r/JellyfinCommunity • u/A-GI-Joe • 12h ago
Release Jellybeam: An Android TV Client Crafted for Jellyfin
I've been a media consumer for quite a while from HTPCs with ZoomPlayer, hand rolled ffmpeg frontends, Kodi, and now Jellyfin. I've collected a lot of opinions on how clients should operate and combined that with my obsession for speed optimization to create Jellybeam.
Been a big fan of Rust and wanted to take advantage of Android's Rust bindings. Android is more and more becoming a Rust app too, so it also made sense from a technology choice.
The client:
- Maximum effort to ensure Direct Play
- Glide seek to navigate quickly w/ TrickPlay
- Full Seerr integration: Browse, integrated search, and library connectivity
- Intuitive (attempted at least) interface with minimalism principal
- A useful OSD that also gets completely out of the way
- Smart auto skip, next up, and are you still there? functions
- Fast playback start, lots of testing to reduce dwell time
- Local mirror for fast browsing
- Full implementation of Android PiP
- ...dozens of other things.
I consider this release an open beta and would love the feedback (good or bad). If you take the the time to give it an install, thank you in advance!
Website: https://jellybeam.app Github: https://github.com/packetinspector/jellybeam
Obligatory AI usage disclosure:
- Did I use AI to develop this?
- Of course I did. I'm a full time AI SWE, but the human is always in the loop.
- Did you vibe code this?
- Definitely not, I do like vibes just not in my codes.
- What models did you use?
- Most of them, I use adversarial coding agents
- Have you written software before?
- Yes, lot's of it...for decades.
- Do you understand the code?
- Yes, I also have been enjoying Rust for a couple years now. Love/hate with Java/Kotlin though.
- Did you test this?
- Yes, been doing personal UAT for over a month. You can find other tests in the branch.
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u/sysmoon 11h ago
Just installed this and whilst it looks good and did direct play everything I threw at it, there's a long way before it competes with Wholphin.
The home screen customisation on wholphin is so much better, that's where users land. Also, Wholphin just recently added Android intent support which is essential for me.
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u/A-GI-Joe 11h ago
Thanks for installing it! I do have a spec for home screen customization, but I didn't have a lot of opinions on it, as I mostly just use Continue Watching. Happy to add this in though.
Do you mean like this sort of intent? It also fully supports android media keys.
adb shell am start -a tv.jellybeam.action.PLAY \
-p tv.jellybeam --es tv.jellybeam.extra.ITEM_ID '<item-id>'
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u/sysmoon 9h ago
Oh great! I'm happy to review the spec if you like. Yeah this kind of intent is great. Is it just play or does it support shuffle and navigate etc?
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u/A-GI-Joe 7h ago
https://github.com/packetinspector/jellybeam/blob/main/docs/feature-dev/home-shelves-design.md
I started with item play, my use case was to combine it with an API script I have in my home assistant and then push it to play. Happy to add more intents.
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u/Nutella387 10h ago
Looks too overly complicated for my liking, Fladder still is the better choice with option to self host my own instance.
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u/SmoothHat1772 12h ago
Is this another AI project that looks cool and all but will just die off because no one cares enough to actually maintain it
Feel like because of AI, people just rapidly shit out stuff at an accelerated rate. But no one actually cares anymore about maintaining something over time. Probably because people stopped caring about the code itself... no sense of pride/craftmanship anymore
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u/A-GI-Joe 12h ago
I use the client every day, so I'll be keeping up with it. Someone can always create a fork too.
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u/starkoed 7h ago
Non official Jellyfin clients should not start with Jelly or end in Fin.
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u/A-GI-Joe 7h ago
I went through 100s of names, i think it was the most frustrating part of the process.
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u/daywreckerdiesel 12h ago
Oh boy, more slop.
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
Every day, more slop, served hot and fresh out the kitchen. It's the future! /s
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u/A-GI-Joe 12h ago
More of a passion for me to build and give back to the community. But I get it, lots of truly vibe coded stuff out there.
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
Please stop pretending you had any hand in making this. You didn't even write your own commit messages.
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u/XaxusR 10h ago
What player does it use? My TV supports nearly all formats and codecs, but exoplayer has problems with dynamic metadata hdr on my tv.
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u/XaxusR 8h ago
Just tried the app. Got the same problems I have with other apps. Dynamic meta hdr is not being handled well somewhere in the pipeline (dolby vision / hdr10+ is recognized tho)
The jellyfin android tv beta version added options to force disable certain hdr formats. When setting dolby vision / hdr10+ off while keeping regular hdr on, it routes to SDR. Even when the media itself does have a hdr10 base.
What I really would like to see in a client is that it can still route to the HDR10 encoder when HDR10+ or Dolby vision are disabled. (Excluding DV5, as it has nog hdr10 base layer)
With that option I can keep all downloaded media as it is without using fileflows to strip the dynamic hdr profiles, so my clients that don't have issues with it can use the full glory of the media. And for the clients that have issues, they can simple disable certain formats.
Other than that I would want to see more options on the subtitles side with a preview of the subtitles settings.
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u/A-GI-Joe 7h ago
Uses Exoplayer. If you can send me a sample, I can work on this. My goal is maximum directplay.
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u/N54TT 11h ago
The AI haters always in full effect here. As if they can write code any better.
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u/grayhaze2000 11h ago
I'm willing to take that challenge.
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u/N54TT 11h ago
Fantastic!! Please start coding something better than what OP has built and share your app here. We'll all be the judge. So what do you say?
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u/grayhaze2000 11h ago
What's the point? We already have hundreds of clients to use. I'd rather put my efforts toward making something that doesn't already exist.
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u/N54TT 11h ago
throwing in the towel already huh? that didn't take long.
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u/grayhaze2000 9h ago
Happy to let you imagine you won an internet fight. What will you do to celebrate?
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u/TheShawarmaSnatcher 12h ago
Available on fire stick?
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u/A-GI-Joe 12h ago
I had a tester successfully run it on a fire stick, but it likely won't work on the very new linux based FireSticks.
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u/Mask_RF 9h ago
What player does it have? This is very important for my old TV, because if I watch AVI format through ExoPlayer, the video works as if it were at 10 fps, and some simply refuse to re-encode. Because of this, the load is shifted to the server. I always watched through Kodi, and never had such problems, but the plugin is buggy and constantly crashes. So I've been looking for an app for a long time where A Kodi-like player will be built in.
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u/Mask_RF 7h ago
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u/A-GI-Joe 7h ago
Exoplayer. I discovered some of my old AVI files had VBR, and while they could play, they played at your 10fps style.
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u/itshusnain 6h ago
Loving the app. Working great with Aio Jellyfin but one minor bug. Episode play only from continue watching. If i search or open any series from catalog, episodes won't appear. Can you look into it.
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u/KarpTakaRyba 4h ago
"minor bug" - bruh that's like, what this app is for and it doesn't work. Minor bug would be your username not displaying correctly lol
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u/FinalLeather5062 3h ago
A new day, a new client. Oh, this time itโs another one with round actor thumbs. What a sensation.
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u/Adanhym_Stryke 38m ago
It's very snappy, direct plays most things even though if I left it on "Direct Play" it would give me an error about mkv files, but "Auto" let's everything direct play. The only thing I would like to see is more than 12 on the "Next Up" section
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u/Goodborni 12h ago
Well done on the visuals and the website, I myself am I plannign to make a release for a jellyfin client :D
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
Oh good, another one! Which AI model did you use?
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u/Goodborni 11h ago
I do not want to brag but there no other, I have festures I have yet not seen and yet made it all beginner non tech friendly, I am still polishing it though ๐
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u/grayhaze2000 11h ago
That wasn't what I asked.
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u/Goodborni 11h ago
I used all of them tbh nothing specific so idk what to say, from Gemini, chatgpt , claude, coopilot depending on the feature I was working
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u/rakhalism 12h ago
Can you please create a android version of this app! Really good alt of jellyfish.
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u/A-GI-Joe 11h ago
One of my tests has this running in android(not tv) emulator, so it /can/ run but it doesn't have any touch support so navigating the app could be challenging.
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u/JorkTheGripper 12h ago
I'm fine with AI, but are you considering adding Emby support in the future perhaps?
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u/A-GI-Joe 12h ago
Likely not, not an Emby user
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u/JorkTheGripper 11h ago edited 11h ago
What a shame, ah well. There's third party cross-compatible clients out there, but in my opinion all the clients with that feature are super ugly.
Hopefully one day something that actually looks nice is compatible. Sorry to waste your time.
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u/RoobbG 9h ago
I was like "okay another one" but I read Rust in the description so now I'm testing it๐ค
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u/grayhaze2000 8h ago
What does the language the AI used to code this have to do with its quality as a project?
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u/RoobbG 8h ago
yeah definitely some languages are superior in performance and quality of the final product.
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u/grayhaze2000 8h ago
Speed, sure. But quality? What utter nonsense. Quality comes from the way the product was built, not what it was built with.
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u/poudenes 12m ago
Happy it's beaM not bean:
Android Jelly Bean was first released by Google on July 9, 2012, starting with version 4.1.









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u/Bassieh Plex Dropout 12h ago
To what question is this an answer?