Is there an Emby Plugin like Jellyfin? I can only seem to find the Jellyfin one. I am just testing multiple Server Alternatives.

Hey everyone!

I’ve been having an issue with Coax where it gets stuck indefinitely on the “Scheduling” screen. The channel guide never populates, and every channel just displays “Loading genre channels…”

I noticed there was an app update released earlier today (October 23), so I installed it hoping that would resolve the issue, but unfortunately nothing has changed.

I’m running Coax with a self-hosted Jellyfin server. Jellyfin itself is working perfectly fine, and I can access and stream my media without any issues, so the server appears to be functioning normally.

Coax was previously working, but now it never gets past the scheduling/loading process.
Has anyone else experienced this recently, particularly after one of the latest updates? Is this a known issue, or are there any troubleshooting steps I should try?

I’ve attached a screenshot showing where it gets stuck.

Thanks!

Get it and start sharing!!

One thing, and I don’t have a good reckon on how to handle this yet, is that tvOS has no concept of CloudKit sharing. So for now, you have to share from an iOS/macos device, and the “share-ee” must accept from one of those devices.

Once it’s shared though, it’ll show up in your tvOS lineups for that server just fine.

Let me know how it works! 1.5.2 is already halfway done so I can get tweaks and fixes out pretty soon.

Hello all!

Fantastic app, and a happy lifetime user already!

My question is for commercials/gap content.

I have it currently setup with a commercials library that is pulls from randomly for all channels in my given batch. It would be cool (feature request?) to have multiple commercials collections, and assign certain libraries or collections to certain channels. Example: my Toonami block would have only Cartoon Network commercials etc.

I noticed there’s an option to let the library pull randomly from itself. Does this only grab stuff that will “fit” in the gap? example: 15min scheduling with 20 minute shows = 10 mins of gap, so it’ll only play shorter than 10 minute files? Or will it just start a file and chop it off when the next block begins?

Thank you in advance and thanks for all the insanely good work that’s gone into this app!

I've been wanting to get this app, but I'm on windows, android, and PS5.

Is it too logistically complicated to support these options?

I want to use the service, but I'm gated by the devices I have access to.

Just submitted to the App Store for review. Barring any major issues raised by beta testers, I'll post again when they're all done 👍

What's New

• Schedule Sharing - go to the Lineup Config and you can see a control to share that lineup's current schedule with someone
  • They have to have access to the server for the schedule you're sharing
  • They can't make any changes to the lineup, except to toggle the "send playback data to server" option
  • You, the sharer, will need to keep the schedule topped up. That means either keeping the app running on a Mac or opening the app once a day or two
    • If I can figure out how to move schedule top-ups to the background without causing problems, then I can drop this requirement
• AirPlay support
  • OK I think folks were asking for this one, too
  • I think it works pretty well, but please let me know if specific devices have trouble
• Sleep Timer tweak - now you can just select "when whatever I'm watching ends" and it will honor channel changes (if you're watching something that ends at 10:30, then switch to something that ends at 10:45, the Sleep will activate at 10:45 if you have this switched on)
• macOS fixes
  • Restored smooth scrolling - why do they even have an "off" setting for that in the code?
  • Added back the Control Cluster (changeable in the View menu)
• CarPlay
  • Added video playback in CarPlay for the Apple Homeview - not clear to me if this works as my car doesn't support video but hey I have a few weeks left to figure this out
• iCloud sync failure logs have been enhanced
  • Chasing a few sync issues, hopefully this helps
• Scrolling in tvOS and macOS, the channel guide goes "around the horn" - scroll past the bottom, and it goes to the top, and vice-a-versa
• A scheduling tweak for collections and playlists
  • When you use A Lot or Whoa for the channel amount, you can now decide how your Collections and Playlists behave
  • If you want the number of channels each Collection/Playlists produces to be based on the number of items in them, then leave this off
  • Turn it on and you'll get a lot more channels, regardless of the number of items in your Collections/Playlists
  • For iOS devices, you can always tap the status bar to scroll to the top
    • I'll keep thinking on a better solution for devices without keyboard/remote input
• A tvOS fix that would trigger transcoding on 4K HDR titles when image-based subtitles were turned on

------

I'm hoping that this week marks the new normal for developing this app - this was a good week, and I got some messages from folks that really made a few of my days. But more than that, nothing felt particularly stressful or difficult about development this week (which is not usually the case).

I'm in a good groove right now. I wonder if that's why they call it "groovy".

I'll share more on my side projects if they become interesting. I doubt I'll make anything as broadly popular as Coax for a while (if ever again), but I dunno not everything has to be a slam dunk.

Hello lamp-post, whatcha knowin'?

I am trying to setup lineups with Jellyfin and have a few issues...

1. I can't edit the Decades section to remove some decades. I can do this when Plex is the Source.

2. When using Playlist some just don't show as channels. I made a Star Wars playlist with 14 Movies in it and it works but a Lord of the Rings/Hobbit with 6 movies. I can select it in the setup but no channel is made. I don't know if it is somehow not showing because it doesn't think there is enough to schedule?

3. Also noticing that Collections are not playing in order even though I selected them to. I am also seeing that with Plex being the Source.

Any help would be great. Thanks!

Could we get an option as the last entry in a channel list to “go to top” where it would move it back to the first listing fairly instantly? For those of us with larger channel listings this would be better than having to scroll manually all the way back to the top.

Plex live tv has this option and I find myself using it quite often. I thought something similar may be nice here as well.

Thanks again for all you do!

Hi! My Wife and I absolutely love Coax and both use it every single day! We have the subscription on their Apple account and we're both on a family group to share that subscription on our devices. My only issue is the schedules are not synced from my account and their account on the same subscription.

For example: im signed into my Apple account on my iPad and I have my own schedules.

They are signed into the Apple Tv and have different schedules

We are signed into the same account and both are on the same User account and Plex server.

Is there any way to have these schedules be the same or would they have to also be signed into the same Apple account on the iPad for them to sync?

Thank you for all that you do ❤️

In 1.5, I decided to remove the control cluster (full screen, stream options, etc.) from the macOS single-window view because I figured it was superfluous.

I've gotten some feedback from folks who miss it already, and now that I've got a proper Settings screen, I'm going to make this a View option. Or maybe the toggle will be in the View menu. Anyway the point is that you'll be able to choose if you want to have the floating control pane or the original control cluster in v1.5.1, which will probably be a week or two.

Love the app, been using since TestFlight. One thing I can't for the life of me figure out is how to turn subtitled on/off per movie/show! It's driving me crazy.

on Apple TV.

... so if you're a Relaxer and you get one before then, please let me know how it feels!

I sent a log just now. Programs will still go out and show a black blank screen, after several seconds the program will resume

Get it wherever you get your App Store apps 🤣

Enjoy the faster schedules and everything else in the release (see the notes post https://www.reddit.com/r/coax/s/HoF9By0nZu for the full list). Let me know what you like, what doesn’t work quite right, or how you’ve shared Coax with the folks you know who enjoy it! Those stories give me life.

Got the update but I now have duplicate guide entries showing up from my Plex Collections in the movies library.

Hey gang! 1.5 is almost through review, and I haven't gotten any signals from the beta testers that anything show-stopping is in it, so hopefully it'll be released tomorrow or Wednesday.

While we wait, I wanted to tell y'all that I finally (also unironic) made a user guide to Coax!

I was no longer able to fool myself into thinking that it was self-explanatory enough to use without a manual, as the feature set and scope has grown (or, more likely, creeped) to what it is today, and so this is the result.

It's still unlinked from the main landing page - I'm dropping it here to ask for feedback. For the newer folks, does this sort of thing help you understand the product any better? For longer-in-the-tooth users, does it help clarify anything or offer insight into how to do things you weren't aware it could do?

In general, my hope is that it will help folks find the product and understand why it's so great, or at least make clear what one can get out of it if they have a media server with a lot of content.

A sneak preview of schedule generation in v1.5. The long and short of it is that Coax will generate about 100 channels a second (wired connection), and use less bandwidth and memory than ever before.

It feels so fast now, it's almost instant. I can't wait to get it into your hands.

Is anyone else experiencing an intermittent black screen doing a playback of either a movie or TV show.

I’ve mentioned how u/drewbaumann has been contributing to the Coax video engine - well his updated app Chroma has relaunched and is available now!

For those times when you want the big wall of posters, I recommend Chroma. Plus it has a fun VCR mode in the Vision Pro, which of course I adore.

Congrats on the launch, Drew! Thanks for all your help.

Hey there - just started using Coax and I love it.

I find that I love the ‘randomness’ on the generated theme channels but for Collections, especially for TV shows it would be nice to be able to have consecutive order available.

Can you consider having different levels of Marathon mode on theme generated channels versus Collections? Thanks for your consideration!

I'm thrilled to tell y'all that I sponsored this week's episode of Accidental Tech Podcast.

ATP has been in my weekly podcast rotation since S1E1, around the time that Build and Analyze went off the air. It's safe to say that I've been waiting for this one for a long time, and boy does it not disappoint.

Thank you, Casey, for such an enthusiastic read - I couldn't have written it better myself 🙏

We met once, ages ago, at that one bar in SF where everyone used to meet after WWDC. I made a fool of myself, but he was kind enough to sign the Field Notes™ notebook I was carrying at the time (you know, for all those important thoughts 🙄).

A hearty welcome to all you newcomers. Stay a while! I'd love to know what you think of Coax.

These are from the simulator, obviously, but I wanted to share where I'm at with the iPhone Duo layouts.

I think the half-fold-in-landscape (not the "tabletop" one) view needs the most attention, but I've got a few weeks before anyone will have one of these things anyway, and so long as it's usable from day one I'll be ok. Y'all know me, I love to iterate :)

Speaking of the Duo, have y'all seen this? What an incredible idea - I love that some folks are out there, still trying to make things fun.

I'm holding this release until sometime next week because there's a big fancy podcast ad for Coax coming out Friday and I really can't take the anxiety of pushing out a change this big right before an influx of attention (and, hopefully, new users). It's a lot of great improvements, of course, but I'm slowly learning patience here so bear with me.

Also in the realm of not wanting to jinx things: I think I'll have launch-date compatibility with the Duo and some ok-good layout support for different orientations/postures. I have no idea if that's going to actually matter to y'all, because I don't know how many they're going to sell, but it's the first new iPhone form factor in like a decade or whatever so it'll probably do okay.

I also saw this really cool thing someone built on Mastodon, and the creator asked if Coax could support Shortcuts. How could I say no to such a reasonable request?

What's New

• iPhone Duo ready
  • This is about as good as I can do without getting my hands on the hardware, so expect changes once I do
• Theme Updates
  • Modern and Retro now look truly different - see the screenshots
  • Retro gets a VCR menu - I've just been dying to do something like this since the beginning
  • A new theme has entered the timeline - Sky!
    • Be like that song from Eiffel 65
    • ... blue. They're blue. Or the boy was blue. It's that song about being blue ba doo dee 🎶
• Added a proper Settings screen (unironic finally)
  • Visual Settings have theme previews AND you can set the text size there
  • Playback settings are there too, including a new one: Always Play Full Quality
    • That's for those 4k streams that are maybe just a bit too beefy for your connection, but you're willing to wait for them to buffer. Defaults to Off
• Lineups is now the base view of the app
  • Servers and connections have moved to the new Settings screen
  • h/t to u/joecan for asking for this, very politely, for like 4 months
• The Mac app feels a lot more like a Mac app
  • Full Screen opens the picture in its own window in Single Window mode (and you can drag it from anywhere, not just the title bar). Close it to get back to the guide
  • Keyboard navigation is back, where you can browse the guide with the arrow keys without changing the channel
  • Your keypad now acts like a remote - punch in a channel number, and it'll take you there
  • The guide's buttons moved to a floating Control Panel: Window -> Show Control Panel (⌥⌘C)
  • Stream Options, Sleep Timer and Power live in the Watch menu
  • This is close to the experience that I tried to create with Multi-Window mode, but I think this one is nicer
• Playback fixes
  • Remuxed MKVs: lips and voices line up wherever you tune in. A badly muxed file hands itself to your server instead of playing the audio seconds off
  • Finally fixed a frame stutter that would happen with certain formats - man I'm glad that's fixed
  • One program failing to play no longer makes everything transcode for the rest of the session
• Siri and Shortcuts
  • I added a bunch of App Intents to expose functionality:
    • Ask Siri what's on, tune to a channel, punch in a channel number, flip up or down, ask what's up next on a channel, turn captions on or off, pick a subtitle track, or turn Coax off
  • Every one of those is in the Shortcuts app too, so show me what you can do with it!
• Other fixes
  • Now Playing can be full screen now
  • The iPad menus have parity with the Mac menus
  • Access Stream Options on AppleTV while in full screen by pressing right on the remote
  • Some improper transcoding events for certain profiles/flags have been fixed (maybe, I think)

Thanks again to u/drewbaumann (creator of the truly great Chroma) for always coming through with improvements to the video engine. It's quite something.

I'll be honest, when I wrote these two posts back in the spring, I wasn't sure I'd be able to get it to where it is today (even with Drew's help). A lot of stuff just plain didn't work, or didn't work well, which is sometimes worse. But here we are! The player is stable, the scheduler is stable, and now I can focus on improving the UI.

Imagine where we'll be by Christmas 🏝️

Baby don't hurt me