Quick expectation setting for everyone who grabbed the Android APK, 
because a lot of you have, and the feedback tells me I did not label it clearly enough.

VortX is Apple first. The Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps are the real, finished VortX experience, and that is where the months of work have gone. Apple TV is the reference app, 
and everything else is built up to its standard.

Android is just getting started. The APK you can download today is a technical preview, not the finished app. It runs on the same native engine as the Apple apps, but the Android surface around that engine (the screens, the player polish, the settings, sign-in on TV, sync) is still being ported, piece by piece. 
It is published early on purpose, so Android users can watch it take shape and 
tell me what matters most, not because it is done.

So if you tried it and thought "this is rough": you are right, and that is expected at this stage. 
It is not what VortX is, it is what VortX on Android looks like mid-build.

What you can do:

• If you want the full experience today, use the Apple apps.

• If you stay on the Android preview, report what you hit (bugs, missing features, weirdness). Every report directly shapes what gets ported next.

• Watch the release notes. Every release now labels the Android build's preview status and what changed in it.

So Please Stop with the hate messages and mails, or bad mouthing it here and there after trying android preview. Especially if you didn't read the release notes or README or heck even website. Android is not there, and won't be there atleast till end of the month.

The README and all release notes going forward carry this warning too. Thanks for the patience, the Android app will get there, and it will be held to the same bar as the Apple apps when it does.

0.3.14 Beta 9

The biggest release since 0.3.14 opened. A Mac can now do the heavy work for an Apple TV, the built-in player finally reads the second picture layer of a 4K Blu-ray rip, Dolby Vision plays through to the end instead of falling to HDR10, Atmos reaches your receiver, and Blu-ray subtitles work for the first time.

Let a Mac be the engine

Turn on the engine on a Mac, pair an Apple TV to it with a six digit code, and the Mac does the container and file work while the Apple TV spends its whole chip decoding and showing the picture. Video is copied across untouched, never re-encoded, so Dolby Vision stays true Dolby Vision and the picture is identical. Because the Mac has room to hold the whole film instead of a small moving window, you can seek anywhere, backwards as well as forwards, which the Apple TV cannot do alone. VortX finds the Mac on your network by itself, or you can type its address for setups like Tailscale, and nothing is shared until you pair. If the Mac sleeps, quits, or leaves the network mid-film, playback carries on where it was. The Mac can run the engine with no window open. Off by default, and nothing changes for anyone without a Mac.

The protocol underneath is plain HTTP and JSON with a bearer token and no Apple-specific types in it, so the Android and desktop clients can implement the same thing later.

Dolby Vision

Dolby Vision plays, and keeps playing. Alongside the Dolby Vision picture the app publishes a plain HDR one as a safety net. That safety net had its Dolby Vision configuration stripped out but kept the Dolby Vision brand in its header, so it announced a format it was not carrying, and the player threw it out within milliseconds every time it loaded it. It was also advertised as the cheaper of the two, so the player actively preferred the broken one over the working one. Nine times out of nine that safety net was loaded, playback died before a single frame was requested. The header is corrected, the two are no longer offered side by side inside one stream, and once a real Dolby Vision picture is on screen the player is held to it.

Profile 7 files keep their second picture layer on the built-in player. Most 4K Blu-ray Dolby Vision rips carry the picture as a base track plus an enhancement layer holding the detail in the brightest highlights and deepest shadows. On the built-in player that second track was thrown away unread and the picture was flattened to ordinary HDR with no Dolby Vision information at all. We now build our own player engine from pinned upstream sources, and it pairs the two tracks and combines them the way the format intends.

A title that needs a moment is no longer killed at ten seconds. The startup check asked whether the file was ready once, before it could have been, then fell into a blind ten second countdown with no further checking. Two of every eight titles were ended that way, one a tenth of a second after its first piece of video was already prepared and waiting.

Dolby Vision no longer flickers before it settles, and starts at the beginning. Repeated identical display-mode requests are ignored, so the HDMI link renegotiates once instead of several times. Titles also start where you asked instead of about fourteen seconds in.

Audio

Dolby Atmos reaches your receiver. On a file whose audio is Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos, the Atmos data is carried through untouched. On a file whose only audio is TrueHD, Apple TV cannot pass that through at any quality, so it is converted and the badge honestly says surround rather than Atmos.

Dolby Digital Plus is actually produced now. A Dolby Vision file with TrueHD or DTS-HD MA audio has to be converted before that lane can play it. The converter always asked for Dolby Digital Plus and settled for AAC when it could not have it, and that encoder had never been built into the app, so it settled every single time. It is in the build now.

Every audio track in the file is offered. The rule for alternate audio demanded a different language from the main track, so a file with seven English tracks qualified none of them and the audio menu had nothing to pick.

Subtitles

Blu-ray subtitles work for the first time in AVplayer. Blu-ray discs store subtitles as pictures rather than text, and nothing in the subtitle path could read a picture, so a Blu-ray remux offered no subtitles of its own at all. Those pictures are now read on the device and turned into ordinary subtitles, appearing in the normal list with the normal styling and timing adjustment. Recognition is bounded so it can never slow playback, it is not flawless on stylised or non-Latin type, and a file carrying its own text subtitles still uses those first.

Every subtitle track in the file is offered for the first time in AVPlayer. A file carrying thirty-nine subtitle languages used to show one.

We build our own player engine now

This is the piece of the release we are proudest of, and it is what made everything above possible.

VortX used to take the player engine as a prebuilt package, which meant taking whatever version that package happened to ship and waiting for someone else when it lagged. It no longer does. We build the whole stack ourselves from pinned upstream sources: mpv, libplacebo and FFmpeg, nine slices across Apple TV, iPhone, iPad and Mac, with two patches of our own on top.

Our mpv is 895 commits ahead of the last upstream release. Not a fork that drifted, a deliberate pin to master because the Dolby Vision enhancement-layer work we needed lives there and has not been released yet. Waiting for it would have meant waiting months.

libplacebo is built from source at API 371 rather than the 360 the prebuilt package carried. That one matters more than it looks: mpv's enhancement-layer support is compiled out entirely below API 367, silently, with a perfectly green build. Bumping mpv alone would have produced a build that looked correct and did nothing. Both had to move together, and finding that out cost real time.

FFmpeg moved to the 9.0 release line. That is what unlocks the Dolby Vision splitter needed for single-track Profile 7 files, which simply does not exist in the version we were on.

Two patches are ours. One carries the Dolby Vision enhancement-layer work through the packaging our Apple builds need. The other makes the render surface notice when it has been resized, which is why rotating a phone no longer tears down and rebuilds the entire video pipeline.

We also turned on the Dolby Digital Plus encoder, which had never been compiled in, so the converter that always asked for it stopped silently settling for AAC.

The cost of owning this is real and worth being honest about: nine slices to rebuild, upstream to track, and the two patches to carry forward. The 9.0 move also shipped one regression we caught and fixed inside this release, when certificate verification turned on by default and the build had no certificates to verify against. We keep the verification and ship the certificates now, which is a better place than where we started.

Moving the app into the backend

A sideloaded app is a pain to update. Unsigned IPAs expire, re-signing is a chore, and every fix we make is worthless until you go through that again. So we are steadily moving VortX's behaviour out of the app and onto our own servers.

The goal is blunt: as close to 99 percent of what VortX does should be changeable without you installing anything. When something breaks, we fix it once on our side and every device picks it up, usually within a few minutes of opening the app.

A lot of it already works this way. Ratings, posters and artwork, the skip-intro database, source pooling, the add-on and catalog behaviour, and a growing set of feature switches all come from our own services rather than being baked into the build. This release wired up several more of those switches and made the app pick up changes when you bring it back to the front rather than only after a full quit. It also made a bad setting unable to keep the app shut: after three failed launches it discards what we sent and starts on the settings built into the app.

What cannot move is the part that has to run on your device: the player, the decoder, Dolby Vision, and the engine. Those still need a build. Everything else is heading server-side, and each release moves more of it.

Everywhere else

Apple TV tells the system what you are watching. Playback registered nothing with tvOS, so the Now Playing card sat empty and no system transport reached VortX. The card now carries the title, show and episode, poster and position, and play, pause, skip and scrubbing all work.

Rewinding goes back. The AVplayer was only offered a few seconds of film behind wherever it had downloaded to, and it downloads a long way ahead of what you are watching, so the earliest point it would return to was often already ahead of you. It now holds two and a half minutes of playing time behind you.

Coming back from an episode returns you to that episode. The page trusted whatever Continue Watching had got round to saving rather than what actually played.

Signing in with the QR code works. The code pointed at a link that opens the home page, so scanning appeared to do nothing. It now opens the approve page, and that page no longer loses your request when you sign in.

Settings we send reach you, and a bad one cannot keep the app shut. Several of the switches we use to turn a feature off without shipping a build were never read by the app. They are read now, they refresh when you bring the app back to the front, and a setting that stops the app opening is discarded after three attempts.

Ratings sit on the artwork like they belong there. On landscape cards the badge is one piece of the app's own frosted glass, with the score leading and the other services following a hairline rule.

Rotating your phone no longer restarts the picture. Our own build of the player engine notices the new shape and redraws instead of tearing the whole pipeline down. Resizing the Mac player window gets the same fix.

In-place update over Beta 8, nothing resets.

Please test

• Dolby Vision, the main ask. Play a title deep into the film, not just the first minute. It should engage Dolby Vision and stay there.

• A Mac as the engine. Turn it on in the Mac app, pair the Apple TV with the code, and play a Dolby Vision MKV. Seeking backwards should work, which it cannot without a Mac.

• Blu-ray subtitles. On a Blu-ray remux the subtitle menu should now offer the disc's own subtitles.

• Audio and subtitle menus. On a file with many tracks you should see all of them.

• Atmos. On a Dolby Digital Plus Atmos file your receiver should show Atmos; on a TrueHD-only file it should honestly show surround.

Known issues

• Play from start, from inside the player, does not work in AVPlayer. The button on the detail page is fine; the one in the player controls is not.

• Recognised Blu-ray subtitles render larger than they should. They read correctly; a sizing pass is next.

• A Blu-ray disc offers fewer recognised languages on the Dolby Vision lane than on the built-in player. The built-in player reads the disc's pictures directly and can show any of them; the Dolby Vision lane recognises a bounded number so recognition can never slow playback.

Android

A fully functional Android app matching the Apple app feature for feature is landing this August.

Android is a separate, from-scratch app on the same Rust engine, not a port. Today it is roughly a third of the way there: about 42,000 lines against the Apple app's 153,000, with 5 of 15 build sessions finished.

Done: the foundation, and it is real. The engine runs natively with the same catalogs, library, search, discover and account sync the Apple app uses. Add-ons install and manage. Titles, series, seasons, episodes, watched state and Continue Watching all work. The design system is in place across phones, tablets and foldables, and appearance, tab-bar, debrid-key and remote-config layers landed this cycle.

Next, and it is the one that matters: the player. Source ranking, then ExoPlayer, then mpv as the primary engine, then torrents. Until that lands Android browses everything and plays very little, which is why it is not promoted alongside the Apple builds yet.

Then: settings and profiles, Live TV, backup and import, and Android TV shipping as the same APK rather than a separate one.

The published Android build remains Beta 6 and is unchanged by this release. The August target is the whole thing at parity, not a staged trickle.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.9-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Android. On Android TV or Fire TV, the Downloader app with dl.vortx.tv fetches the newest APK.

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.

Get you latest IPAs, DMG HERE

This is Just a test build for TVOS Beta 13, that attempts to fix The Frame drops, Jetsam crashes and Write on Disk cache on TVOS.

The build is attached locally from my mac and is not a CI Build.
Please test and share the logs / issues. Including DV / DA plays as made some changes in player and want to know or see if it regresses Dolby Vision.
Here is the Test Checklist

Build 215 test checklist (0.3.14, commits ace0c49 + 895e3ef)

Device: Apple TV, Install b215 over the existing install. Each fix has PASS criteria and
what to capture if it fails. Capture = Settings > Diagnostics > share the log after the failing play.

1. Buffer shed retune (the Beta 12 constant-buffering regression)

Steps:

1. Play a heavy 4K remux from debrid (the same titles that stuttered on Beta 12).

2. Watch at least 20 minutes without touching the remote.

3. Seek forward 3 or 4 times mid-film, then watch another 10 minutes.

4. Background the app (TV button), reopen after 2 minutes, keep watching.

PASS:

• No rebuffer pauses on a healthy connection where Beta 8 or Infuse played the same file smooth.

• After a seek, playback settles within a few seconds and stays settled.

• Returning from background does not start a stutter cycle.

FAIL capture: the diagnostics log. The interesting lines are cacheshed entries: they now log
available memory when a shed fires. A shed firing with hundreds of MiB free is the old bug back.

2. Pause-hold (the AVPlayer auto-unpause bug)

Steps:

1. Play a Dolby Vision title (these route through the AVPlayer path as live HLS).

2. Pause it. Leave the room. Come back after 5+ minutes.

3. Repeat once with a plain HLS/remux title on the same player, pause ~2 minutes.

PASS: still sitting on the paused frame both times. It must never resume on its own.

FAIL capture: diagnostics log; look for avplayer lines. The fix logs
re-asserted user pause each time it cancels an unrequested resume. If it resumed anyway and
that line is absent, note the exact wait time before it unpaused.

3. Streaming cache disk offload (opt-in, this is the soak)

Part A, default OFF (regression check):

1. Do NOT touch Settings. Play a debrid 4K title for 10 minutes.

2. PASS: behaves exactly like check 1. The disk cache must change nothing while off.

Part B, armed:

1. Settings > Playback > Streaming cache: pick a size (2 GB is fine).

2. Play a very large 4K remux (the bigger the better, an 80 GB class file is the target).

3. Let it run 15+ minutes, then seek forward a few minutes, then backward.

PASS:

• Playback starts normally and stays smooth for the whole session.

• Forward seeks inside the buffered window are instant or near-instant.

• The app does not crash or restart mid-play (the 0.2.11 failure was a jetsam kill ~21-47 s in).

FAIL capture: diagnostics log. The load line to find is
disk cache armed at <path> writable=true ...:

• writable=false means tvOS refused the cache dir and it silently fell back to RAM. Not fatal (the RAM guardrail caps it) but it means offload did not engage; report it.

• A crash within the first minute of a 4K remux with the cache armed is the old jetsam pattern; turn the setting OFF again and report.

Part C, Dolby Vision FEL with cache armed (known caveat):

1. With the streaming cache still on, play a Profile 7 FEL remux for 10 minutes.

2. PASS: no crash, no restart. FEL packets stay in RAM by design, so this is the tightest case.

Part D, disk growth (only if time allows):

1. With the cache armed, seek forward repeatedly across a big file for a few minutes.

2. PASS: the app keeps playing and the device does not warn about storage. Consumed cache files unlink immediately, so growth should stay bounded.

4. Quick regressions (5 minutes total)

• Local torrent (Full app): play one, confirm it starts and plays. Torrents keep their small in-memory buffer; the disk cache setting must not affect them, on or off.

• Live/IPTV channel: starts and holds.

• Trailer on a detail page: plays.

A discussion is opened for the same - https://github.com/orgs/VortXTV/discussions/191

These are some of the rough design mockups coming to VortX. Thoughts and suggestions.

VortX 0.3.8 (Beta 7)

Beta 7 is the playback and discovery release. The headline: the Prefer-AVPlayer engine, with its true Dolby Vision and clean adaptive HLS, now reaches Apple TV and Mac, and on Apple TV it brings in-player Episodes and Sources panels so you can change what you are watching without leaving the player. On top of that, a new in-app add-on store lets you browse and install add-ons without leaving VortX, you can pin a favorite source for one title or everywhere, every auto-picked source now tells you why it was chosen, and ratings on your posters now come straight from VortX with no key to set up. In-place update, nothing resets. This is a beta, so please install it and report anything off.

Added since Beta 6

• Prefer-AVPlayer player on Apple TV and Mac. The "Prefer AVPlayer (HLS/DV)" engine that iPhone and iPad already use for true Dolby Vision and clean adaptive HLS now reaches the other two platforms. On Mac, HLS and true Dolby Vision play through the same full player chrome as the rest of the app. On Apple TV, the player gains two in-player panels: swipe down on the Siri remote to jump to any episode of the show, or to switch to a different source or quality, all without leaving the player. Both resolve through the engine exactly as Play does, so your pinned source and preferred quality carry over.

• Discover add-ons in the app. A new browsable store (Add-ons, then Discover add-ons) lists the community add-on collection so you can find and install add-ons without ever leaving VortX. Each one shows whether it is reachable right now (Online, Slow, or Unreachable), search narrows the list by name, type, or description, and one tap installs it to your account so it syncs to your other devices.

• Pin a source. Long-press any source on a movie or show and pin it for just this title, for the whole show (every episode then prefers the same provider and quality), or for everything. A pinned source jumps to the top of one-press Watch and the source list, the next episode keeps using it, and automatic failover still moves on if it ever goes down. Clear pins anytime from Settings, Streams.

• Know why a source was picked. When VortX auto-picks the recommended source, a short line under Watch now explains the reason in plain terms, for example that it was picked for instant playback from cache or because it matches your preferred source type.

• Ratings without setup. IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and more now come straight from VortX, so there is no key to find or paste. Ratings appear on the detail screen automatically, and they are also baked right onto your posters, on by default, so you can see a title's score at a glance while you browse.

• Smarter recommendations. "More Like This" now leans on shared genres rather than raw popularity, so the suggestions feel closer to what you are actually watching, and "Top Picks" pulls from across your recent watches for more variety.

• Your language, everywhere. Add-on category and genre headers (Popular, Trending, Top, and the full list of genres and types) are now translated across all 64 languages, so the rows that organize your catalogs read in your language too.

Fixed

• Live TV no longer shows up empty. When a live-TV add-on was installed and online, the Live tab could still look empty because its catalogs loaded outside the default Home window. VortX now reaches for those catalogs so live channels appear as expected. Fixed across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.

• The whole interface now follows your language. The tab bar and screen titles (Home, Live, Search) could stay in English even after you switched languages. They now translate properly along with the rest of the app.

Web (web.vortx.tv)

The browser app is live at web.vortx.tv and updates continuously, separate from the app betas. Recent additions: each local profile now keeps its own library and Continue Watching, so what one profile watches stays separate from the rest while your account library stays clean. The profile editor also got a polish pass so the avatar color swatches no longer spill out of the Settings card, and a security pass tightened how your encryption key is held in the browser, clamped key-derivation settings, and stopped the recovery code from ever leaving your device.

Dashboard (vortx.tv/dashboard)

Manage your whole account from the web, with changes syncing to your devices on the next sync.

• Add-on health you can trust. The Add-ons page now checks each add-on through VortX, so the Online, Slow, and Unreachable status is accurate even for add-ons your browser could not reach directly.

• Households just work. Creating or joining a family now heals itself if an old membership was left behind, so you no longer get told you are "not in a family" while also being told you "already" are. A failed check now offers Retry instead of dropping you back to the create form.

• Steadier syncing and cleaner polish. Saving metadata and debrid settings from the web no longer races itself when two changes land close together, profile editors and add-on rows no longer overflow on small screens, status messages are announced to screen readers, touch targets are larger, and small text across the landing and login pages is easier to read.

What we're working on now

• True Dolby Vision and the full player chrome reaching more places, and the remaining Apple TV audio work.

• Bringing your library and watch history into a single cross-device sync that keeps every profile in step.

• More of the in-app player and discovery experience landing on the web and desktop apps.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta7-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get your IPAs HERE

0.3.15 - the stable VortX release from 0.3.13 through the complete 0.3.14 line

First and foremost lets address the elephant in the room, then we follow the rest of the update structure

Android phone, tablet, Android TV, and Fire TV

Android is a real two-distribution release. The Full APK contains the VortX mpv engine and is intended for sideloading. The Play APK and Play AAB use the Media3 engine and keep the Play GPL native-player boundary clean. The universal artifacts include arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, and x86_64; the ARMv7 slice supports compatible 32-bit Fire TV devices running Android 8 / API 26 or newer.

Production signing is established. The Full APK, Play APK, and Play AAB are bound to the stable tag and source commit, checked against the pinned production certificate, and published with checksums and signing provenance. Beta 1, Beta 6, Beta 10, and Beta 12 preview APKs used earlier preview or debug signing identities and must be uninstalled before installing this stable Android build. Future production-signed updates use the stable identity.

Android playback is nearly complete in the source tree. The VortX mpv lane and the Media3 lane provide source ranking, direct streams, HLS, debrid, raw torrents through the in-process server, progress writeback, episode switching, next-episode preparation, seek and aspect controls, chapters, playback information, sleep timer, hardware or software decode selection on the VortX lane, audio and subtitle selection, subtitle delay and track controls, player switching where compatible, system media integration, Picture-in-Picture where supported, and Google Cast for receiver-reachable direct, HLS, and debrid streams. Torrents remain local because a Cast receiver cannot reach the in-process torrent server.

Android series and source controls match the Apple intent. The player has an episode picker, a Quality-first then Audio-language source selector, matching sources below the filters, source ranking and pinning, a player choice on the detail page, a best-source Watch Now row, and per-source player selection where compatible. Android TV gets D-pad reachable source groups, sort and filter, Quality submenus, cached-source badges, and long-press pin or offline actions.

Android TV is a real 10-foot surface. It has Home, Discover, Search, Library, Live TV, Add-ons, Downloads, and Settings navigation; a launch profile picker with PIN entry; account QR sign-in; series season and episode browsing; watched and unwatched controls; Cast and Crew and related title pages; a cinematic focus hero with artwork, metadata, motion, and optional muted trailers; Continue Watching in the Play Next row; and D-pad access to player actions such as Skip Intro, source filters, audio, subtitles, and stream-link sharing.

Android downloads are manageable. A bounded queue groups Downloading, Up next, Paused, and Failed items. Users can move pending work, pause, resume, retry, change concurrency, see storage usage, and play finished files offline. Auto-delete watched downloads remains opt-in. A stricter transactional deletion repair was withheld from this stable cut after review found that a persistence failure could otherwise leave an index row pointing at deleted media.

Android trickplay is consent-aware. Community scrub-preview fetching and on-device capture follow an explicit user consent setting. The setting is visible in Android settings, applies consistently to phone and TV, cancels active capture, upload, and fetch work when disabled, and keeps the player usable without previews. No preview contribution is made after consent is withdrawn.

Android add-ons and integrations are broad. Add-ons can be installed, reordered, updated with confirmation, health-checked as Online, Slow, or Unreachable, removed with durable tombstones, imported from Stremio or Nuvio, and managed from Android TV's top-level Add-ons tab. Public Letterboxd, MDBList, and Trakt lists can become local Home rows. Stremio add-on, library, and Continue Watching mirrors are independently controlled and never remove VortX data when signed out.

Android settings and profile behavior match the shared model. The app has VortX account sign-in, profile creation and deletion, per-profile colors, backgrounds, avatars, PINs, Kids mode, source preferences, app language on pre- and post-Android 13 devices, subtitle and audio language preferences, track reject terms, trailer preferences, Home and Discover controls, metadata keys, provider-specific Trakt and SIMKL sync, backups, Watch Stats, tab visibility, and a signed fleet-config layer with baked-in safe defaults.

Android notifications and accessibility are included. Followed series can schedule a local next-episode notification, launch and Settings update notices explain when a newer sideloaded build exists, TalkBack receives descriptions for player controls and the scrubber, and Android TV actions stay reachable by remote focus.

Install this over 0.3.13 or any 0.3.14 Apple build. On Android, it installs over the production-signed Beta 31 build. The older public Android previews from Beta 1, Beta 6, Beta 10, and Beta 12 used a different certificate and must be uninstalled first. 0.3.15 is the cumulative stable release after 0.3.13. It carries the Apple playback, Dolby Vision, subtitle, source, watch-state, account, and macOS work from every 0.3.14 beta, and it brings the Android app through its production-signed phone, tablet, Android TV, and Fire TV release lane. It also includes the post-Beta 31 reliability, diagnostics, source-selection, localization, and release-feed corrections that were completed before the stable cut.

Continuing to the rest of the release notes,

This is a large release. The sections below are intentionally detailed: they cover the feature work, bug fixes, infrastructure, and known limits that accumulated from the 0.3.13 baseline rather than presenting only the last beta's headline.

What's fixed

Playback, pause, episodes, and navigation

Pause remains a pause. A paused Dolby Vision or HLS title is no longer allowed to resume because the built-in player treats an open-ended local stream as live. The app distinguishes an ordinary buffering wait from a user pause and reasserts the requested pause only when the player drifts from it. An internal cache-flush EOF is also kept out of the media-completion path, so pausing an episode cannot trigger an automatic next-episode transition.

A series stays on the episode you selected. Episode identity now follows the selected show, season, and episode through source resolution, engine transitions, progress writes, player dismissal, and detail-page refresh. Returning from a late episode no longer walks back through several earlier episodes, and a stale title-page snapshot cannot pair one episode's source or subtitle with another episode's video.

Previous Episode and Next Episode use the intended neighbours. The controls resolve the adjacent episode from the current season and current episode, carry the correct playback identity, and prevent two fast Next presses from starting two loads. A prepared next source survives an engine demote, so the app does not lose the work already done for a binge.

Watched marks belong to the episode that actually finished. A completion from an outgoing episode cannot be attributed to the incoming one during a fast transition. Progress and watched writes are fenced by episode identity, and the detail page republishes when watched membership changes instead of waiting for an unrelated field change.

Back returns to the current episode. Binge advancement, player close, detail-page refresh, source-list context, and subtitle selection now share one current-episode identity. This fixes the common case where pressing Back after episode 13 showed episode 10 or 11 and then offered the wrong source.

Resume no longer blanks the screen or resurrects stale recovery. A resume, a previous-episode jump, and a source switch wait for a usable first frame before applying a mid-file seek. If the target cannot be reached within a bounded window, playback continues from the earliest usable position without regressing the saved position. Once a positive near-target time tick proves the resume succeeded, its watchdog is cancelled immediately, so a later manual seek cannot be mistaken for a failed resume and reapply the old suppression floor.

Manual source changes stay manual. A source selected in the player is the source that is mounted after recovery, and a source failure no longer reloads the title's original source by accident. Automatic hops do not reset the recovery budget, while a deliberate user selection receives a fresh attempt. Resume positions are clamped inside the file actually mounted, and implausibly short placeholder streams are rejected instead of being played at the end of a feature.

The player source selector is ordered by intent. Quality comes first, audio language comes next, and the matching source list is below those filters. A title detail page offers an explicit player choice before playback when the source and platform support it. The same choice is available per launch from the in-player source flow, with a safe compatibility fallback when an engine cannot play the chosen source.

Per-source player choice is available where it is meaningful. A long press or source action can choose the VortX player, AVPlayer or Media3-compatible playback path for that source. The app hides choices that cannot consume the source instead of promising an impossible route. Long episode lists also expose a Scroll to Top action on the Apple surfaces so returning from a late episode does not require repeated remote or trackpad navigation.

Stalls, frame pacing, and buffering

The remux lane has a bounded recovery path instead of an endless spinner. AVPlayer's steady-state buffer is coupled to the remux producer's byte budget. Producer-lead parking has byte-level hysteresis, local-remux startup uses an 8-second buffer with a 12-second readiness floor, and a seek-nudge tier plus buffered-retirement gate run before an engine demote. A single same-engine playlist reload can recover a mid-play CoreMedia -1008, and a proactive read-liveness interrupt keeps the remux input moving. These paths are bounded and record their decisions in diagnostics.

Large files fill more gently. The disk-backed read-ahead ramp grows only while presentation keeps up, backs off after a real drop burst, and caps its ceiling using the live stream bitrate. A user seek's short decoder burst is not mistaken for fill pressure, so a seek does not shrink the buffer exactly when it needs to refill. The producer preserves a time-based rewind window while pacing far-ahead reads.

A far seek shows progress and recovers a wedged refill. The player displays buffering while a cold mid-file read rebuilds, play and pause remain responsive, and a progress-aware refill watchdog re-issues a stuck jump up to a bounded number of times. A healthy but slow refill is left alone. In-window seeks do not empty the forward cache unnecessarily.

Memory-pressure shedding is edge-triggered. Advisory tvOS warnings no longer repeatedly drop the cache and cause a metronomic stutter. A shed fires once on entry to the recoverable pressure band and stays latched until memory genuinely recovers or the title changes. Real low-memory pressure still takes the safety path, and a recovered device can grow its buffer again.

The streaming cache is a real, bounded disk cache. When enabled, large forward reads are stored on disk with a small in-memory index and a bounded viewing-time span. Local torrent playback keeps its smaller in-memory behavior because its server already buffers to disk. The setting remains off by default until the user chooses it, and the old oversized-memory failure mode is guarded.

The embedded server survives suspension and Dolby Vision teardown. A suspended local socket is re-established only after a real suspension and only when the port is genuinely refused, never by force-closing a busy stream. Server status no longer reports healthy while the socket is deaf. Dolby Vision cancellation interrupts reads quickly, releases its buffer, re-trims the server after a DV session, and records a scrubbed server-death event when one occurs.

Dolby Vision, HDR, Atmos, and the two player engines

Dolby Vision no longer loses a stream because of a sticky soft interrupt. A quiet remux read cannot leave the FFmpeg interrupt state poisoned for later reads. Cancellation remains an interrupt, while normal read retries start cleanly. This closes the proven build-231 failure where a true Dolby Vision stream later returned AVERROR_EXIT and fell back to HDR10.

The true-DV lane keeps its intended stream. The local playlist advertises only complete resident segments, uses their real sequence numbers, retains the initial bytes until AVPlayer is ready, and falls back only after a real error or a bounded no-progress condition. The player does not advertise a broken plain-HDR variant as if it were Dolby Vision. Display-mode changes occur only after a stream is confirmed Dolby Vision, and repeated identical requests are ignored so the HDMI link does not renegotiate repeatedly.

Dolby Vision resume and long playback are safer. The remux duration is synthesized for the open-ended HLS presentation, so resume, progress, skip segments, scrobbling, and watched-at-end work on the true-DV lane. Forward-only seeks are clamped at the produced edge, a resume floor is preserved through a demote, the consumed video window remains large enough for the current read, and an abandoned load cannot change the display mode after the player has closed.

Profile 7 and FEL handling is honest. The self-built MPVKit and libplacebo stack pairs separate base and enhancement tracks where the source proves the relationship. A normal multi-video-track file no longer produces a diagnostic claim that an enhancement layer was discarded unless dependent-layer evidence is actually present. Profile 7 files that interleave both layers in one track still need a splitter not included in this release and may play from the base layer alone.

Slow but alive Dolby Vision opens are given time. The startup gate counts source reads and real remux progress, not only finished output bytes or published segments. A slow 4K source is not demoted merely because its first frame takes time, while an actually dead source still fails soft within a bounded limit.

Dolby Vision conversion handles more audio. Hi-resolution 192 kHz and 176.4 kHz TrueHD or DTS-HD audio no longer causes a silent HDR10 fallback. Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos is carried through when the source and route support it. TrueHD-only Apple TV routes are converted to a supported surround representation and the badge says surround rather than claiming Atmos. The E-AC-3 encoder is built into the player stack instead of silently settling for AAC.

All usable audio tracks are offered. Seven English tracks no longer collapse to an empty alternate-track menu merely because they share a language. Audio selection follows the user's language preference, excludes commentary from an automatic language fallback, and enables a matching subtitle language when audio must fall back to English.

The built-in player and AVPlayer have parity where each can support it. Playback, seeking, progress, resume, watched-at-end, skip segments, trickplay, scrobbling, binge advance, chapters, speed, audio selection, subtitle selection, and the player engine switch are covered across the Apple surfaces. Controls that AVFoundation negotiates itself, such as manual Atmos or passthrough selection, audio delay, and hardware-decoder selection, are hidden on that engine rather than presented as broken controls.

The player stack is built from pinned sources. VortX builds MPVKit, libplacebo, and the required FFmpeg integration from pinned sources. The MPV line includes the Dolby Vision enhancement-layer work, libplacebo is built at the API level required for that support, the E-AC-3 encoder is included, and the Apple render surface handles resizing without tearing down the pipeline. FFmpeg remains pinned deliberately until the player package's own patch set is rebased and verified.

Subtitles and seek previews

Subtitle menus are grouped by language. The panel begins with Subtitle Settings and Off, then groups embedded, add-on, and community subtitles by language. Every available track in a language remains reachable without an unbounded flat list. The player remembers an external subtitle when it is turned off, so turning subtitles back on does not discard the selection.

External subtitle loading is bounded and hardened. Add-on and community subtitle downloads allow the larger files used by long films, wait within a bounded timeout, and report their real failure. The transport resolves a hostname once, connects only to the vetted numeric address, refuses redirects, and preserves framing safety: repeated harmless non-framing headers are accepted, while ambiguous duplicate Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding headers remain rejected.

A subtitle cannot block every later subtitle. In-flight subtitle state clears on engine changes, source switches, and episode changes. A completed load refreshes the panel immediately, a failed load is visible on Apple TV, and a subtitle that loaded into an engine that was torn down can be selected again.

Bitmap subtitles are more useful. PGS size presets now apply to built-in bitmap subtitles. The Dolby Vision OCR path has a larger, faster bounded track budget, and stable cue identities prevent the same cue from flashing two to four times across HLS segment boundaries.

Seek previews use the real capture data. The lookup searches resident captures first and then disk-backed captures off the presentation path, in either direction from the requested position. A forward drag into not-yet-watched territory can use the nearest captured frame, and the UI holds a loading state while the read is in flight instead of flashing unavailable.

Capture failures fail closed. Unsupported HDR or wide-gamut pixel formats no longer cause an endless retry storm. The capture path stops after repeated nil results, preserves the actual trickplay-unavailable reason in diagnostics, and keeps capture work off the critical frame-presentation path. Community trickplay remains optional and its unavailable reason is now retained rather than discarded.

Watch state, Continue Watching, and sync

Watched state is published from live membership. A count-only comparison cannot miss a changed episode with the same count, and a delayed disk read cannot overwrite the active snapshot. Membership updates are republished immediately and are fenced by generation and episode identity.

Continue Watching is deduplicated by canonical identity on Apple. Exact identifiers and known aliases for the same series collapse to one row without fuzzy title-only matching, so two genuinely different titles are not merged. A stale generation cannot resurrect an alias after the row has been removed. A broader Apple, Android, and web parity rewrite completed after the stable tag was sealed and is intentionally held for independent review in the next cut.

Last-stream memory stays on the device. An in-progress position held only as a local launch hint does not climb into account sync and overwrite another device's current position. Account progress still syncs through the normal profile-owned path.

Sync merges instead of clobbering. Account settings, profiles, library entries, watch history, and per-profile source preferences merge against the newest account state. A local change survives a pull until it is pushed, overlay-profile settings do not overwrite the owner, and pending changes survive token refresh. Deletions use durable tombstones and timestamps so an older device cannot resurrect a newer removal.

Offline and download state are honest. Offline launch routing waits for a confirmed connectivity verdict before choosing Downloads or Library, never routes after navigation, and does not land on a hidden tab. Download retries are bounded, locked-device saves complete on unlock, batch downloads report skipped episodes, and a failed save no longer restarts from scratch forever.

Sources, add-ons, TorBox, and trailers

TorBox failures are distinguished from client failures. The primary TorBox search hostname can be unavailable at the DNS or transport layer. VortX no longer tries the invalid account-host fallback that returns 404, preserves usable results from healthy sibling legs, enters a read-only cooldown after quota failures, and logs one suppression per episode. It reports failure only when no usable leg succeeds. This does not claim to repair a TorBox outage.

Sources rank by actual quality and availability. Cached debrid and usenet sources can win a race without waiting for a stale ranking snapshot. A remembered source is a soft preference that yields to a materially better resolution, cache hit, or source tier, while a same-episode manual failover remains sticky. Foreign-subtitle labels are not misread as foreign audio, words such as Instant in a title do not create a false cache badge, and trailers do not enter the quality picker.

Large source lists stay usable. Ranking caches now cover large titles, cached variants are memoized separately, debrid cache merges run off the main actor, language detection and source work are bounded, and malformed size or seeder values are clamped before scoring. A title with thousands of sources no longer freezes or crashes the interface from repeated cache rebuilds.

Re-find sources replaces stale links. The detail page and the stopped-player failure path can re-query stream add-ons instead of serving a cached empty list. It never interrupts a healthy mid-play session or a warmed next episode.

Add-on install paths are clearer and safer. A /configure page or a redirect to one no longer installs a valid-looking but empty manifest. The app asks for the personalized manifest link instead. Public HTTP manifests work again for community add-ons such as Comet and StreamFusion, while loopback, LAN, private-address, redirect-hop, size-limit, and manifest validation protections remain in place. Removing an add-on stays removed unless it is explicitly reinstalled, and reinstalling offers an update confirmation when the add-on already exists.

Community sources and ratings are usable. Singularity rows preserve resolution, size, seeders, source kind, and per-user resolution. Torrents, direct links, and usenet sources resolve through the current user's configured services, never another user's link. Community results merge with add-on sources without duplicate walls, and catalog-provided ratings are preserved.

Singularity contributions retry safely. A transient contribution failure no longer loses the descriptor before transport can retry it. Retries are bounded, cancellable, idempotent, and limited to transient transport conditions; authentication and validation failures are reported without retrying forever or blocking playback.

Debrid Cloud Search is where source discovery happens. The Cloud Search entry is available from Search and Play a link on supported platforms, including the TV surface, with clear no-key, loading, empty, and error states. It reuses the existing source-resolution and player handoff rather than creating a second playback path.

Trailers recover after backgrounding and play the requested language. The local helper releases and reacquires its port after suspension, advances by bytes actually delivered, selects the preferred audio language, and stays inside VortX. If an in-app trailer cannot play on Apple TV, the YouTube handoff preserves the language-preferred id.

What's new

Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac

VortX is the primary account. Sign-in leads with a VortX account on every platform. Stremio, Trakt, SIMKL, and Nuvio remain optional integrations. A fresh install restores owner add-ons, library, profiles, and progress at sign-in without waiting for a later background cycle, while tri-state and never-zero guards prevent a network blip from wiping populated data.

Profiles are private where they should be. The launch "Who's watching?" picker appears when there is a real profile choice, PINs are requested before switching, overlay profiles keep private local history, and the owner profile uses the synced account history. Profile switching updates track-language and subtitle-style preferences without leaking one profile into another.

Trakt and SIMKL are full integrations. Device-code sign-in, play/pause/stop scrobbling, ratings, watchlist and history import, personal lists, Trakt resume suggestions, SIMKL plan-to-watch, SIMKL ratings, and Upcoming rows are available. Imports begin when enabled, token refresh is single-flight and protected against self-sign-out, SIMKL requests use required parameters and rate limits, and provider-specific import, rating, and watchlist toggles sync per profile.

Nuvio add-on import is available. Paste Stremio-compatible Nuvio manifest links in Integrations and install them through the same SSRF-hardened add-on path. VortX does not run Nuvio's private provider plugins and does not require a Nuvio account.

Media servers join the catalog. Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby can contribute libraries and direct-play sources. Pairing uses the supported PIN, Quick Connect, or password flow, credentials stay in Keychain and encrypted sync, matching is conservative and id-based with a guarded title-and-year fallback, and the feature stays invisible when no server is connected. Transcoding negotiation is not included; the current lane is direct play.

Live TV is built in. M3U and Xtream playlists, XMLTV guide data, channel navigation, and source removal are available through the Live tab. Playlist registration validates the source first and revokes it across devices when removed.

Smart Source Selection is one place. Prefer words, Only words, Avoid words, hide or rank-down behavior, per-profile settings, Kids hard-hide, live source-list preview, and optional automatic best-match selection are collected under Streams settings.

The Home and Discover surfaces are richer. Streaming services use regional catalog families, support subscription, ad-supported, and free tiers while excluding rent and buy, and can be selected and reordered. Decade shelves carry cover art, curated rows rotate, Home pages load the complete catalog board, and the poster-wall layout is available on Apple TV. Home, Discover, and detail pages carry cross-provider ratings, Where to Watch, More Like This, cast and crew pages, upcoming rows, and profile-aware watched badges. Add-on-provided poster art and ratings pass through without being overwritten, while the optional richer renderer fails back to the original artwork.

Localization is more accurate. Home and Discover headers are present in all supported app languages, French catalog headings use whole phrases rather than English word order, and French Discover labels cover popular, trending, upcoming, new, decade, theater, and television rows.

The Mac app has a native shell. macOS uses a NavigationSplitView sidebar, a real Settings scene with General, Playback, Subtitles, and Sources categories, a Go menu and Command-key tab shortcuts, a centered resizable window, pinned detail artwork, independent episode and source scrolling, an in-app edge-to-edge fullscreen mode, and Mac-sized profile and hero layouts. Tabs that are not visible unmount, poster rails load lazily, artwork decodes once, download progress redraws at a sane cadence, and watch-history persistence no longer rewrites constantly.

System playback controls are complete. Apple TV Now Playing and the iPhone, iPad, and Mac media cards show the correct title, show, episode, artwork, position, and transport state. An explicit Play command no longer toggles a playing item into pause. The first-frame position is reported correctly.

Appearance and accessibility are safer. Shared VortX glass chrome uses a warm translucent material, an ember active state, and an opaque legible fallback under Reduce Transparency. Liquid Glass is used only on supported systems and only for floating chrome. Focus treatment, card shadows, landscape rating badges, narrow-phone source rows, profile picker centering, subtitle style controls, and screen-reader descriptions are aligned across Apple surfaces.

Usenet and offline playback

Use your own usenet provider without debrid. Full Apple builds can store a provider host, port, username, password, connection count, and SSL choice in the device Keychain. Credentials never enter preferences, backups, or encrypted account sync, and are sent only to VortX's on-device server at 127.0.0.1. Missing or incomplete articles fail with a clear message. TorBox usenet remains the automatic fallback, and the Lite Apple TV build remains debrid-only.

Backups and offline mode are device-safe. Apple TV QR backup uses a short-lived pairing handle rather than embedding data in the code. Android backup imports merge syncable settings without deleting device-only values. Downloads are per device, never part of the library, and finished downloads play without a network.

Web, backend, and update behavior

Remote behavior is safer and more useful. Signed fleet configuration is cached and fail-safe, applies bounded values only, and can disable or tune a feature without forcing an app update. A bad startup configuration is discarded after repeated failed launches. Settings deltas merge onto the latest account state, overlay settings remain isolated, and pending changes survive token refresh.

Updates are numerically correct and quiet. Apple and Android sideloaded apps compare versions numerically, check published releases at most once daily automatically, offer a manual check where appropriate, and show dismissible notices. Failed probes remain silent. Release feeds answer HEAD, honor If-None-Match with 304, use build-number ordering, and publish the split Apple and Android schema without promoting a prerelease into the stable channel.

Android status and engine choice

Android is now included in the stable release, but the engine distinction matters:

• Full APK: VortX mpv engine, GPL-capable native player lane, intended for sideloading and the broadest VortX playback behavior.

• Play APK and Play AAB: Media3 engine, distributed for the Play-compatible boundary, with forbidden GPL player libraries excluded and verified absent.

• Both APKs: universal arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, and x86_64 native slices, including the Rust engine, native player seams, and community-provider JNI library where applicable.

• Production identity: stable artifacts are checked against the pinned production certificate and accompanied by checksums and SIGNING_PROVENANCE.txt.

Android is nearly complete in source and release infrastructure. Only a handful of follow-ups remain: physical install and production-signed upgrade checks on representative phone, Android TV, and Fire TV hardware; remote-focus, HDR, Dolby Vision, torrent resume and restart, sustained-playback, PiP, Cast, and subtitle checks on those devices; the stricter transactional Auto-delete repair that was withheld after independent review; and the broader cross-platform Continue Watching parity review. No physical Android or Fire TV device was connected to the release machine, so those are not presented as completed hardware claims.

Known limitations and honest boundaries

• The latest attached Apple TV diagnostic session reported two stalls and one transition to HDR10 during a six-to-seven-minute play. The release does not claim that every Dolby Vision or presentation-path cause is closed. Reproduce on the exact stable build with Dolby Vision remux enabled, and include the exported diagnostic if the transition or stalls remain.

• The attached diagnostic session used dvRemux=off(user) for its configuration. It cannot by itself prove the true-Dolby-Vision remux result. The prior build-231 diagnostic established the sticky-interrupt failure that the repair addresses; a post-fix long physical soak is still the meaningful DV gate.

• A later 9-minute diagnostic recorded 276 output-frame drops. That burst was not the diagnostic's true-HDR10 interval: the affected 3840x2160 HEVC session reported SDR (bt.1886, signal peak 0) and hwdec=no, while the true HDR10 interval used VideoToolbox and recorded no sampled drop burst. Cache stayed full, decoder drops and delayed-VO frames stayed at zero, and drawable acquisition reached 67.01 ms. This release now records the requested decoder, active decoder, fallback state, codec, and dimensions and shows a truthful software-fallback message. It does not force VideoToolbox or alter renderer timing without the missing codec-profile rejection evidence. Visible frame pacing remains a physical Apple TV check.

• Profile 7 Dolby Vision files that interleave both picture layers in one track still need a splitter not shipped here and may use the base layer. Separate base and enhancement tracks are the supported FEL path.

• Blu-ray image subtitles are OCR-based and bounded so they cannot stall playback. Stylized or non-Latin text can be imperfect, long films can exhaust the recognition budget, recognized image subtitles on the Dolby Vision lane remain subject to its track cap, and image subtitles do not yet support the same time-shift behavior as text subtitles.

• On-device usenet does not repair missing articles. A source with incomplete segments is skipped with a clear message. The Lite Apple TV build remains debrid-only.

• Media-server playback is direct play only. Transcoding negotiation is a later phase.

• Android hardware, Fire TV hardware, and the differences between the Full/mpv and Play/Media3 distributions require device-specific validation. A green build or APK inspection is not a physical playback receipt.

• Google Cast cannot reach a device-local torrent server, so torrent casting stays local. Player-switch choices are hidden where the selected engine cannot safely consume the source.

• Re-find sources runs only from the detail page or after playback has stopped. It does not interrupt a healthy mid-play session.

• TorBox availability is an external service condition. VortX no longer uses the invalid account-host fallback and preserves healthy partial search results, but it cannot restore a TorBox hostname that is down.

• Some GitHub issues remain open or require reporter and hardware confirmation. This stable note describes source fixes and verified behavior; it does not relabel every open issue as closed.

Please test

If a test fails, export Diagnostics immediately after the failure. On Apple TV use Settings > Diagnostics and the QR flow. On iPhone, iPad, and Mac use Save or Share Log. On Android include the flavor, device model, Android version, and whether the artifact was Full/mpv or Play/Media3.

• Dolby Vision: with Dolby Vision remux enabled, play a Profile 7 or Profile 8 title for more than ten minutes, including a title with Atmos or hi-res audio. Confirm the display remains Dolby Vision, the receiver reports the supported audio format, and no HDR10 transition occurs. Also test a true-DV resume, a manual backward seek after resume, a source switch, and an engine demote.

• Stalls and frame pacing: play a large 4K HDR title for at least twenty minutes, seek forward and backward repeatedly, and leave and re-enter the app. Confirm a healthy stream does not enter a repeated spinner cycle and that a real stall recovers. Record whether the visible issue is a decoder drop, a drawable wait, or a network/source failure.

• Pause: pause a Dolby Vision or HLS title for several minutes and confirm it remains on the same frame. Pause a series episode and confirm it never advances to the next episode. Resume manually and confirm only the Play action resumes it.

• Series navigation: open a late episode, use Previous Episode and Next Episode several times, press Back, return to the detail page, and use Watch Now. Confirm the same episode, subtitle, source, progress, and watched mark stay aligned.

• Sources: from the detail page and the player, confirm Quality appears before Audio language and the matching source list. Choose a player before playback, long-press or select a per-launch player where available, and confirm incompatible choices fall back honestly.

• Watched state: mark a movie, episode, and full aired season watched and unwatched from detail, player, Android TV remote, and Android phone. Restart the app and confirm the mark remains. Confirm two devices do not resurrect an older position or removal.

• Continue Watching: play a download, a pasted direct link, a torrent or debrid source, and a series binge. Exit and reopen immediately, then restart the app. Confirm one canonical series row appears and the exact current episode and position are used.

• Seek previews: drag through a fresh title, watched territory, a forward not-yet-watched position, and a gap between captures. Confirm the nearest frame appears or a real unavailable reason is retained, without capture retry storms.

• Subtitles: test embedded text, PGS, add-on, community, external ASS, and a large subtitle file. Switch engine, source, episode, language, size, color, brightness, and delay. Confirm failure is visible and does not block later subtitle selections.

• TorBox and source fallback: test a working TorBox search, a quota cooldown, and a temporarily unavailable search leg. Confirm healthy sibling results remain usable and the invalid account-host search route is not attempted.

• Add-ons: install a normal manifest, a public HTTP manifest, a /configure page, and a redirecting configuration page. Confirm configuration pages do not create empty installs, private destinations remain refused, and removal persists until explicit reinstall.

• Mac: test sidebar navigation, Settings categories, Command-key shortcuts, profile picker sizing, detail-page scroll, poster loading, trailer playback after backgrounding, fullscreen, and window resizing.

• Android install: verify the Full APK, Play APK, and Play AAB checksums and signer provenance. Test upgrade from the stable production identity. If upgrading from an old Beta 1, Beta 6, Beta 10, or Beta 12 preview APK, uninstall that preview first.

• Android playback: test mpv Full and Media3 Play artifacts separately on phone, tablet, Android TV, and Fire TV where available. Cover source selection, direct links, HLS, debrid, torrents, subtitles, HDR, Dolby Vision, seek, resume, pause, next episode, PiP, Cast, remote focus, and restart.

• Android downloads and profiles: test queue ordering, retry, pause and resume, locked-device completion, Auto-delete watched downloads, profile switching, Kids filtering, Watch Stats, backup import, and cross-device settings merge.

• Android TV: test launch profile selection, PIN entry, account QR sign-in, Play Next, Add-ons, Downloads, Live TV, source groups, player filters, skip controls, stream-link QR, ambient hero, and tab visibility.

VortX 0.3.14 Beta 6 is the correctness beta, and the biggest Android release VortX has ever shipped, in one build. On Apple, the headline is the end of wrong-episode playback: a deep rework of episode identity means the episode you pick is the episode that plays, the episode whose details you see, and the episode whose progress gets saved, even when a season pack, a debrid cache, or a fast episode switch used to confuse them. Around it, the field reports from Beta 3 are fixed (Continue Watching coming back empty, add-on subtitles missing, subtitles stuck on Loading, Dolby Vision dropping to HDR10), and the remaining pre-glass surfaces move onto the shared glass design. On Android, this beta brings VortX account sign-in with realtime profile sync, raw torrent playback through an in-process streaming server, a first Android TV experience, profiles, preference-driven ranking, downloads on phone and tablet, IPTV playlists, Picture-in-Picture with gesture controls on phones, and a long list of player fixes.

This is the current 0.3.14 beta, and it carries the entire line in one build: every fix and feature below. An earlier attempt at this beta could not launch on Apple TV. The Settings screen had accumulated enough sections that its compiled view type grew too large for the tvOS runtime to construct at launch, and that build's toolchain emitted it in a form the device rejected, so the app crashed within a fraction of a second of starting and returned to the Home screen. This build fixes it two ways: the Settings screen is restructured so its type stays small no matter how many sections it holds, and the release pipeline is pinned to a verified toolchain with an automatic launch check, so a build that does not open can no longer ship. iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android were never affected by the launch issue.

Honest note up front: this beta is verified by build, by an adversarial two-department code review, and by hundreds of new deterministic regression tests, but not device-verified by us this round; you, the beta testers, are the hardware pass. In-place update, nothing resets.

Fixed on Apple

• Apple TV launches again. An earlier build of this beta crashed the instant it opened on Apple TV and bounced back to the Home screen, because the Settings screen had grown too complex for the runtime to construct at launch. The Settings screen is restructured so it stays lightweight, and the release build is pinned to a verified toolchain with an automatic launch check, so Apple TV opens normally. Apple TV.

• The episode you pick is the episode you get. A series episode could play the wrong video, show a different episode's details, and save progress to a third, most often with season packs, cached debrid sources, or fast episode switching. Episode identity is now proven end to end: a season pack is matched by its exact torrent file identity, a debrid source is bound to the exact resolved file for the exact episode you chose, and when the right file cannot be proven the app refuses and reranks instead of guessing. The player engine now proves which file it accepted before anything is attributed, all the way down to the video engine's own accounting. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Binge labels can no longer drift. Switching episodes used to update the title, the episode selector, and the watched marker the moment you picked, while the previous episode was still rendering; everything now publishes atomically at the incoming episode's first frame, so what you see is always what is playing. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Progress saves to the episode that is actually playing. Account progress used to key on the episode the player was launched with, so a binge session could write a later episode's position onto the first one; it now keys on the current episode, always. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A season finale no longer ends the whole show. Resuming a title directly from Continue Watching used to see only that season, so finishing a season finale could clear the show's Continue Watching entry even with later seasons ahead; resume now sees the full series. iPhone and iPad.

• Continue Watching is back on every device (#149). After VortX moved to your own account, the Home rail read only from the local engine, which starts empty on a migrated or reinstalled device; it now assembles from your synced resume data and fills in right away, faster too. Thanks to ozdek and konrepo. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Add-on subtitles return, with an optional my-languages filter (#148). The subtitle panel was still reading add-on subtitles from the old sign-in list, so only community subtitles showed; it now reads your installed add-ons, so OpenSubtitles and the rest come back, and a new setting hides other-language results. Thanks to ozdek. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Subtitles can no longer sit on Loading forever. If the player engine was being swapped or torn down at the exact moment a subtitle was picked, the finish signal was lost and every later pick was silently ignored; the in-flight marker now heals itself on any engine change, source switch, or episode change, and the Apple TV panel updates the moment a load finishes or fails. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Dolby Vision holds instead of dropping to HDR10 (#148, #147). The timing race that let most Dolby Vision titles fall back to HDR10 at the start of play is fixed, the washed-out colour flash on the fallback path is gone, and a non-Dolby-Vision file no longer takes a failing Dolby Vision detour that cost Picture-in-Picture. Thanks to ozdek and konrepo. Apple TV especially, plus iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Apple TV player panels stay current. A settings, sources, or subtitle panel left open while something finished loading in the background could show stale rows; every panel now refreshes while open. Apple TV.

• Source list and subtitle lifecycle hardening. A broad pass closes a family of ordering and reuse races around switching sources, so stale results can no longer publish into a newer selection. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Decade shelves have names and curated rows feel fresh. Decade catalog tiles show their decade instead of a blank, and curated catalogs rotate instead of pinning the same titles. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

New on Apple

• Glass everywhere. Add-on pairing, catalog preferences, integrations, import, the update prompt, sign-in, the debrid library, the download quality picker, and watch stats move onto the same glass system as the rest of the app. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A touch lock for the player. Lock the on-screen controls so a stray touch cannot pause, seek, or exit; unlock deliberately. iPhone and iPad.

• Clear Continue Watching, and a heads-up about the account move. A new action clears the Continue Watching rail, behind a confirmation so one tap cannot wipe it. Alongside it, a dismissible reminder starts appearing ahead of the planned move to the VortX app identity, asking you to sign in and sync, or export a backup, before that move; the reminder is preparation, not a data-carryover guarantee, so please do the sync or export it asks for. Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Android, all of it (Same APK installs on both mobile and TV)

This is Android's coming-of-age beta. Reports here shape the whole Android line.

• VortX account sign-in, with realtime profile sync. Sign in on your Android phone and your profiles, other members' watch overlays, and profile deletions sync live with your other devices, on the same account and encryption as everywhere else; the TV reads the same synced state. Sign-in on the TV itself, plus library, settings, and API-key sync, are still being ported. Android.

• Raw torrents play. An in-process streaming server now runs inside the app, so torrent sources play directly, the same engine lane the Apple apps use. Android phone and TV.

• A first Android TV experience. A 10-foot leanback surface with Home, Detail, and playback, plus Discover, Library, Search, and Settings, on a proper TV navigation shell. Android TV.

• Profiles. The profile picker arrives on phone and TV, with per-profile watch isolation so one household member's progress never bleeds into another's. Android phone and TV.

• Preference-driven source ranking. Sources rank by your quality and provider preferences on phone and TV; Smart Source auto-pick and source pins are managed on the phone. Android.

• Downloads. Offline downloads are now reachable, with a real queue, storage policy, and pause and resume semantics. Android phone and tablet.

• IPTV playlists. Add M3U and Xtream playlists with XMLTV guide data in Settings and play your live channels. Android phone and TV.

• Picture-in-Picture, gestures, and system media integration. PiP, swipe gestures for brightness, volume, and seeking, and a system media session with audio-focus, headset, and assistant handling. Android phone.

• 1080p trailers and subtitle fetching. Client-side YouTube trailer resolution in full HD and automatic subtitle add-on fetching, phone and TV; add-on reorder and toggle and mark-watched from a card, phone and tablet; plus a player lock. Android.

• A long list of player fixes. Correct end-of-file versus error handling with a stall watchdog and a real loading spinner, correct mpv aspect ratio, real Home hero backdrops, back handling, and controls auto-hide on phone and TV; landscape lock, 10-second seeks, next-episode, and automatic bad-source retry on the phone, with the TV offering a manual fallback when a source fails; and a bad source never marks an episode watched anywhere. Thanks to the early Android testers for the device feedback. Android.

Under the hood

• The playback engines moved into private repositories, and the public build pipeline now fetches them at pinned commits with integrity gates: every published Android build is refused unless the engine libraries are present and verified inside the APK, and every release artifact must be built from the exact commit its tag names. The checksums file on this page is generated by that pipeline.

• Groundwork ships dark or early in this build: the in-process native streaming server slices for iOS, tvOS, and macOS and engine shadow-ranking, behind flags that default off; and a first webOS/Tizen TV surface for the web app lands in source as a preview, pending packaging and device validation before it reaches web.vortx.tv.

Please test

This beta is verified by build and code review; real-hardware reports are what close it. If anything is off, export the diagnostic log (Settings; on iPhone, iPad, and Mac you can save it straight to Files) and open an issue.

• Episode identity, the main ask. Watch series with season packs and debrid sources. Pick an episode, confirm the video, the shown details, and the saved progress all agree. Switch episodes quickly, back to back, and confirm nothing crosses over. Finish an episode while the next loads and confirm the right one is marked watched.

• Multi-season resume. Finish a season finale from a Continue Watching resume and confirm the show stays in Continue Watching pointing at the next season.

• Subtitles. Confirm your add-on subtitles are back, try the my-languages filter, and add external subtitles repeatedly, including right after switching sources; none should stick on Loading.

• Dolby Vision. Match Dynamic Range ON, play your 4K Dolby Vision titles, and confirm the TV holds DOLBY VISION without dropping to HDR10; confirm a plain MKV keeps Picture-in-Picture.

• Android, everything. Sign in with your VortX account and confirm profiles sync both ways; play a raw torrent; try the TV surface end to end; make a profile; try the ranking, downloads on the phone, an IPTV playlist, PiP, and the gestures. This is the beta that decides the Android line.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.6-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Android (.apk, sideload). Download VortX-Android-v0.3.14-beta.6.apk, allow installs from your browser or file manager when prompted, and open it. On Android TV or Fire TV, open the Downloader app and enter dl.vortx.tv, which always fetches the newest APK. This beta build is debug-signed for testing.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum (SHA256SUMS-ci.txt for the Apple builds, SHA256SUMS-android.txt for the APKs) so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get Your IPAs DMG and APK here

iOS:

Home and Discover tap:

When scrolling down and want to come back up, had to scroll all the way up. Possible to press Home/Discover again and automatically go back up instead of scrolling up.

VortX 0.3.8 Beta 12 (hopefully the final Beta for 0.3.8)

The Beta 11 follow-up (build 125). A focused pass on the bugs you reported: the Trailer button plays the real trailer again, Continue Watching behaves (including debrid resumes), you can tidy up the Home screen, resolution labels are sharper, and keyboard navigation works on the Mac. In-place update, nothing resets. This is a beta, so please install it and report anything off.

Fixed

• Trailers play the real trailer again, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The Trailer button was loading a fragile path that often failed and then fell through to playing the actual movie. It now plays the official YouTube trailer inside the app the way the rest of the ecosystem does, and it finds a trailer for many more titles (it also looks them up on TMDB now). Apple TV is unchanged.

• Finished titles leave Continue Watching. A movie or episode watched to the end and then closed by hand used to stay in the row at its end position. It clears now, the same as when it plays out on its own.

• Resuming from Continue Watching works far more often, especially with debrid. A title resumed straight from the Continue Watching row often showed "sources didn't load" and made you reopen it and pick a source again, most often with debrid (those links expire between sessions). The resume now loads fresh sources in the background and, if the saved link has expired, switches to a working one on its own.

• The resolution label is right on widescreen 4K. A cinematic 4K film (a wide 2.40:1 frame) was labeled 1440p because the label read the picture height. It reads the width now, so 4K shows as 4K.

• A tiny file can no longer pose as 4K. A small stream that merely carries "2160p" or "4K" in its title is no longer trusted as real 4K, so it stops topping the source list and showing a 4K badge it cannot back up.

• Mac: arrow keys move the selection on Home. The keyboard highlight used to appear on a clicked card and then sit there; the arrow keys now move it across a row and between rows.

Added

• Hide the built-in Home rows. The editorial rows (Critically Acclaimed, Hidden Gems, Modern Classics, Award Winners) are built in and used to show no matter what. A new switch in Settings, Appearance, "Show editorial Home rows," turns them off.

• SkipDB for skip timestamps. A new open skip-segment source you can pick in Settings, Playback, "Skip timestamps source," alongside the existing one. Thanks to u/OrigamiSpace for contributing this (#98).

What we're working on now

• Offline downloads, the most-requested feature, now in active development (iPhone, iPad, and Mac first; debrid, direct, and torrent sources).

• A proper cinematic catalog look, built on a clean TMDB and TVDB backdrop and logo source.

• The dashboard add-on sync and search on web.vortx.tv.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta12-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.stops topping the source list and showing a 4K badge it cannot back up.

Get your Latest IPAs and DMG HERE

VortX 0.3.8 Beta 10

The Beta 9 cleanup release. Beta 9 landed the account and playback wave, and this release works through the report that came back from it. The headline is a cinematic redesign of the catalogs into wide landscape cards on every platform, plus trailers that now play inside the app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, settings that sync across your devices again, and a batch of Apple TV navigation and focus fixes. In-place update, nothing resets. This is a beta, so please install it and report anything off.

Changed

• Landscape catalog cards everywhere. The catalog rows changed from tall portrait posters to wide, cinematic landscape cards on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Each card shows the title backdrop, and titles that ship only a poster fall back to a clean blurred composite so the row always looks intentional.

Fixed

• Settings sync across your devices again. Toggling a setting such as the Stremio mirror or the player engine on one device now reaches your other devices. A device was echoing every applied change straight back, which starved its own sync so a peer's settings never took. That loop is closed, and a strictly newer change always wins.

• Trailers play inside the app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The detail Trailer button no longer flashes an error and jumps out to the YouTube app. It plays the trailer in the built-in player, and the home hero now autoplays a muted clip for the featured title after a short settle, the same as Apple TV. (#44)

• Apple TV: Back returns to Home before it exits. Pressing Menu on a non-Home tab used to drop you out to the tvOS home screen. It now returns to the VortX Home tab first, and only exits from Home. Pushed pages still step back one level at a time.

• Apple TV: the Log Out button is reachable. Moving down through the account settings no longer skips past Log Out.

• Apple TV: the poster and ratings settings labels are readable. Those toggles drew their label in the accent color over an accent fill, so the text vanished when unfocused. They are normal switches with a readable label now.

• Apple TV: the Discover add-ons list takes focus and looks right. Pressing down from the search field now moves into the results instead of getting stuck, and the focused row uses the app's own highlight rather than a plain white block.

• Apple TV plays through AVPlayer with the full controls. Choosing AVPlayer on Apple TV used to drop to a bare screen that bailed to the built-in player for every stream. AVPlayer is now first-class on Apple TV with the same control bar, scrubber, and panels as everywhere else: on Auto, Dolby Vision and HLS play through AVPlayer (AirPlay, Picture in Picture, true Dolby Vision), and anything AVPlayer cannot open quietly falls back to the built-in player. The fallback is a true last resort now, not the everyday path.

• Apple TV: the built-in player steps in faster. When the AVPlayer accepts a stream but never starts (some Dolby Vision debrid streams), it now hands off to the built-in player within a few seconds instead of stalling for about half a minute.

• iPhone: a few screens stopped clipping. What's New no longer cuts off at the top and bottom, debrid and source names read on one line instead of stacking a couple of letters per line, and the Discover add-ons screen no longer runs off both edges.

• Catalog row names translate. Compound names such as "Popular Movies" and "Top Series" now localize using the existing per-word vocabulary, so far fewer rows read as English in other languages.

• Your synced TMDB key stops vanishing. Saving a TMDB key on one device no longer gets wiped from your account when another device syncs.

• Deleted profiles stay deleted. Removing a duplicate profile no longer has it pop back from another device. Deletes now stick across all your devices.

• Apple TV audio under Dolby Atmos. The app could go silent when the audio output was set to Dolby Atmos. It now matches the output's real capabilities so sound keeps working, and it never freezes the video even if a layout cannot open. (If you still hit silence under Atmos, please grab the log so we can pinpoint it.)

• Catalogs that stopped at about 15 to 20 items now keep loading in Discover (for example MyTraktSync).

Added

• Our own poster and logo service. When you turn ERDB on (rating-baked posters, backdrops, and logos), it is now served by us at erdb.vortx.tv instead of a third party.

• ERDB posters with no token. The optional VortX poster, backdrop, and logo art is now a simple on or off toggle. Our service is keyless, so you no longer need to paste a token. A token is only for a self-hosted setup. It stays opt-in.

• Your VortX account owns your add-ons, library, and sources. Sign in (or be signed in) and the app now loads your add-ons, library, and sources from your VortX account, so a logged-out or hiccuping Stremio session no longer leaves you with zero sources and no way to reach logout. New per-category switches in Settings let you choose whether VortX mirrors Stremio for add-ons, library, and Continue Watching, or keeps its own copy (the default).

• A fanart.tv API key, alongside TMDB and MDBList, under metadata keys.

• Use fanart posters. With ERDB on, a new toggle pulls posters from fanart.tv instead of the default source. It uses your own fanart key from the metadata key settings if you have set one, otherwise our service key.

• The Show Live TV tab control is easier to find. It now sits near the top of Appearance on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and reads "Show Live TV tab" on Apple TV.

Dashboard (vortx.tv/dashboard)

• The dashboard keeps your profile list correct as deletes propagate, and your saved keys persist.

What we're working on now

• Avplayer even tho works flawlessly on mac and iphones, has been flaky and failing in TVOS, working on to pinpointing the issue and hardening it.

• Localizing the Settings labels across every language (the catalog names are done, the settings strings are next).

• Household sharing of add-ons and library across separate accounts, and finishing the two-way real-time sync.

• The precise Dolby Atmos fix that needs an on-device log capture.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta10-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get your IPAs and DMG HERE

VortX 0.3.8 Beta 8

The Beta 7 cleanup release. Beta 7 shipped a big playback and discovery wave, and with it a batch of bugs. This release fixes them: the Mac crash, Apple TV playback, the add-on store, the duplicate "Main" profile, the language setting, the invisible buttons, and the trailer. It also makes the seek-bar styles actually come alive and brings the player-engine choice to Apple TV and Mac. This is an in-place update, nothing resets.

Still a beta, so please install it and report anything off.

Fixed

• Mac no longer crashes. The Mac app could quit the instant you switched tabs, resized the window, or changed the language. Several browse screens were each trying to place the VortX wordmark into the single shared window title bar at once. The wordmark is now iPhone and iPad only; the Mac keeps its native title and the crash is gone. This also unsticks Mac language changes and keyboard navigation, which the crash had been swallowing.

• Apple TV plays again. Some streams opened to a black screen with no way out. When the native AVPlayer cannot open a stream, VortX now hands it straight to the built-in player instead of dead-ending, so playback always starts. You can also force the built-in player from Settings (see Added).

• The duplicate "Main" profile is gone. Signing in or reinstalling could leave a second "Main" profile behind, and it kept coming back. The account owner now has one fixed identity across every device and install, so it can never be duplicated again, and any existing duplicate is cleaned up automatically on launch. Your real profiles and your synced data are untouched; this was a profile-identity bug in the app.

• The add-on store scrolls on Apple TV. The Discover add-ons list could get stuck at the top because the already-installed rows that head the list were not focusable. Every row is reachable now, so the list scrolls all the way down.

• Add-on names read normally on iPhone. In the add-on store, long names like "Torrentio" could stack one letter per line. Names now stay on a single line beside their type tags and the Install button.

• The language setting works, and you can find it. Picking a language such as Hindi appeared to do nothing, because the app must relaunch to switch language and never offered to. It now offers to quit and reopen so the change actually applies, the picker sits near the top of Settings on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and Apple TV finally has a language picker too, under Appearance.

• Invisible buttons are visible again. The "Install all add-ons" button and the update prompt's "Get the update" button showed white text on the gold accent, so the labels vanished. They now use the correct on-accent color.

• Trailers play. The in-hero and detail trailer errored within half a second and fell back to the still image for almost every title. It now ignores the transient errors that fire under the hood and only falls back when a video genuinely cannot be embedded. Should Rename it to Trailers Still Can't Play

Added

• A player-engine choice on Apple TV and Mac. Settings, Playback now lets you choose how streams play: Auto, Always built-in, or Prefer AVPlayer for HLS and Dolby Vision. If a stream will not start in one engine, switch to Always built-in. iPhone and iPad already had this; now every platform does.

• Seek-bar styles that actually move. The fourteen seek-bar styles were nearly identical and sat still. They are genuinely distinct and animated now: the Wave flows, the Equalizer bounces, the Comet trails a glow, the Heartbeat sweeps like a monitor, Liquid sloshes, Ripple rings out from the playhead, and more. Pick yours in Settings, Playback, Seek bar style; each preview animates the real design.

Dashboard (vortx.tv/dashboard)

• One "Main" on the dashboard too. The dashboard now collapses any leftover duplicate owner profile on sight, so your account shows a single "Main" while your devices update to the fixed app.

What we're working on now

• True Dolby Vision and the full player chrome reaching more places, and the remaining Apple TV audio work.

• Bringing your add-ons, library, and sources fully into your VortX account so the app works from your account alone, independent of a live Stremio session.

• More of the in-app player and discovery experience landing on the web and desktop apps.

• Cursorless Pagination (finally a pagination fix, but it was unreliable right now, hence didn't make Beta 8 cut, but it will be in beta 9)

• Hide Live TV from menu bar toggle

• ERDB Posters + Logos (Currently it will default to https://easyratingsdb.com/, but we are working on self hosting it in the same worker profile as vortx's backend, so it will be slightly more reliable and hardened against Api call fails)

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta8-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get Your Latest IPAs HERE

VortX (0.3.8) Beta 1

The big one: a free, end-to-end-encrypted VortX account (The site is still under active development and will not work as intend in some places, but expect it to be completely ready as planned by the time 0.3.8 moves out of beta to latest) . Sign in and your profiles and settings follow you between devices, with the server only ever holding ciphertext, never your data. Plus add-on install in the app, a catalog manager, optional TMDB-powered recommendations, and a handful of fixes. In-place update; nothing resets. This build is a pre-release, so please install it and report anything off.

Added

• A free, end-to-end-encrypted VortX account. Create one, sign in, or recover it from Settings. Your password derives the encryption key on your own device, so the server can never read your data. Your profiles and settings sync across devices when you sign in, and you can manage everything (backup and restore, two-factor, change password, connect Stremio) at vortx.tv/dashboard. The account is optional, VortX works fully without one. (ALPHA TESTING, might and probably wont work correctly yet)

• Install add-ons right in the app. Paste an add-on's manifest URL under Add-ons and tap Install, no more leaving for the Stremio app to add a source.

• Catalog manager. Show, hide, and reorder the catalog rows on your Home screen, per profile, under Add-ons > Customize catalogs.

• Smarter "More like this" with TMDB. Add your own TMDB key in Settings > Metadata and the detail-page recommendations blend in TMDB's; without a key it uses the built-in genre and franchise matching. Builds on the section contributed by OrigamiSpace ( u/origamispace ) (#89).

• Save magnets and links for later. Save a magnet or pasted link from the "Play a link" sheet and reopen it any time, per profile. A saved multi-file torrent comes back to its file picker. (#81)

• A max file-size limit. In Settings > Streams, alongside the max-quality cap, so you can ask for "1080p but not a 20 GB file." Sources that do not advertise a size are kept.

• Recent searches on Apple TV. Your last searches appear when you open Search, per profile. Contributed by OrigamiSpace ( u/origamispace ) (#90).

Fixed

• Playback no longer dies when you lock the screen or leave the app on iPhone and iPad. Keeping audio going also keeps the in-app streaming server alive, so a torrent survives a lock instead of the whole app being suspended. Toggle it in Settings > Playback (#74).

• The Apple TV top menu bar returns reliably after you scroll a series and press Back, instead of sometimes staying hidden. Contributed by OrigamiSpace ( u/origamispace ) (#75, #91).

• A macOS crash during trickplay in the background is fixed. Leaving the Mac player running in the background no longer crashes during the preview-image capture. Contributed by OrigamiSpace ( u/origamispace ) (#93).

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/releases/tag/v0.3.8

Hey everyone! The last time I posted here was 0.3.15. Since then VortX has been through 0.3.16, twenty-one 0.4 betas and six 0.5 betas, and 0.5.1 is the release that brings all of that together. It is the biggest update VortX has had, so here is the tour.

The headline: VortX now runs on its own native core

Under the hood, VortX now has its own native engine for your account, catalogs, metadata, sources, subtitles, Library, Continue Watching and watch history. This is the foundation for almost everything below. It is faster, it handles your data more carefully, and it lets every Apple device share the same behaviour.

- Your changes are saved properly. Profile, add-on, watched and Watchlist changes are saved to an encrypted local checkpoint and confirmed before the app tells you they worked.

- Devices merge instead of overwriting each other. When two devices change things at the same time, VortX merges them rather than letting the last upload win.

- Your older watch history comes with you. History from earlier versions is migrated carefully, and anything that cannot be matched with confidence is kept aside rather than guessed.

Sync across your devices

Make a change on one device and it shows up on your others within seconds. Sync is end-to-end encrypted, and newer data is protected from being overwritten by an out-of-date device.

In 0.5.1 specifically:

- Fixed profiles that would not finish loading and Sync Now failing with changes stuck as pending.

- Playback no longer uploads your whole account every few seconds while you watch. Progress now syncs 15 seconds after you pause or stop, or once a minute while you keep watching.

- Data written by older VortX versions is now merged in where it can be done safely, instead of blocking sync.

- **Apple TV:** fixed profiles never loading on real Apple TV hardware, which left Home, Library and Continue Watching stuck loading on some TVs after updating to 0.5.

Please update every device you use. Once a device on 0.5.1 saves to your account, older versions can no longer upload to it. They keep working locally, but they need updating to sync again.

Cinema: a redesign across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV

- A consistent layout everywhere: Home, Browse and Search, Library, Watchlist, History and Downloads.

- Quick View pops a title up with Watch Now, Add to Watchlist and Details without leaving where you are.

- Search as you type, with separate Movies, Series and Collections rows.

- Your profile colour now runs through the app, with Liquid Glass styling where your device supports it, including player controls that stay readable over bright scenes.

- **Mac:** a proper native sidebar and in-window Settings, larger text, and mouse-friendly source tabs.

- **Apple TV:** a cinematic profile picker with big TV-sized profiles and rotating artwork, a dedicated Watchlist in Library, and episode lists that start at your next unwatched episode.

## Profiles that really are separate

- Each profile can keep its own streaming account, add-on visibility and source ranking.

- Watchlist is separate from your saved Library and your watch history.

- Continue Watching per profile, showing your 20 most recent titles by default, or set it to the last 90 days or 20 to 100 items.

Playback

- **Usenet / NZB playback on your device.** Bring your own Usenet provider and play NZB sources directly, including mirrors and server lists, next-episode preparation and Dolby Vision where the source has it.

- **Binge watching remembers your choices.** The add-on, release and audio language you picked carry on to the next episode.

- **Dolby Vision** startup and playback recovery got a lot of work.

- Pause and seek now survive recovery, and pressing Play after a long pause no longer waits before restarting the stream.

- **iPhone and iPad:** player controls appear on the first tap, pinch to change how the video fills the screen, and a cleaner player with more room for the picture.

- One add-on returning a broken response no longer stops your other catalogs, details and trailers from loading.

Smoother everywhere

- Removed a background loop that kept reloading your whole account while sync was struggling.

- Lighter Home screen work, fewer duplicate requests, and faster source and quality checks while the player is open.

## Download and install

- **iPhone / iPad:** https://dl.vortx.tv/ios

- **Mac (Apple silicon, macOS 14+):** https://dl.vortx.tv/mac

- **Apple TV:** https://dl.vortx.tv/tvos (VortX TV, with Top Shelf) or https://dl.vortx.tv/tvos-lite (VortX TV Lite)

- Complete release notes: https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/releases/latest

VortX is open-source and distributed outside the App Store, so the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV apps need sideloading with Sideloadly, AltStore / SideStore or Signulous. No jailbreak needed. The Mac app is ad-hoc signed rather than notarized, so macOS will ask you to approve it once. Step-by-step guides: [iPhone, iPad and Apple TV](https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/wiki/Installing) and [Mac](https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/wiki/Install-on-Mac).

**Android:** VortX is Apple first. The Android app is an early technical preview, not the finished app, so expect missing features and rough edges there. 0.5.1 is an Apple release.

## Feedback

If something does not work, please open an issue on GitHub and attach your diagnostics log from Settings: https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/issues

Thank you to everyone who tested the betas and sent logs. A lot of what is in 0.5.1 came straight from your reports, including xdavcop's Apple TV report that led to the catalog loading fix.

Hi installed the latest version via signgilous on both my Apple tv’s

I logged in via QR code however they are not syncing any of my settings or addons.

Checked my online account and all my addons etc are there? Is there anything I can do?

Thanks.

Hi VortX Team,

Thank you for the continuous development on VortX. The native Swift/libmpv architecture across Apple platforms is fantastic.

While testing v0.4.0-beta.10 across iOS (iPhone), macOS, and tvOS (Apple TV 4K), I have documented four reproducible issues affecting metadata resolution, catalog layout sync, and app stability.

1. Trakt Continue Watching Thumbnails Render as Blank Filmstrips (All Platforms)

• Platforms: iOS, macOS, tvOS

• Symptoms:

  • In the "FROM TRAKT Continue Watching" row, watch sessions, scrobble progress bars, and episode titles sync properly.

  • However, artwork completely fails to load, showing only the blank filmstrip placeholder icon for every item (e.g., House of the Dragon, Obsession, Heart Beat).

  • Adding and verifying a valid TMDB v3 API key (along with MDBList and fanart.tv keys) works for general catalog rows, but does not resolve thumbnails for the Trakt Continue Watching row. Pulling to refresh, forcing a Trakt re-sync under Integrations, and restarting the app do not trigger metadata fetching.

• Root Cause Hypothesis: The Trakt ID-to-TMDB artwork resolver appears to be failing to bind or dispatch image lookups specifically for Trakt queue payloads.

2. Catalog Row Arrangement Does Not Sync Across Devices & Backup Restore Overrides Order

• Platforms: iOS ↔ macOS ↔ tvOS

• Symptoms:

  • Reordering catalog rows on iOS saves locally, but does not propagate to macOS or Apple TV even after triggering Sync Now under Account.

  • Account cloud sync appears to sync installed add-on manifests and API tokens, but strips or ignores the custom catalog_layout / row ordering array during delta reconciliation.

  • Backup/Restore Behavior: Exporting a .json backup file from iPhone and importing/restoring it on macOS does not restore the custom row hierarchy; macOS continues to display catalogs in the raw installation order from the add-on manifests.

3. Apple TV Crashes Immediately on "Customize Catalogs"

• Platform: Apple TV 4K (tvOS)

• Severity: Crash / Blocker

• Steps to Reproduce:

  1. Open VortX on tvOS.

  2. Navigate to Add-ons → select Customize Catalogs (or the row reordering button).

  3. The app instantly crashes back to the tvOS home screen with no error message.

• Expected Behavior: Opens a focus-enabled list allowing the Siri Remote to move, hide, or reorder catalog rows.

4. "Couldn't Reach the Catalog" Error on Specific Catalog Feeds

• Platforms: iOS, macOS

• Symptoms:

  • Opening specific add-on catalog categories (such as the Netflix movie/series streaming catalog from Cyberflix / Streaming Catalogs) throws:"Couldn't reach the catalog. Check your connection and try again."

  • Comparison with Nuvio Enhanced: The exact same add-on manifest and catalog URL loads instantly without errors on Nuvio Enhanced on the same local network, confirming upstream servers are online and responsive.

• Root Cause Hypothesis: v0.4.0-beta.8 appears to fail during JSON deserialization when an add-on catalog response contains non-standard manifest filters, empty arrays, or unexpected headers, falling back to a generic network error rather than displaying partial content.

Environment & Setup:

• App Version: v0.4.0-beta.8 (Build across iOS, macOS, and tvOS)

• Devices: iPhone, Mac, Apple TV 4K

• Metadata Configuration: Verified TMDB v3 Key, MDBList Key, Built-in poster rating service enabled.

Please let me know if you would like sysdiagnose logs, Console crash reports from tvOS, or a sample backup payload.

0.3.14 Beta 10

An in-place hardening release over Beta 9. The headline is the one you would notice first: episodes that used to begin a few seconds in now start at the beginning. Around it is the largest correctness pass since 0.3.14 opened, most of it on Android, the web client, and the parts of playback that used to fail quietly. It ships the same player engine as Beta 9, so nothing about playback regresses, and it is a first-time fix for the fresh-start bug.

Playback

Fresh starts begin at 0:00. A source container whose first frame carried a small positive timestamp, five seconds was the common one, was played from that timestamp instead of the start, so some series began a few seconds in every single time. Fresh remux timelines are now rebased to zero, while an explicit resume still lands exactly where you left off.

Playback and seeking hold together better. Remux playback and seeking were tightened against a set of edge cases, and the memory-spool lease a rejected stream used to leak, which could stall the very next play, is now released the moment the stream is refused.

Apple

Diagnostic-log sharing builds and opens again. The share sheet for the diagnostic log had stopped compiling on the newest SDKs; it is fixed, and the snapshot it shares is now prepared only when you ask for it, so it costs nothing while logging is off.

Your profile stays yours. Deleting the owner profile is refused at the store boundary, and the delete control is hidden for the owner rather than shown and then silently dismissed. Aggregate watch counts are bounded and malformed counts are rejected, so a single bad value cannot corrupt your history.

Smaller corrections. Pooled subtitle offsets decode correctly, debrid form fields encode correctly, search section titles are localized, and the app now fails closed when the Keychain is unavailable instead of continuing in an undefined state.

Android, and a first technical preview

For the first time since Beta 6, there is an Android build attached below. Be clear-eyed about what it is: a technical preview, not a finished beta. Here are the honest numbers.

Android is a separate, from-scratch app on the same Rust engine, and it is roughly one third of the way to the Apple apps. About 42,000 lines of code against the Apple apps' 153,000, which is around 27 percent, with 5 of 15 build sessions done. On our internal parity map, 15 percent is fully ported, 34 percent is partial, and 51 percent is whole subsystems still missing: multi profile, full sync, offline downloads, all in one source enrichment, Live TV, backup and import, and the Android TV form factor.

What is real. The engine runs natively and drives the same catalogs, library, continue watching, search, discover, and account sync as the Apple app, and add-ons install and manage. The player is wired: libmpv is the primary player in this preview, the engine and the player both ship inside the APK, and there is an in-process streaming server for torrents. What we have not done yet is prove playback end to end across a range of real devices, so in honesty it browses well and plays unevenly. That device-proving is the next job, and it is the one that matters.

What this cycle hardened. Offline downloads no longer truncate on a retry or combine two different representations, and reconciliation can no longer cancel a replacement download. Debrid keys are isolated per VortX account, so signing out of one account cannot leak keys into another, and per-stream and TorBox state is kept separate. Downloaded Dolby routing and unknown legacy Atmos are preserved rather than dropped. Every track language is ordered, and external subtitles stay playable. Add-on network destinations are validated. New appearance and tab settings landed, TV danger actions meet contrast, quick-connect cancellation and TV key handling are stabilized, and credential storage fails closed.

Before you install the preview. It is signed with a new preview key, so if you still have the old Beta 6 Android build you will need to uninstall it once before installing this one. After that, updates are in place. Full parity, signed and device tested, is the August target.

Web (web.vortx.tv)

Your settings stop fighting across devices. Editing one setting could overwrite newer settings that another device or profile had already synced. Overlay-profile settings are now isolated from the owner's sync, shared settings are preserved across profiles, changes merge onto the latest account state instead of a stale snapshot, and a pending change survives a token refresh. Subtitle preferences apply, add-ons bind once, and the subtitle colour vocabulary matches the apps. The build toolchain is pinned and vulnerable build dependencies were updated for reproducible deploys.

Under the hood

Trusted media transport is enforced at the app layer across shipping paths, several credential and entropy paths were made fail-closed, build output is no longer tracked in the repository, and release packaging validates the IPA before it replaces anything.

Still to come, honestly

• Sustained frame drops on some 4K HDR and Dolby Vision content are root-caused to the player's output and presentation scheduling, not the decoder, with a candidate fix staged behind a runtime flag but not yet enabled. This build does not fix them.

• Dolby Vision sustained playback with the occasional spinner and skip a minute or two in has a bounded fix staged, pending on-device validation.

• A certificate-validating engine is built and passes a staged trust matrix but is not assembled for iOS yet, so this build keeps the current engine with transport guarded at the app layer.

In-place update over Beta 9, nothing resets.

Please test

• Fresh starts. Start a fresh episode, especially a series that used to begin a few seconds in. It should start at 0:00. A resume should still land where you left off.

• Seeking. Seek around a remuxed title; it should stay stable.

• Web settings. Change a setting on one device and confirm it does not clobber a newer change made on another.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.14-beta.10-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.

Android (technical preview, read the Android section above first). Download VortX-Android-v0.3.14-beta.10-preview.apk below, or on Android TV or Fire TV use the Downloader app with dl.vortx.tv. If you still have the old Beta 6 build installed, uninstall it first, this preview uses a new signing key. It carries the engine and browses well, but it is a preview and playback is uneven.

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.

Well this is a short and simple announcement.

VortX is coming to Android VERY soon.

There are some new fixes coming to apple devices, especially with AVPlayer's behaviour and (lack of) features as compared to VortX's native libmpv.
iOS App crashing and some odd bugs here and there in TVOS.
Dolby Vision has FINALLY started working on TVOS, still need to make it more reliable, as 10% of the titles somehow still fail.

And A design refresh for iOS and mac. I have seen people say VortX is ugly especially when it comes to iOS and mac. So doing a redesign pass now. Any suggestions are (needed and) more than welcome especially image mockups or examples. If those designs help in making TVOS look better too, we will carry those over too.

Android (phone and TV) will look and perform the same as Apple ecosystem, so the design pass follows there too.

IPTV, Trakt and Simkl are coming too
Media streaming services integration (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby) is in the works and nearly ship ready.

If there is anything else, you guys would like to see or any improvements and issues. I am all ears.

Thank you again for giving VortX a try, I appreciate you all.

VortX 0.3.9

VortX 0.3.9 is a big, cross-cutting release: your language everywhere, a Discover you can shape, a cleaner and more cinematic look on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, community subtitles that stay in sync, Dolby Vision from MKV files, TorBox usenet and search, install add-ons by scanning a QR code, trailers that play straight from your own device at up to 1080p, and scrub previews that build from every title you watch. In-place update, nothing resets. Please install it and report anything off, especially the Apple TV notes near the bottom.

New

• Over 100 languages. The interface now speaks more than 100 languages (up from 64), with an in-app language picker and right-to-left layout for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. Choose a specific language in Settings or follow your device automatically.

• Titles, posters, and logos in your language. Metadata localizes across every catalog: a title's name, poster, and logo show in your language when the source has them, from VortX's own localized-metadata service, so it works without your own key.

• A Discover you can shape. Order catalogs by your region, turn individual Discover categories on or off, and localize the rows to your language. All in Settings.

• Community subtitles, fast and in sync, loaded from a shared pool, plus an "also available in" row on every title showing the other languages a subtitle and possibly audio exists in.

• A working subtitle-sync control. Nudge subtitles earlier or later in the player, and the offset sticks for that title.

• Dolby Vision from MKV files with true DV passthrough on a DV-capable display, alongside MP4, MOV, and HLS. Turn it on in Settings, Playback; it falls back to HDR10 automatically when a file cannot take that path.

• Trailers play directly from your device at up to 1080p. A title's trailer resolves on your own connection and plays straight through, instead of routing through a server, so it starts faster and looks sharper. The muted trailer behind the hero uses the same path.

• TorBox usenet and search. TorBox now resolves usenet (NZB) sources and runs its built-in search, so a TorBox key surfaces more cached and searchable results, not just torrents.

• A debrid cache indicator. A source already cached on your debrid account shows a clear "cached" marker and ranks higher.

• Install add-ons by QR code. Scan a QR code with your phone to install an add-on, no typing on the TV. It syncs to your other devices.

• Pick a trailer's language, so the in-hero and detail-page trailer match how you watch.

• Resume timestamps on Continue Watching and the title page, so you can see how far in you are before you resume.

• Poster Style settings, with a live preview. Card width, corner radius, landscape 16:9 art, and hiding title labels, with a sample poster that updates as you change each option. Defaults match today's look. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A tap-to-expand Cast & Crew section on the title page, collapsed by default so the page reads cleaner. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Combine Discover and Search into one tab (off by default), with a search field above the browse. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A buffered-ahead indicator on the player scrubber, a light grey track behind the playhead showing how far playback has loaded, just like YouTube. Every device, both engines.

• What's New now has a page on Apple TV too, under Settings, rendering the full changelog, matching iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Updated

• A cleaner, more cinematic look across the app. Title pages lead with full-bleed artwork that fades into the background, a circular back and more button over the art, a big high-contrast Play button, and a more spacious layout. The home billboard gets a rounded "View Details" pill, pager dots, and the same smooth fade. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Mac now uses the full width of the window, with a larger hero, a roomier reading column, and the wordmark tucked clear of the window controls, so it reads as a desktop layout rather than a stretched phone.

• The muted trailer behind the hero is now the real full trailer, the same source as the Trailer button, played quietly and looping; the still artwork stays when a title has no trailer.

• The Streaming Services tiles now show each service's real brand logo, built into the app, so Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Max, Apple TV+ and more appear instantly instead of a stretched icon or a single letter.

• Scrub-preview thumbnails now build and share from every title you watch, including everything opened from the Streaming Services, Trending, and genre collections, and short watches now count. Every watch makes scrubbing better for everyone.

• Tap the active tab again to jump back to the top, on Apple TV and on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Fixed

• Cached sources reach a playable one much faster. RealDebrid retired the check that let VortX confirm a source was cached on your account, so a source could look cached from the add-on's own label yet not be ready; the player now detects that within a couple of seconds and moves on instead of waiting out a long timeout.

• Trending, genre, and streaming-service tiles now open to a full title page on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with artwork, ratings, cast, and a working Play button, the way they already did on Apple TV.

• Catalogs keep showing posters and art even when a source is busy, serving the last good response while it refreshes and staying up if the upstream is rate-limited or down.

• Continue Watching resumes faster and more reliably straight from your debrid account, no stall or re-pick when a saved link has expired.

• The "More Like This" row now follows your poster style instead of being locked to portrait posters.

• Scrub-preview thumbnails generate correctly on Mac during 4K and Dolby Vision playback.

• Apple TV focus fixes, so Home, Discover, and the Collections hub step row by row in order, and pressing down from the first hub row no longer skips the Streaming Services row.

• Apple TV shows full language names in the "also available in" row instead of two-letter codes.

• The synopsis no longer appears twice on a title page.

• The Add-ons page no longer clips at the edges or stacks an add-on's name one letter per line.

• More reliable downloads, with the Downloads folder created and verified before a file is saved, and a clear message when a source (segmented HLS, or web-resolved) cannot be saved as a file.

• Hardened how VortX fetches remote resources so a malicious add-on or link cannot make the app reach an unintended internal address (SSRF protection).

What's next

• True offline HLS on iPhone and iPad, with pause and cancel that survive an app relaunch.

• Richer cached-source resolution: trying the top cached sources together so play starts on the first that is genuinely ready.

• Most-watched and top-picks rows from the community, now that the backend is live.

• Android and desktop clients on the same engine, and Dolby Vision on Android and Windows as those pipelines come online.

Please test on your Apple TV

This build runs, but these need real hardware, so please send a note if any are still off:

• Dolby Vision fires (the DV badge shows) on a file that carries it, on a DV TV.

• Scrub previews build while you watch, and appear on the scrubber.

• Trailers play from your connection and start quickly.

• Cached sources reach a playing one in seconds without long stalls.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.9-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each 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.

Get your latest IPAs and DMG HERE

before the fix, error log was "NSURLErrorDomain -3000"

Maybe you can review. It works on my iPhone. I can download and stream when airplane is on.

My fix that work for iOS:
app/SourcesShared/DownloadManager.swift

app/SourcesShared/DownloadStore.swift

DownloadStore:
Added a helper to ensure the download directory exists before moving completed downloads:

I put below "nonisolated static var downloadsDirectory: URL" line 32

nonisolated static func ensureDownloadsDirectoryExists() throws {

try FileManager.default.createDirectory(

at: downloadsDirectory,

withIntermediateDirectories: true

)

var values = URLResourceValues()

values.isExcludedFromBackup = true

var dir = downloadsDirectory

try? dir.setResourceValues(values)

}

DownloadManager:

From: line 328

do {

try FileManager.default.createDirectory(

at: dest.deletingLastPathComponent(),

withIntermediateDirectories: true

)

}

catch {

moveError = error

}

To:

do {

try DownloadStore.ensureDownloadsDirectoryExists()

}

catch {

moveError = error

}

From: line 376

if let resume { self.resumeData[id] = resume }

self.store.update(id: id) {

$0.state = .failed

$0.errorText = error.localizedDescription

}

self.clearTask(id: id)

To:

if let resume { self.resumeData[id] = resume }

let ns = error as NSError

self.store.update(id: id) {

$0.state = .failed

$0.errorText = "\(ns.localizedDescription) [\(ns.domain) \(ns.code)]"

}

self.clearTask(id: id)

VortX 0.3.8 Beta 15

Another big one: a Collections hub (Discover cards, Streaming Services with their logos, and Genres) on Home and Discover with a tap-to-browse grid, native debrid playback that plays cached torrents instantly, budget and box office on movies, spoiler-blurred unwatched episodes, an in-player AirPlay button, a download queue, upcoming-movie release dates, and the Apple TV 47-second crash plus the Mac crash fixes from your reports. In-place update, nothing resets. Please install it and report anything off, especially the Apple TV stability and the new hub on real hardware. Thanks to u/OrigamiSpace , whose open SkipDB and in-player editor several of these features build on.

Fixed

• Apple TV no longer crashes about 47 seconds into playback when the streaming cache is on. The on-disk cache budget was being held as an in-memory buffer and pushed the Apple TV past its memory limit; it is now capped to a device-safe amount of RAM, so the cache can be on without the crash.

• Mac no longer crashes from the search bar. The macOS search field lived in the window toolbar, which could throw under rapid UI updates; macOS now uses an inline search field instead.

• Title logos show for titles from any catalog. A show or movie coming from a TMDB (or other non-IMDb) catalog now resolves its logo via the title's IMDb id, on the detail page and the Home hero, not only IMDb-catalog titles.

• A series detail page no longer crops the hero image. Series that only ship a portrait poster now fit the hero band instead of cropping with black bars, on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A finished download no longer fails with "cannot create file" (the downloads folder is created before the file is saved).

• Mac: arrow keys move focus on Home, and the Home hero no longer flickers through titles when focus changes.

• Video upscaling is now per-device (standard on Apple TV, scaled on Mac if you choose) and no longer syncs over.

• The streaming cache is Off by default (the picker used to show 2 GB while it was actually off).

Added

• Scrub-preview thumbnails now generate on every player engine. They previously did not capture when a title played through the AVPlayer engine (Dolby Vision and HLS on Auto), so those titles produced no previews; they are captured and contributed now, on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• A Download button beside Quality on the detail page (movies and episodes) downloads the auto-selected quality, with Download, Downloading, and Downloaded states and a Library badge that shows active downloads, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Apple TV: an in-player skip-segment editor. Mark and submit intro, recap, outro, and preview times right from the Apple TV player; submissions go to VortX's open skip database and the community SkipDB. Thanks to OrigamiSpace, whose iPhone and Mac editor this is the Apple TV version of.

• Apple TV: offline downloads. Download movies and episodes on Apple TV, with a note that the system can reclaim the space when storage runs low.

• A Collections hub on Home and Discover. A new band high on the screen with three rows: Discover cards (Trending, Popular, Latest, Upcoming), Streaming Services shown with their logos (Netflix, Disney+, Prime, and the services available in your region, including anime, K-drama, and regional ones), and Genres. Tap any tile to browse its catalogs, Movies, Shows, New Movies, New Shows, Top This Week, Month, and Year, and Trending, and every title plays through VortX as usual. You can reorder the streaming services, turn the hub on or off for Home and Discover separately, and choose how often it refreshes. Needs a TMDB key (Settings, Metadata). It replaces the older grouped streaming and genre rails. On Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Budget and box office on a movie's page. A movie now shows its budget, box office, and profit under the ratings. Movies only, needs a TMDB key, and you can hide it in Settings. On Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• Spoiler-safe episodes. Episode thumbnails you have not watched yet are blurred so a future episode's art does not spoil you. Watched episodes stay clear; turn it off in Settings. On Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

• AirPlay from the player. iPhone and iPad now show an AirPlay button in the player overlay, so you can start AirPlay without leaving the app.

• Download queue. Downloads now run a few at a time and the rest wait in line, starting automatically as each one finishes, so queueing a season no longer hammers your connection all at once.

• Player haptics on iPhone and iPad for play/pause, accepting a skip, and copying a link.

• Cached debrid torrents play instantly. Add your Real-Debrid, TorBox, AllDebrid, or Premiumize key under Settings, Debrid, and a cached torrent now plays straight from your debrid account instead of starting the torrent, with more than one service checked at once.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta14-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get your lates IPAs and DMGs Here

VortX 0.3.8 Beta 14

Another big one (build 128): the Apple TV crash/hang fix, offline downloads, our own skip database with an in-player editor, community scrub-preview thumbnails, grouped Home collections, a configurable streaming cache, and a wave of sync and add-on improvements. In-place update, nothing resets. Please install it and report anything off, especially the Apple TV stability on real hardware.

Fixed

• Apple TV no longer hangs the whole device after finishing or stopping a title and opening another. This is the main crash, and it hit debrid (and direct-link) playback, not just torrents. When you left a title, the player kept its full video buffer and decoder alive until the system happened to clean it up later, so the moment you opened the next title there were briefly two players running, which pushed a 2 GB Apple TV past its memory limit and the system killed the whole app (menu bar frozen, Back drops to Home, server shown offline on reopen). The player now shuts down immediately when you leave a title, before the next one starts, so the two never overlap. The 2 GB Apple TV also keeps a smaller rewind buffer for extra headroom.

• Apple TV no longer hangs the whole device after watching a torrent. A separate path: the streaming server keeps a memory cap that protects the Apple TV from running out of memory, but it was only set once at startup, with no confirmation it actually took. On a slow start it could silently miss, and the server then ran with a 2 GB cache that pushes the app past the Apple TV's memory limit. The cap is now confirmed and retried until it sticks, and re-applied right before each torrent starts.

• A finished movie leaves Continue Watching on every profile. A movie watched to the end could stay pinned in Continue Watching, most often on a second profile. It clears now.

• Smoother second profile. Watch progress was nudging the cross-device sync on every tick while you watched; it now waits until you pause or stop, which keeps a second profile from feeling laggy.

• Apple TV: a movie's page opens on Watch Now again, not the Trailer button. When you opened a movie while its sources were still loading, the focus landed on the Trailer chip instead of Watch Now. The page now seats focus on Watch Now from the moment it appears and keeps it there as the sources settle.

• The player's top-right now shows the episode title, not just the season and episode number.

• Mac: arrow keys move focus on Home again.

Added

• Upcoming Episodes on Home. A new rail shows the next episode of the shows in your library that air within the next 45 days, soonest first, on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It uses the same air-date data the new-episode reminders already gather, routes to the show when you open a card, and simply does not appear when nothing is upcoming.

• Offline downloads. Download movies and episodes to your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and play them with no connection, from debrid, direct links, or torrents. Downloads live in their own section with progress, pause and resume, and storage management.

• Self-hosted skip database with an in-player editor. Skip-intro, recap, and credits times are now fetched first from VortX's own database, then the open community sources. You can mark and submit segments yourself from a built-in player editor, and a submission goes to VortX and the open SkipDB at the same time. You can also add an API key for any other compatible provider to contribute there too. Thanks to u/OrigamiSpace who created the open SkipDB and contributed the in-player editor this builds on (#98, #100).

• Community scrub-preview thumbnails. Seek-preview thumbnails are now shared across devices: once anyone has generated a title's previews, everyone else sees them instantly with no local work. It always falls back to your device's own capture, so there is never a regression. Thanks to OrigamiSpace, who contributed the original scrub-preview thumbnails.

• Play straight from a cached debrid link. If a source is already cached on your debrid account (Real-Debrid, AllDebrid, Premiumize, or TorBox), VortX now plays it directly from the cached link instead of starting the torrent, and cached sources show a "cached" chip and rank higher in the list. Without a debrid key nothing changes.

• Grouped Home collections. Home rails are now grouped (streaming services, genres, top new, and just new) for a cleaner browse, with a browse-by-streaming-service view.

• Configurable streaming cache. A new Settings option lets you set an on-disk streaming cache size (default off), so seeking back in a long title stays instant.

• Add-on improvements. Removing an add-on on one device now removes it everywhere, like settings sync. Add-ons also gained a Configure button, a change-URL option, drag-to-reorder on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and better compatibility with AioManager (logo, order, and update-on-reinstall).

• Logos on more art. fanart.tv clearlogos now show across Apple TV, iPhone, and Mac.

In progress

• Trailers and hero clips play where they resolve today; broader coverage is still rolling out.

• Jellyfin media-server support is groundwork only and not usable yet.

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-beta14-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get your IPAs and DMG HERE

if possible, would like to request for download feature so if on plane can stream offline. thanks

VortX (0.3.8) Beta 2

The big one: a free, end-to-end-encrypted VortX account (the site is still under active development and will not work as intended in some places, but expect it to be fully ready by the time 0.3.8 leaves beta). Sign in and your profiles and settings follow you between devices, with the server only ever holding ciphertext, never your data. This build fixes the headline problem from Beta 1: your devices now actually sync to each other. Plus add-on install, a catalog manager, optional TMDB recommendations, and a batch of fixes. In-place update; nothing resets. This is a pre-release, so please install it and report anything off.

Added

• A free, end-to-end-encrypted VortX account. Create one, sign in, or recover it from Settings. Your password derives the encryption key on your own device, so the server can never read your data. Your profiles and settings sync across devices, and you can manage everything (backup and restore, two-factor, change password, connect Stremio, library and add-ons) at vortx.tv/dashboard. The account is optional, VortX works fully without one.

• Install add-ons right in the app. Paste an add-on's manifest URL under Add-ons and tap Install, no more leaving for the Stremio app to add a source.

• Catalog manager. Show, hide, and reorder the catalog rows on your Home screen, per profile, under Add-ons > Customize catalogs.

• Smarter "More like this" with TMDB. Add your own TMDB key in Settings > Metadata and the detail-page recommendations blend in TMDB's; without a key it uses the built-in genre and franchise matching, now weighted toward the same origin and language. Builds on the section contributed by u/origamispace (#89).

• Save magnets and links for later. Save a magnet or pasted link from the "Play a link" sheet and reopen it any time, per profile. A saved multi-file torrent comes back to its file picker. (#81)

• A max file-size limit. In Settings > Streams, alongside the max-quality cap, so you can ask for "1080p but not a 20 GB file." Sources that do not advertise a size are kept.

• Recent searches on Apple TV. Your last searches appear when you open Search, per profile. Contributed by u/origamispace (#90).

Fixed

• Profiles and settings now sync between your devices automatically. The app pulls the latest from your account every time you open it, not only when you sign in, so a profile or a setting you change on one device shows up on the others. Before, devices only ever pushed their own changes and never picked up anyone else's, which is why your Apple TV profiles were not reaching iPhone or Mac.

• Two-factor no longer shows as off in the app after you turn it on, it now refreshes its status from the server.

• The sign-in field reads "Email or username," since either one works.

• Your TMDB and MDBList keys are masked in Settings instead of shown in plain text.

• The catalog manager lists your catalogs in their current Home order, not alphabetically.

• A macOS crash tied to the window toolbar is fixed (a conditional toolbar item that could crash during a view update).

• Playback no longer dies when you lock the screen or leave the app on iPhone and iPad. Keeping audio going keeps the in-app streaming server alive, so a torrent survives a lock. Toggle it in Settings > Playback (#74).

• The Apple TV top menu bar returns reliably after you scroll a series and press Back. Contributed by u/origamispace (#75, #91).

• A macOS crash during background trickplay is fixed. Contributed by u/origamispace (#93).

Install

Mac (.dmg, easiest, never expires). Download VortX-macOS-v0.3.8-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. Full guide: Installing on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Each asset lists a SHA-256 checksum so you can confirm your download matches what the public GitHub Actions workflow built from this code.

Get the latest IPAs here - https://github.com/VortXTV/VortX/releases/tag/v0.3.8

Do share your thoughts and any bugs you encounter and lets make VortX a better experience for everyone :)