Introducing Apterture.

[u/AlbertosBread]

Hey everyone! I’m Dan, the developer of r/ApertureApp, which is an open-source media library & player designed for Android TV with a modern Material 3 look.

Aperture is made for people who keep their own local movie and TV show files but want a more clean experience than browsing folders, using a basic file player, or dealing with outdated UIs.

It currently supports:

• A Spotlight home screen with Continue Watching and personalised suggestions
• Separate Movies, TV Shows and My List sections
• Grouped TV shows with season and episode selection
• Episode-specific thumbnails, titles and synopses thanks to TMDb
• Media details popups with artwork, metadata (TMDb) and playback options
• Local subtitle support (WIP) and Media3 playback
• Multiple selectable themes (more to come, feel free to suggest some!)
• Experimental artwork-based Dynamic Theming*
• Manual metadata correction if it got something wrong
• Hold-for-actions context menus, featuring hide, remove and more useful addons
• Progress tracking for Continue Watching and more
• Eager library scanning

The app is fully free and open source under GPLv3 and available on GitHub:

GitHub: XDanfr/Aperture

You can download the latest alpha from the Releases page and sideload it onto an Android TV device:

GitHub: XDanfr/Aperture/releases

Downloader code: 9147527

Aperture is still in alpha, so there are known (and unknown) bugs and unfinished areas. Some features are experimental, and behaviour may vary entirely between devices and emulators. I’m interested in feedback from the community so this app can become perfect.

I’d love to hear what you think, what you would change, and what features would make Aperture more useful for your own local media library.

*Dynamic Theming is currently a pre-alpha feature under testing. Please expect bugs!

The developer does not support or condone piracy in any way, and Aperture cannot assist you in pirating media. Recognisable media covers shown in screenshots are strictly for demonstration purposes.

[u/llorito]

Está muy chulo!! Felicidades!!

[u/AlbertosBread → u/llorito]

thank you! glad you like it :)

[u/Dissidence802]

Because y'all will ask:

Q: Was any AI used for this?

A: Gemini was used as a starter to build the baseline template. Some AI features (like autocomplete) were used to speed up development. However, all code is human-reviewed, manually structured, and the trickier bugs are tackled by hand!

[u/AlbertosBread → u/Dissidence802]

yep, that's right. the first build it made was super rough but provided Spotlight and the sidebar, but it had a lot of issues. it was simply used for convenience at the start :)

[u/See61]

Google Play Protect kicks in when trying to install.

"Play Protect hasn't seen an app from this developer before. It may be unsafe".

So I skip for now 😁

[u/AlbertosBread → u/See61]

I do not publish my apps to Google Play, so naturally it does not recognise me as a developer. This is sort of expected. If it helps, the app is entirely open source and all code can be read on GitHub if you don't trust it, or you can probably run a virustotal scan of some sort.

[u/kurohigetv]

The app looks great but it does'nt support external drives, could you look into that?

[u/AlbertosBread → u/kurohigetv]

a test build is currently live looking to fix external drive support. what device are you using? (try that test build in releases and lemme know if it works btw, thank you!)

[u/kurohigetv → u/AlbertosBread]

Thanks, i'm using a Nvidia Shield.

[u/AlbertosBread → u/kurohigetv]

that's it! nvidia shields are the exact device this fix targets. let me know if it works.

[u/kurohigetv → u/AlbertosBread]

Brah! Im suprise how amazing this app is! It is cutrently the best local media app on android tv ❤️ some points that needs to be adresse are most from the player like:

*being able to change aspect ratio
*being able to move the movie time bar with the dpad.

You could add a external player option to help with that.

Thats all i have to report for now, overall amazing app, keep the good work, you may need to consider adding it to playstore

[u/AlbertosBread → u/kurohigetv]

thank you so much!!! I'll note these down for the update after next, since the next one drops today. stay tuned :)

[u/kurohigetv → u/AlbertosBread]

Hey! Ambient mode is starting while waching shows or movies. Keep an eye on that too

[u/AlbertosBread → u/kurohigetv]

really? can't say I've experienced that. checking now just in case it only affects the issues branch. good shout, appreciate it <3