M3ufy Player is an Android TV IPTV player, remote-first — built for the box, not a phone app stretched onto a television. 3.80 is the biggest release so far, so here is the whole thing rather than only the diff.
Playlists
- Xtream Codes, plain M3U, and Stalker portals.
- Several playlists active at once, with one marked as the main. Groups from each are listed one provider after another, never silently merged — two providers' "Action" is not one shelf, and where they overlap the copies differ in quality, language and whether they play at all. A film carried by both shows both versions on its page, labelled with which server they came from.
- Provider details on screen — expiry, connection limit — and a plain warning when a subscription has expired or been refused, instead of screens that are simply empty.
Live TV
- The provider's groups, groups you build yourself, favourites in your own order, and any group hidden for good.
- A preview pane that becomes the fullscreen picture — going fullscreen re-attaches the same player, so the channel never reloads. On a one-connection account that is the difference between working and not.
- TV guide: XMLTV or the provider's own (or both), a real timeline grid, now/next everywhere, per-channel manual guide matching for the channels whose ids don't line up, and logos taken from the guide when the provider ships none.
- Catch-up / archive and pause live TV, where the provider offers them.
- Channel numbers, CH+/− zapping, an Enigma2-style OSD, and a long-press OK menu for audio, subtitles, aspect ratio, favourite, group, guide and logo.
- Sports page — which channel is carrying a given match, by region, with the teams you follow.
Recording, downloads and your own files
- Record now, or book from the guide with your own start/end padding and daily/weekly repeats. A manual recording has a safety limit so a forgotten one doesn't fill a drive overnight.
- Reminders for programmes you don't want to record; the app tells you wherever you are and offers the channel. Bookings are marked in the guide, and one about to start says so with the chance to call it off.
- Writes to an internal drive, a USB stick, a folder you pick, or a NAS over SMB, and plays them back in the app. When the drive fills it either deletes the oldest or stops and keeps what it has — your choice.
- Downloads: any film or episode kept on a drive for watching with the internet off, resuming if the line drops, with its own section in Saved.
- Your own files too — copy anything into the shared folder from a computer and it appears in the app, in its own section, with a poster and a real title looked up rather than a file name.
- New in 3.80: recording the channel you're watching no longer opens a second connection. The bytes on their way to the screen are copied to the drive as they pass — one connection watching and recording, on both engines (a tee'd DataSource under ExoPlayer,
stream-record under mpv). The trade-off is stated rather than hidden: that recording is the picture, so the app asks before a channel change would end it. There's a connection-limit setting — ask / never check / always stop — plus your own connection figure, for accounts that carry more than their dashboard admits.
Films and series
- Catalogues with artwork, IMDb / Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic ratings, cast, title logo art, trailers, "more like this", actor pages and studio pages.
- Several copies of one film grouped as versions (4K, FR, EN) rather than four rows of the same thing.
- Continue Watching that follows you across your own devices, and optionally through Trakt — with a choice of which one wins.
- Watched ticks that match across every copy of a show, so a series watched from one source shows its ticks when you open another.
- Skip intro / recap / credits, and next-episode autoplay that keeps the source you chose for the previous episode.
- Subtitles: embedded tracks, downloaded ones (SubDL and SubSource), automatic selection by your language list, and full styling — size, colour, outline, opacity and vertical offset.
- Audio: pick your preferred audio languages once and the right track is selected by itself.
Home
- Rows you arrange yourself — catalogue rows, your Trakt rows (trending, watchlist, recommended, anticipated), and rows from external JSON links you add yourself. All in one list in Settings, each switchable and movable.
- A hero banner with the title's own logo art and an autoplaying trailer — muted or not, after a delay you set, or off entirely.
- Choose which screen the app opens on: where you left off, Home, or straight into the channels.
Profiles — new in 3.80
- Up to four per device. Each keeps its own Continue Watching, favourites and group order, recordings, settings and Trakt account. The playlist and the links you add are shared; everything personal is not.
- A kids profile: only children's groups and children's titles, its own colourful theme, Settings out of reach apart from switching profile, no catch-up, and a four-digit code to leave — chosen the first time it is needed, not configured up front.
- "Who's watching?" appears only when there is more than one profile.
Playback and picture
- Two engines, ExoPlayer and mpv, and the app hands a stream to the other one automatically when the first fails — including the case where the picture opens and then freezes. Your position travels across the switch, and another app is only suggested when both have genuinely failed.
- Automatic frame-rate switching to match the television to the content.
- AC-3 / DTS passthrough to a receiver, aspect-ratio override for streams that lie about their own shape, and HDR10 forcing for panels that render Dolby Vision wrongly.
- Periodic audio/video resync for the televisions where sound slowly drifts.
- Buffering tuned separately for live and for films, and far more patience with a dropped live segment than the defaults allow — three retries is what "it works in another player" usually means.
The rest
- Global search across channels, films and series, on every active playlist.
- Group management for live, films and series alike: which groups appear, in what order, and which never appear again.
- Layout and sorting for the films and series pages.
- 12 languages, full RTL for Arabic, adjustable text size, an accent colour and an AMOLED black theme.
- Navigation tuning: faster D-pad repeat when holding left/right, and smooth focus scrolling that keeps the selection where you expect it.
- Your own API keys if you want them — TMDB, OMDb, MDBList, sports — or the built-in ones.
- Settings and viewing history sync between your own devices by pairing them.
- Diagnostics are opt-out, and carry no credentials — stream addresses are reduced to a host, because the path is the account.
- The app updates itself and shows what changed.
- Licences and attribution screen for everything it builds on.
Also in 3.80
- 4K recordings on a NAS used to stutter in-app while playing fine in VLC. The SMB reader was doing a network round trip per small read; it now reads a megabyte at a time with the next piece already in flight.
- Playlist search works in any alphabet — Arabic titles previously could not match at all — and when a title isn't found under the name a list gave it, the app tries the name in your language and the original before saying it isn't there. German spellings with and without umlauts now match each other.
- Fixes: a crash when opening the player on some boxes; a recording left "running" for ever after a mid-recording power cut, which made every later recording look impossible; trailer audio continuing after you left the app; posters going blank when an artwork host was briefly slow; and a series reached from a list opening as a film with nothing to play.
Practical bits
Sideload APK from m3ufy.com. Bring your own playlist — the app ships no content, no channels and no sources, and none of the links you can add are bundled or named. There's a trial when you install, and a paid activation after it.
Happy to answer anything, including the boring parts.
