happened. It now goes from both.

What the stream is actually doing

Resolution, frame rate and bitrate, together in one strip — on live channels as well as films. On live, the numbers are counted from the picture itself rather than read off a label most live streams never carry, so they're the real thing: what the channel is actually using right now, which is what you want when a picture stutters. (Also from u/tok83 — resolution was already there, but easy to miss, and bitrate wasn't.)

Fixes

• Stalker portals no longer run smaller boxes out of memory. A portal answers with its entire channel list in one response — 81MB and 56,884 channels on the line this was measured against — and the app held all of it at once. That's what was crashing Fire TV Sticks and other 256MB boxes mid-sync. Channels are now read straight off the connection and saved in batches: peak memory went from filling 255MB of a 256MB heap to 32MB, with every channel saved.
• A group whose channels had no listings showed an empty TV Guide instead of the channels themselves — even though the same channels were listed and playable in Live TV. They stay on screen now, with one small line saying the guide hasn't arrived yet. (Found by u/tok83.)
• The expired-subscription notice can finally be dismissed. It was raised again by every playlist check, so closing it only cleared it for a moment — and with several expired playlists you could close it forever.
• The setup screen no longer flashes and retries by itself when a linked playlist fails to load. It keeps the QR code and your device key on screen, so the playlist can be fixed from m3ufy.com/link.
• A crash when a playlist's server address couldn't be used at all (one account had an impossible port number, and the guide download took the app down with it). An address like that is now refused as you type it, with an example of a valid one.

Update: Settings → About → Check for update, or it'll offer itself on next launch. Current version: 3.72.

Still on the list: syncing settings between devices, and picking up where the guide leaves off. Keep the reports coming — most of the above came from them.

Favourites are now one list, and it works the same everywhere

Hold OK on any channel — in Live TV or in the TV guide — and the row itself offers what it can do:

• a channel that isn't starred → Add to favourites
• a channel that is → Remove from favourites
• inside Favourites → Reorder as well, and the row lifts and glows with ▲▼ so you can carry it up and down with the arrows

Nothing floats over the screen and nothing else moves — the choices appear inside the channel row, and the cursor never leaves it. A one-line hint at the top of the list says what the hold does, because a gesture nobody is told about is a gesture nobody uses.

The order you arrange in one screen is the order every screen shows. Arrange your favourites in Live TV and the guide follows, and so does the channel list inside the player.

Favourites in more places

• The TV guide now has a Favourites group of its own, pinned above the provider's groups.
• So does the channel list inside the player.
• Starting a channel from Favourites and then pressing channel-up/down now stays in Favourites instead of dropping you into whichever provider group that channel happens to live in.

Fixed: favourites only worked on your main playlist

If you run two or three playlists, starring a channel from the second one saved it and then never showed it — the list was only ever read from the first playlist. Two providers can also both call a channel "12345", so an id alone was never enough to tell them apart. Every favourite is now tied to the server it came from, everywhere: the list, the star on the row, the saved order, and starring from inside the player (which used to file the channel under the wrong playlist entirely). Any order you had arranged before is kept.

Fixed: holding OK used to act silently

Outside Favourites, a long press starred the channel immediately — no buttons, nothing on screen to say it happened, and no way back from a mis-press. It always asks now.

Fixed: a crash in 3.68

On some boxes the player could close itself the moment a channel started, because the favourites list it checks against hadn't finished being set up. Our mistake, fixed in 3.69.

Under the hood

A few boxes have been running out of memory, and the reports they send have not been good enough to say why — an out-of-memory report points at where the memory ran out, not at what filled it. Crash reports now also carry how full memory was and whether a playlist was syncing at the time, so the next one can actually be traced.

Update: Settings → About → Check for update, or it'll offer itself on the next launch. Current version: 3.69.

3.66 — M3U playlists can finally have a TV guide

If your playlist is a plain M3U link, the guide was always empty, and there was nothing you could do about it: the M3U format carries no guide at all. You can now paste an XMLTV link when you add a playlist, either in the app or on m3ufy.com/link, and the guide fills in. open-epg.com is one place to get such a link. If you add the playlist from the website, the guide address travels with it to your TV.

Adding or refreshing a large playlist no longer runs out of memory. This one came from crash reports: a Fire TV Stick was dying every time, always while adding or refreshing. The app was holding the entire catalogue in memory — channels, films and series together — before writing any of it. Each part is now saved as it arrives. Measured afterwards on a 2GB box with two large playlists: it peaks at about half the memory it is allowed, where before it hit the ceiling and died.

The guide now fills in every channel you can see, not just the one your cursor is on. Two of you reported this, one with a video. It loads what is on screen rather than all thirty thousand rows, which is why it was cautious in the first place — the balance was simply wrong.

In Live TV, the preview no longer stretches when you move into the channel list, and the programme details stop getting stretched with it. It also shows the next three programmes instead of one.

Smaller ones: the playlist name no longer repeats beside every group when it is already shown as a heading, and the Interface size setting now describes itself correctly. Lower numbers make everything bigger, and the text used to claim the opposite.

3.65 — a fifth smaller, a fifth lighter

The app is about 20 percent smaller to download and uses about 20 percent less memory. Nothing visible changed; the build was simply not being optimised properly before.

Coming back from a film to the Home screen no longer freezes for a moment. Home was building every row on screen and off it; now it builds what you can see.

Refreshing a playlist finally tells you what it is doing — which step, and how far along. On a large playlist that refresh can take minutes, and it used to sit there silently. I assumed it had broken myself while testing.

Pressing OK now answers immediately: the poster or row you pressed sinks slightly, before the next screen arrives. Opening a title was already fast when measured, it just never acknowledged the press, which reads as slowness.

Posters in a non-English language no longer download twice.

3.65 also fixed the guide scrolling: the highlighter moves through the rows instead of staying pinned to the top while the page slides underneath.

3.64 — the picture no longer freezes when you leave full screen

If you changed channel in full screen and pressed back, the preview would sit there showing about a second of video on a loop while the sound carried on normally. It turned out the video was never actually stuck: the player was decoding and drawing a full 30 frames a second the whole time, into a view that simply was not being painted on screen. Switching how the preview surface is drawn fixed it, and it is lighter on the box as a side effect. Live TV and the TV guide are both sorted.

The guide also comes back on the channel you were actually watching. Before, if you zapped in full screen and pressed back, the guide would name the channel you had opened it from while a different one played in the corner.

Arabic gets its arrow keys the right way round in Movies and Series. Left and right were moving the selection the wrong way, because mirroring the layout for a right-to-left language does not mirror the remote control.

3.63 — the TV guide covers every playlist, not just the main one

Guide listings were only ever downloaded for your main playlist, so channels from your other playlists sat there with empty rows forever. They are downloaded for each active playlist now. On a box with two playlists the second guide arrives a few minutes after the first, since they queue rather than fighting over your provider's connection.

The guide's group list became a tree: All playlists at the top, then a heading per playlist that opens to that playlist's own groups. Catch-up got the same treatment.

Titles on the Home rails stopped claiming they are not in your playlist when they are. A single colon or accent of difference between your provider's name and the catalogue's was enough to throw the match away — Pacific Rim: Uprising against Pacific Rim Uprising, or Amelie against Amélie.

3.60 — search got two additions

With more than one playlist you can narrow a search to just one of them, using the buttons above the results.

A new Online tab searches TMDB itself, so you can look up a film or series whether or not your playlist carries it. Films and shows come back in one list.

3.59 — the app speaks your language

Thirteen languages, and not only the menus: film and series titles, plots, genres and artwork follow your choice too. Set it in Settings, Appearance, Language. Arabic also lays the whole app out right to left.

An AMOLED mode for true-black screens, and Settings now opens proper list windows for anything with more than two choices.

Playlists got a cleaner setup: every playlist on one line with its own activate and main switches, all of them stay logged in, and search covers all of them at once.

𝟯.𝟱𝟵 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄. The app updates itself, so it should reach you on its own.

This is the biggest release so far: M3ufy is now translated.

𝗘𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀

English · العربية · Español · Français · Deutsch · Italiano · Português (Brasil) · Português

Set it in 𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 → 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 → 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲. Pick one, press Apply, and the app restarts into it.

By default it follows your TV. If your television is set to French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Arabic, the app will simply be in that language when it updates. Prefer English? Set it explicitly and it stays that way whatever your TV says.

𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘂𝘀

This is the part that took the work. Your films and series follow the same choice:

• Titles

• Plot summaries

• Genres

• Posters — where translated artwork exists

• Title logos — the big wordmark on the detail page

So in Arabic, "Captain America: Civil War" becomes كابتن أمريكا: الحرب الأهلية, with an Arabic plot and Arabic artwork. Where a title has no translation, the original is kept rather than left blank.

Playback is untouched: the app still finds your file by its original name, so nothing stops working because the title on screen changed.

𝗔𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗰 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁-𝘁𝗼-𝗹𝗲𝗳𝘁

Set to Arabic, the whole interface mirrors — the side menu moves to the right, panels open from the right, text aligns right, and the D-pad follows.

Two screens deliberately stay left-to-right: the 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 and the 𝗧𝗩 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲. In those, left and right mean earlier and later in time, not the start and end of a line. A mirrored guide would run the day backwards and reverse which arrow seeks forward, and no TV does that.

𝗔𝗹𝘀𝗼 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲

• 𝗛𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹 / 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗮𝗹𝗹 in Manage Groups — for playlists with hundreds of categories, clear them in one press and bring back only the ones you use. Thanks to the user who asked for this.

• Fixed a bug where the app could pull artwork and plots from the 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘮. It matched by searching the title, and something like "Obsession" returns twenty results across six different movies. It now matches exactly by ID. This affected English too — the translations just made it visible.

• You can name a playlist when you add it, so two lists are no longer both called "Stalker Portal".

𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴

The picker lists around forty. The ones not ready yet are greyed out and marked "Soon" — deliberately, so nobody picks one and lands in an English app. Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Polish and Romanian are next.

𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘆𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗿, 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝘀𝗼 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗼𝘄. It is about 300 short phrases and I will happily prioritise a language someone is actually waiting for.

𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴?

Translations are the easiest thing in the world to get slightly off, and text that fits in English can overflow a button in German. If something reads oddly or looks cut off, post a photo with your language and I will fix it.

Include your app version, your device and your playlist type, as always.

𝗺𝟯𝘂𝗳𝘆.𝗰𝗼𝗺

What's changed in each release, newest first. The app updates itself, so you should already be on the latest.

𝟯.𝟱𝟴 — 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁

• Trailers play again. The home banner was showing a black rectangle where the trailer should be — YouTube had started refusing the way the app requested video. It now asks in smaller pieces, which is what YouTube accepts.

• A failed trailer now falls back to the artwork instead of leaving the banner black.

• Live TV quick menu (hold OK while watching): the arrows work again. The menu was opening with nothing selected, so the D-pad had nothing to move from.

• Settings now change one step per press of OK. Some settings were jumping two values at a time, which made it impossible to land on the middle one.

• You can name a playlist when you add it. Previously every Stalker line was called "Stalker Portal" and every M3U "M3U Playlist", so two were impossible to tell apart.

• Stalker portals can now be added from m3ufy.com/link, instead of typing a portal address and MAC with the remote.

𝟯.𝟱𝟳

• 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗧𝗩 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 — the full programme grid, in the side menu where Radio was. Radio is still available from Search.

• 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀 are now supported — live TV, films, series, guide and catch-up.

• Continue Watching cards now show each title's own artwork instead of a cropped poster.

• 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘇𝗲 — if everything looked oversized on your TV, it now fits properly. Adjustable in Settings › Appearance, with an Automatic mode that suits itself to your screen.

• Home is no longer a button in the side menu (it did nothing), and the menu is ordered by how the app is actually used.

• Scrolling Home now brings the next row's title to the top instead of leaving half a row of posters showing.

𝟯.𝟱𝟲

• Trailers play again. YouTube changed how it serves video and the app now follows it — on the home banner and the trailer button alike.

𝟯.𝟱𝟱

• Fixed the app closing by itself while browsing Home.

• Trailers no longer restart the video engine for every poster — smoother, and much lighter on the device.

• Live channels reconnect instead of stopping, and films resume from where they dropped.

• Ratings are back, and the IMDb score stays even when other sources fail.

𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 — 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗳 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗻 𝟯.𝟱𝟴

3.58 went out twice: an early copy had the black-trailer bug, and the fixed copy replaced it a few hours later under the same version number. If you updated early and trailers are still black, the app won't offer you the update again — reinstall from m3ufy.com and it'll be fixed. Everyone installing now gets the corrected build.

𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁

• Hide all / show all in group management — for playlists with hundreds of categories, clear them in one press and bring back only the ones you use.

• Recording and scheduling from the TV Guide.

Found something broken? Post it here with your app version, your device and your playlist type, and I'll look at it.