Features
Playback and quality
Two places control how a stream looks and sounds: Settings for the device, and the tool strip for the stream in front of you. This page covers both, including the two switches that are stored and not yet used.
Last updated
Most of what people want from this page is one of two things: a stream that stops pausing, or a picture that fills the screen properly. The first is in Settings › Playback and applies to the whole app. The second is in the tool strip and applies to what is playing.
Buffer size
Three values, and the app describes them in its own words on the screen: the buffer determines how much video is downloaded before playback starts, and raising it helps if you frequently see buffering. Here is what each one actually asks for.
| Preset | Media held | Wait after a stall |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | The player library's own default. No tuning. | Library default |
| Large | About two and a half minutes | 10 seconds |
| Very large | About five minutes | 15 seconds |
The column that matters most is the third one, and it is the one nobody expects. Every preset starts playing after the same one and a half seconds of media has arrived. That gate is deliberately kept out of the preset, and it is set slightly below the player library's own default because start‑up is the one moment with nothing banked to fall back on. So changing this setting does not slow down channel switching, whatever the note on the screen implies. It is a note written for the cautious case and left in place.
What a bigger preset costs you is memory, and patience after an interruption. Once a stream has actually broken off, Very large waits fifteen seconds before resuming rather than a couple, on the reasoning that a source which just failed will probably fail again in a moment. That is the right trade on a flaky feed and a poor one on a good one.
There is one more thing set here regardless of your choice: the player is told to start drawing as soon as it has enough time of media rather than enough bytes. On a cheap box with a high‑bitrate channel that is the difference between a picture in a second and a picture in five.
Which to pick
Large for a source that stalls every few minutes. Normal on a box with a gigabyte of memory, where five minutes of held video is competing with everything else the app is doing. Very large only when Large was not enough, and if it makes no difference either, the problem is bandwidth rather than buffering, which the buffering page goes into.
Audio decoder and Video decoder
Two separate rows, both Hardware by default, both offering Software. Hardware means the chip in your device does the decoding, which is why an inexpensive box can play high definition at all.
Choosing Software does not disable the hardware decoder. It moves software decoders to the front of the queue and leaves hardware behind them, and fallback stays switched on, so if no software decoder can handle the stream, the player quietly uses hardware instead of failing. That is worth knowing before you experiment: you cannot make a stream unplayable from this screen.
Reach for it when one device misbehaves and others do not. Audio that arrives as silence or as crackling usually means the hardware claimed a codec it handles badly, and Audio decoder › Software fixes it outright. Video that breaks into blocks or goes green on one channel is the same story on the video side. The cost is processor load, so on a weak device a high‑bitrate channel may stutter in software where it played in hardware.
Change one row at a time and test between. Both settings are app‑wide rather than per‑channel, so a software decoder chosen for one awkward channel is in use for everything, including recording playback.
Auto frame rate
Auto frame rate (AFR) is off on a fresh install, with Switch screen resolution for 4k video underneath it.
Switched on, it asks your display for a mode whose refresh rate matches the frame rate of what you are watching. A 25 fps broadcast shown on a 60 Hz panel has to have frames repeated unevenly, which is the faint stutter on slow camera pans that you notice most in football and least in dialogue. Matching the rate removes it.
Four details of how it behaves here:
- It changes the refresh rate only, and keeps your current resolution. The 4K toggle is what allows a resolution change as well, and only when the stream really is 4K.
- It prefers a rate that is a whole multiple of the frame rate. A 24 fps film picks 24, 48 or 72 Hz over 60 Hz, and where two candidates score alike the higher one wins.
- Nothing happens until the frame rate is known, so the switch lands a moment into playback rather than at the start. The black flash while the television re‑synchronises is the set, not the app.
- It is undone when playback ends, so a rate chosen for a film never leaks into the rest of the interface.
It needs Android 6 or newer, and on older devices the switch stores your choice while nothing acts on it. Support also varies by television regardless of Android version, which is why the app's own note is careful about it. Live TV, films and shows all use it; recording playback does not.
Two rows that store and do nothing
Audio passthrough is a switch with no reader. Your choice is saved, the screen shows it back, and no player consults it. Audio is decoded in the app whichever way you leave it. If you want a bitstream sent untouched to an amplifier, that decision belongs to your device's own sound output settings rather than to this row.
Use external player reads Available for premium users and stays on No. There is no premium tier in this build, so there is nothing to unlock and nothing to buy; handing a stream to another player app is simply not available yet.
The tool strip
Everything above is a device setting. Everything below is per stream, and lives in the strip along the bottom of the picture that Show menu opens: Long OK or Menu by default, or Down from the player's control row. Left and Right walk it and it wraps at both ends. It hides itself after five seconds.
Three of its tiles are labelled with their current value instead of their name, which makes the strip a readout as well as a menu: the subtitle tile reads Off, the aspect tile reads Normal, and the two track tiles read whichever track you are on. One glance tells you what the stream is doing.
| Tile | What it does |
|---|---|
| Search | Opens search over the picture. |
| TV List | Channel list with the stream continuing in a corner. |
| Multiview | Drawn, not connected. |
| Recordings | Drawn, not connected. Use the sidebar instead. |
| Video track | Picks the video stream, where more than one is offered. |
| Audio track | Picks the language or the audio format. |
| 0ms | Audio delay. Drawn, not connected. |
| Subtitle track | Subtitles and captions, with an explicit Off. |
| Normal | Aspect ratio, described below. |
| off | Reminder. Drawn, not connected. |
| Add to favorites | Toggles the current channel in favourites. |
| Settings | The settings screen, over the picture. |
Four of the twelve are placeholders. They are in the strip because the icons and the layout came first and the features behind them did not arrive; pressing them does nothing at all, which is better than a crash but worth knowing before you hunt for the audio delay that the 0ms tile promises.
Video, audio and subtitle tracks
All three lists are built from what the stream announces about itself. Nothing is invented, so a channel that offers one audio track shows one row, and a channel that announces nothing at all shows No tracks.
Where your provider supplied a name for a track, that name is used. Where they did not, the row is assembled from the stream's own properties, a video track as its resolution, format, frame rate and bitrate, an audio track as its language, format, channel count and bitrate. That is why some channels give you English and others eng audio/mp4a-latm 2ch 128kbps. The second is uglier and tells you more.
Subtitles are detected generously. As well as tracks the stream declares as subtitles, formats that look like subtitles are picked up by their type (the caption streams carried inside broadcast video, WebVTT, TTML and SubRip among them), so a live channel with captions buried in it usually appears here even when it never says so.
What is remembered
On live TV, all three choices are stored against the channel and re‑applied the next time you tune in. The matching is deliberately loose: if your provider reorders the tracks between one evening and the next, the stored language is matched instead of the position, so a channel you set to a second audio language keeps it.
They are applied once buffering finishes rather than before the stream starts, which has a visible consequence. The first second or two plays in the stream's default track and then switches. On a channel where you chose a different language, that is what you are hearing.
In the film and show players the choices apply to what is playing and are not saved. There is no per‑title memory, so a series watched in a second language needs the track picking again on each episode. The tools there also wait for buffering to finish before the list opens, so pressing Audio track the instant a film starts appears to do nothing for a moment.
Switching audio can stall a live stream
Changing audio track mid‑stream makes the player rebuild its renderers, and some streams do not survive it. The app expects this: it forces a restart at the current position, and if playback has not resumed after about a second it prepares the stream again. In the film and show players it goes further, retrying three times and then falling back to the track you were on before. On a live channel that ends up frozen anyway, change channel and come back, that is quicker than anything the app can do for you.
Aspect ratio
Eight modes, and the tile is labelled with the one in use:
| Mode | What you get |
|---|---|
| Normal | The stream's own shape, fitted to the screen. Black bars where the shapes differ. |
| Full | Stretched to fill the screen. Faces get wider. |
| Zoom | Enlarged until it fills the screen, shape kept, edges lost. |
| Reduced | The picture at 92% of the screen, centred, for a television that overscans and cuts the edges off. |
| 4:3 | Forced into a 4:3 frame and fitted inside it. |
| 16:9 | Forced into a 16:9 frame, cropping whatever does not fit. |
| 16:10 | The same, into 16:10. |
| Zoom - 2.35:1 | Cropped to a cinema frame. For a film delivered with black bars baked into the video itself. |
The last one solves a specific annoyance. Some films arrive as a 16:9 file with the letterbox bars burnt into the picture, so the player has no way to know they are not part of the image; on a widescreen television you then get bars above and below as well as the ones already there. Zoom - 2.35:1 crops to the film's real shape and they go.
At the bottom of the list, below the modes and without a radio button, sits Apply to all channels: On or Off. Off, the shipped state, means the mode you choose is remembered for that channel alone, and every other channel opens at Normal until you set it. On means one mode for everything.
Which you want depends on the cause. A single channel your provider delivers in the wrong shape is a per‑channel fix. A television that overscans everything is a whole‑library fix, so choose Reduced and switch Apply to all channels on. The switch itself is remembered across restarts, so this is a decision you make once.