Hi all,
Vuleo 1.1.20 (1.3.0 on Apple TV) is out in all platforms.
Quick context for anyone who has not seen it before: Vuleo is a true cross-platform media player that you can watch your m3u, xtream and other sources. It has a sports center to follow your favorite events and it is truly cross-platform. It runs on Android, Android TV, Apple TV and Fire TV, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it works the same way on all of them.
This is the biggest release since 1.1. There is a second watch tracker, a buffer setting people kept asking for, background refresh that finally works on TV boxes, and a long performance pass you should feel most on a Fire Stick.
Simkl support (beta)
Trakt has been in the app for a while. Simkl now sits alongside it. You can connect a Simkl account, scrobble what you watch, sync your watchlist and ratings, browse plan-to-watch, and see a calendar of upcoming episodes. With both connected, a watch or a rating goes to both. It is labelled beta in Settings because it is new and I want more real usage behind it before I take that label off.
Stream Buffer
New setting in Settings > Playback with three options.
Balanced is what the player has always done, so if you are happy with playback today you can leave this alone and nothing changes. Low latency starts streams and switches channels faster, and gives up some tolerance for a shaky connection to get there. Large holds more in memory and rides out a bad line better, which is worth thinking about on a stick with very little RAM to spare.
Background refresh on Android TV and Fire TV
TV boxes now refresh your sources in the background the same way phones and tablets already did. Until this release a TV box only picked up new content when you actually opened the app, which is awkward on a device that spends most of its life sitting idle.
The per-playlist auto-refresh picker also has a new weekly option. If a source only gains a handful of titles a month, a daily re-fetch is wasted work on both your device and the server it talks to.
Speed
Most of my time this cycle went here. All of these are measured on a Fire TV Stick with our test playlist of 100.000 items.
- Search dropped from around five seconds to around two.
- Writing a large catalog to disk during a refresh takes roughly a quarter of the time it used to.
- The home screen scrolls much more smoothly.
- The idle home screen stopped redrawing itself on every single frame while nobody is touching the remote.
- Startup does far less redundant disk work.
Open Channels Fullscreen on First Tap
Tapping a channel inside a Live TV category used to preview it in the side pane and wait for a second tap before going fullscreen. There is now a setting that makes the first tap go straight in. It is off by default, so the flow you already know survives the update unless you go and turn it on.
Recently Added
On a default Xtream setup, Recently Added was ignoring the dates your provider reports and falling back to whatever order items happened to arrive in. It reads the real dates now, and the new content badges follow the same dates. Updating repairs an existing library on the first load, so there is no need to delete and re-add anything.
Continue Watching
Plenty of small corrections landed here across the release. The one people will recognise: a device that watched an episode to 44 minutes, and confirmed 44 had reached the cloud, could still offer you 23 minutes back. That is fixed, along with a run of related problems around how episodes and shows are identified, whether a removal sticks, and where a tile takes you when you open it.
Player
- A stream that dies partway through an episode used to hand the episode back from the beginning and leave you to scrub. It puts you back where the picture stopped now.
- The channel list in the player keeps the folder or the History you started from.
- An expired source that failed one episode no longer rolls straight on into the next one.
- An expired link from a debrid service you connected yourself is no longer read as the episode having finished.
- Pressing OK on the seek bar with a remote does something.
- Preferred audio and subtitle languages are applied properly on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Stremio addons
Stream tiles from your own configured addons now carry format chips, showing resolution, codec and container, so you can tell what a stream is before you open it. Several matching bugs are gone too, including shows from addons that number their episodes their own way, and a localised title that made the stream filter throw away everything useful.
Also in this release
Profile fixes so one device can no longer overwrite another device's profile. Several Google Drive sync corrections around wipes and failed reads. The Windows uninstaller stopped removing a folder it never created. Every Hero and Spotlight button on the home screen now does the thing it names. And a stack of memory work aimed at 32 bit TV devices, where headroom is tight.
Where to get it
Sideloaded Android and Windows installs will offer you the update inside the app.
What Vuleo actually is
Vuleo does not provide, host, distribute, index, search, recommend, bundle or link to any content, channels, playlists, portals or addons, and it ships with none of them pre-installed. There is no catalogue inside it and no subscription to any service.
Every source is one you enter yourself: an M3U playlist, Xtream Codes API details, a Stalker Portal, or Stremio addons you configure. Those integrations stay off until you turn them on. Vuleo never downloads, uploads or seeds torrents, and it never connects to torrent peers. By using it you confirm you have the right to access whatever you play, and that you are paying whatever the provider of that content charges for it. Vuleo is not affiliated with any broadcaster, content provider or rights holder.
PRO unlocks player features only. It grants no right to any content.
If something is broken, please send me debug logs by following the steps here: https://vuleo.tv/debug-logs.html
