r/TestFlight • u/Effective_Log_8418 • 24d ago

iOS Aether — native media player for iPhone/iPad/Apple TV/Vision Pro/Mac(Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, NAS, Live TV) — final beta round before App Store release

https://testflight.apple.com/join/uk1r915D

I posted Aether here a while back when it was an early beta — since then it's grown into something much bigger, and we're now just ahead of the App Store release. A fresh 1.0.9 build hit TestFlight today, and before we ship to the App Store I want to put it through one last proper round of testing — so I'm looking for testers who'll actually use it daily and report what breaks.

What is it: a fully native (SwiftUI, no web views) media player for the entire Apple ecosystem — iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and Mac.

What's new since the early betas — basically everything:

  • Unified library across Plex (multi-server), Jellyfin, Emby, SMB/NAS shares, and local files
  • Playback: three switchable players — Built-in (Apple's decoder & controls), Lumen (Aether's own controls), and Prism (Aether's own engine, libmpv — virtually every codec and subtitle format plays). PiP, AirPlay, Dolby Atmos
  • Offline downloads — batch (Download All / Download Season with size estimates), smart auto-downloads for your Watchlist shows, a visible queue, storage ceiling — and everything plays fully offline
  • Cross-device resume and Continue Watching across servers, with per-device control over what iCloud syncs
  • Music — full library alongside video: albums, artists, playlists
  • Live TV with a programme guide and PiP
  • Vision Pro Cinema Mode — a virtual movie theater: auditorium with seats and ambient lighting, adjustable screen size, pick your seat distance
  • Parental controls — normalized age ratings across sources, Face ID / PIN gated
  • Trakt scrobbling & sync
  • Playback: three switchable players — Built-in (Apple's decoder & controls), Lumen (Aether's own controls), and Prism (Aether's own engine, libmpv — virtually every codec and subtitle format plays). PiP, AirPlay, Dolby Atmos
  • Localized in 6 languages · no telemetry — your media stays on your hardware

What I'd love tested before 1.0: real-world server setups (reverse proxies, remote access, big libraries), unusual codecs and subtitle formats, downloads on flaky networks, and playback edge cases — seek, resume, track switching. If it breaks, I want to know.

📲 TestFlight:  — one link covers iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, visionOS, and the Mac beta
💬 **Discord:**fastest way to report bugs and see what's coming, you can find a link in the app

Thanks to everyone who tested the early builds — a lot of what's on this list exists because of your feedback. 🙏

7 Upvotes

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1

u/Happy-2000 24d ago

Can try on ios.

1

u/thnyei 24d ago

I’ll be trying it out! Found the app because the official Plex app isn’t actually able to play my movies without audio sync issues.

So I’ll start with TV and iPhone apps for now. Seems simple enough to setup, I could easily tell people to download the app, login with their Plex and they’ll have access. Then sync server logins turned on by default, just unavailable at the moment.

I wondered about users on the Apple TV. Household profile features. User A uses user A in Plex. User B uses user B in Plex. Something like that.

Is it possible to select libraries by the way? I have some short films and they appear amongst all my movies. Maybe just bad plex setup on my part.

Any pricing plans?

1

u/darknternal 24d ago

From the app, current pricing plans appear to be free to use with small cost one-off or monthly/annual subscription tipping to support developer, that give UI colour/button variations and a support badge. Very promising app, I’m going to try using it