Offline playback / downloads
Dope. Aside from the usual, outside of wifi situations, if your networking skills are (like mine) not to the point of confidently, and securely opening ports, this is a great stopgap. It’s a nice-to-have feature that’s missing from the official app, last I checked.
I think the official app does let you download but its literally a file on your phone. So you need a file manager and a video player that can play your file in addition. There is generally no management of downloads or a way to see what you downloaded in the official app.
Findroid improves on this massively, I however keep having the issue it doesn’t seem to download images from the library, so all my downloads are grey boxes. Just a cosmetic issue though as they all play fine.
What are the advantages over the regular jellyfin app? Seems like it maybe does less?
the regular jellyfin app is just a web wrapper, at least it behaves like and looks like it, as for advantages, it’s the little things, like offline playback, double tap to skip like in youtube etc.
Interesting because the jellyfin app can double tap to skip as well as download media for offline playback.
I have both and UI seems like the only difference between the two (findroid looks MUCH better) except you have no access to any admin, profile, or library settings or functions (like scanning for new media or fixing metadata) in findroid.
The official app does download files for offline viewing, but it downloads the file to your downloads folder, like a web browser.
Findroid downloads the file to the apps internal storage and plays it back in-app.
Some other platform-native third party JF apps like JellyFlix and Streamyfin allow you to transcode your downloads for smaller files, different resolution, and file compatibility. They also download to the app storage and play back in-app
Might just be me, but I don’t like double tap to skip. Findroid has another scrubbing method I’ve not seen anywhere else but I wish it were the standard.
When you drag your finger to the right, it says how far you’re about to skip ahead. The longer your swipe, the further you go. When you release, it scrubs to that timestamp. Same with going backwards.
I find it faster, more accurate, and more versatile. The only thing I don’t like about the Findroid player is the UI timeout is twice as long as I need it to be.
Oh, VLC for Android scrubs like that too!
Findroid does less, but what it does, it does better (imo).
In addition, Findroid supports jumoog’s Intro Skipper and Trickplay, which isn’t available in Jellyfin Android.
The major missing feature is transcoding support.
I’ve been using findroid. And honestly this has captured my opinions exactly. If you’re using the official Jellyfin app, I’d urge you to try Findroid. It does many things very well.
Just a personal use case, maybe it isn’t an advantage. But the official android app is just a web wrapper and the use of MPV as external player don’t allow self-signed local certificates (and they never will…).
Findroid does the job for you while using MPV under the hood and you can connect to your local DNS with self-signed certs without any issues :).
I have no issues connecting to my server when using my local DNS and self-signed certificates with the normal app either, or perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
Ohhh? I tried to make it work even adding the certificate into de
/datafolder of MPV (rooted android) but it didn’t worked… (source)I remember I even checked the logs via ADB and while I can’t remember the exact error logs, it wasn’t accepting my certificate.
Also android MPV is the only application on Android that doesn’t accept my self-signed certificate. Navidrome, HTTP shortcuts, bitwarden, Tempo… They all accept without any problems.
If you have some juicy info to share I’m all ears 👍 !!
Edit: It’s probably related to android 14 (god I hate it here…) But can’t revert to 13… The Stock firmware builds are Bitwise different.
Love findroid, it just feels good. Only disadvantage is no random play/shuffle but other than that I like it very much, it’s nicer than the og jellyfin app/web wrapper
- Direct play only, (no transcoding)
The app sounds great but this is for me a critical missing feature.
May I ask why? Maybe I haven’t been in your actual case so I probably can’t relate.
However having everything in a format that every device can read and disable transcoding on jellyfin, saves resources and power usage.
Being able to stream my shows on an unstable or lower bandwidth internet connection like on a train (which is where I really enjoy watching it) is impossible if I am streaming the raw files. I usually watch 480p or 720p on the go but enjoy the 1080p quality when watching from home.
Also, downloading a 1080p file takes significantly longer and takes up much more space than a 480p or 720p. My phone has no memory card and despite having 128GB internal storage, it is scarce. For a while, in the morning I was downloading my episodes before heading out, but really needed to luck out to get the episodes before I needed to catch the train (as the native jellyfin client does not allow downloading the transcoded files). You could argue I should adapt my habits to my means but I frankly really think it should be the other way around, and transcoding solves that for me.
Being able to stream my shows on an unstable or lower bandwidth internet connection like on a train
Oh yeah good point wasn’t thinking of that kind of use case. Internet is available everywhere now and I’m so used to gigabit Ethernet and high-speed WiFi/5g that I forgot the low speed of public WiFi or locations where the connection can get unstable.
You could argue I should adapt my habits to my means but I frankly really think it should be the other way around, and transcoding solves that for me.
In the past I probably would ^^" but today it’s nearly impossible if you want a balanced life in a daily working/study routine. There’s so much to do, to much to think of, to much information… Automating stuff is where you can gain hours in the long run, so I totally get it !
Thanks for your answer !
For some content DirectPlay is just not possible, as much as I’d love it to be.
More complex stylized subtitles will absolutely trash almost any Android device unless transcoded.
What kind of stylized subtitles? I do not have a big library so I have never encountered this kind of trouble. But I’m curious to know to circumvent in advance.
Most anime have .ASS subtitles and are kinda complex sometimes with singsong related subtitles, but never had any issues on android with them.
And most movies have simple plain text subtitles.
Most anime have .ASS subtitles and are kinda complex sometimes with singsong related subtitles, but never had any issues on android with them.
That’s exactly what I meant. Most simple subtitles will be fine.
This example is still relatively simple, but it should give you an idea: https://streamable.com/nj8fey
Good fansubs can sometimes do really crazy things, including replacing entire moving backgrounds.Haha I’m to late :( Not available anymore. You sure it isn’t about the external player used by jellyfin on mobile?
Cauz’ I remember I had issues with
.ASSsubtitles only on mobile when VLC was used as external player.Damn, I didn’t know streamable is so crappy now…
Anyway, I’ve tried a lot of different players and they all struggle.
On the phone it’s almost fine, but any Android TV Box just gets killed with a sufficiently complex scene.I have no idea what streamlabs or Android TV boxes uses as backend player, but after a lot of debugging MPV solved all my subtitles issues on mobile (android) and desktop (Linux).
It made me kinda sad because VLC was the defacto application I installed on Windows for years !! But since I’m on Linux, MPV is the new standard in my default applications.
Maybe have a look if you can change the default player?
Look very nice but I miss some simple features but necessary features for me:
- Random play.
- Background play.
I usually have a random episode playing on my phone so I can fall asleep since I have a mild form of tinnitus.
I use Symphonium for a year now and it is all I ever needed. Has all bells and whistles, great support and all of the features you could wish. A huge step up from the native app or even findroid and the likes.
Honestly, I know Emby gets a lot of hate due to its background but this is why I enjoy it so much. The emby app for android is very well polished.
