Moonfin for Smart-TVs

Moonfin v2.10.0 Release Notes

Moonfin 2.10.0 brings the app to two new kinds of device: Xbox consoles, with the console's own player behind the interface for HEVC, 4K and HDR, and Fire TV sticks running Vega OS. If your server runs the Achievement Badges plugin you now get friends and chat on the TV, Home gets a seasonal row and seasonal effects, games pick up the arcade core picker, controller remapping and shared save states from Moonfin-Core, and low and mid tier sets navigate faster everywhere. A long list of fixes comes with it, including the right audio track on Samsung direct play, trailers on LG, collection rows on Home, and switching users actually refreshing Home.

What's New

Xbox

• Moonfin runs on Xbox. Xbox One, One S, One X and the Series X and S all get the same app as the TVs, with the controller as the remote: A selects, B goes back, the d-pad and left stick move, the triggers rewind and fast forward, and holding Start opens the game pause menu. For now it installs on a console in Developer Mode through the Xbox Device Portal, until the app reaches the Microsoft Store.
• Video plays through the console's own player. HEVC, 4K and HDR10 files play as they are on every console, including the Series X and S, whose browser engine refuses HEVC outright. DTS and TrueHD sound, WebM and MPEG-TS files, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and VC-1 all play without a transcode, Dolby Vision files with an HDR10 base layer play as HDR10, and the console switches the display to HDR10 for an HDR file and back after. The app's controls and subtitles draw over the picture as on any other set. Console Video Player, under Decoding & Rendering, turns it off and goes back to the web player.
• A device probe in Settings plays a set of test clips through both players, checks HDR and surround sound, and sends a report to the server, so a console's real capabilities are a button away.
• Trailers play at full quality from YouTube's manifest, with the console fetching the playlists and segments the browser engine keeps from the page.
• Typing on the keyboard, X deletes the last character and the Menu button finishes.
• The console draws every app's interface at 1080p and scales it to the TV, so on a 4K set text and posters look a little softer than the TV's own apps. Video isn't affected.

Fire TV

• Moonfin runs on Fire TV sticks with Vega OS, the Fire TV Stick 4K Select and newer, as a .vpkg installed through the Vega SDK on a stick in Developer Mode, until the app is in the Amazon Appstore. The stick gets its own device profile, play method and key map, the remote's menu key does the long press action, and a second press of Back from Home exits to the launcher.
• Playback fits the stick. Transcodes come as fMP4 segments so the server can send HEVC or H.264 by its own encoding setting, direct play bitrates are capped per stick, the system media controls work, and backgrounding the app leaves playback for the details page with the stop report still sent. Live TV works on the sticks too.

Friends and Chat

• Friends and chat from the Achievement Badges plugin. A Friends button in the navigation opens your friends list, requests and privacy settings, and direct and group chats, with banners when a message comes in. Moonbase isn't needed, and Emby servers don't have it.
• Unlock notifications. A switch on the achievements screen, backed by the plugin's own setting, shows a banner when you unlock a badge.

Home

• A seasonal Home row appears around the holidays with titles to match, picked by your region, and Lunar New Year and Diwali are in the calendar alongside the rest.
• Seasonal effects now match the other clients, with Christmas, spring petals, fireflies and Halloween, and a density setting for how much of the screen they fill.
• A Library Order screen saves the order of your libraries for each server, and Home redraws as soon as you change the order or hide a library.

Details Screen

• A Sections screen under Settings > Details Screen hides the parts of the details screen you don't want.
• Seerr details keep refreshing from the request until the title is done, every fifteen seconds while it downloads and every thirty while it waits, and pause while the app is in the background.

Playback

• Trickplay settings from the other clients. Single, filmstrip and full screen previews, with settings for the size, the distance from the seek bar and whether the preview follows the scrub, and a live preview of them in Settings.
• Modern card transition speed, with its curve, under the card settings. It defaults to Off and stays instant on low and mid tier sets.
• The setup wizard asks about playback on its last step, with optional playback language, subtitle mode and default audio track choices.

Live TV

• A stalled channel recovers. A reconnecting overlay comes up while the stream is brought back, with a Retry card if it can't be, and a replaced stream is only closed once the new one is playing.
• Channel cards tune the channel. Outside Search, selecting a channel card starts it instead of opening its details.

Search and Browsing

• Voice search. A microphone button in Search hands the field to the TV's own keyboard, which is where the remote's microphone lives, and what it hears lands in the field like typed text.
• Sort & Filter gets a Clear button on each section, and a search box on any list with ten or more values.
• A long press menu on playlist rows with View Details, Delete from Playlist and entries to move the item, and a press on a row plays the playlist from there.

Games