More improvements for the Android TV and Fire TV app

September 17, 2015

A new release of the Android TV and Fire TV app will soon available in the Google and Amazon stores with another round of improvements to both playback and the interface – especially for Live TV users.

Live TV – better than ever

The Android TV and Fire TV app already had a great Live TV interface with a full grid-based guide and now it is even better with that same guide available during Live TV playback.

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Also, accessing and managing your recorded TV and schedules has never been easier. Together with the new Emby TV implementation in the server, Emby is becoming your complete Live TV and DVR solution (for non-protected content).

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Improved Playback – Even less transcoding and auto bitrate detection

With an upgrade to the custom VLC player, and the implementation of ExoPlayer, we now have even more reliable playback and many formats will direct stream without the need for transcoding.

This version of the app is also smarter when it comes to determining what can be played without transcoding. With a new “Auto” bitrate setting (which will be enabled by default on update) the app will test your network speed and adjust its playback requests to the server to fit within the available bandwidth. You should no longer need to fiddle with the max bitrate setting to get perfect playback no matter what the network situation.

This new version also improves support for all subtitle formats.

New Grid View

Continuing the trend of improving the overall interface and making it much easier to browse large libraries of content, the app now includes a new Grid View to put more items on the screen at once when browsing at the library level.

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The new grid allows quick sorting and filtering options that are saved per user and per library and are persistent across app sessions. When sorted alphabetically, it also provides a quick jump-list by letters.

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A choice of image types is also available.

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This new view makes traversing large libraries much easier and really shines when it comes to things like Photos (more photo handling improvements will be coming in a future version as well).

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