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Comment by dspearson | Hacker News Reader

I haven't noticed any difference or problems with the Android TV application vs the Android or web client. What exactly is broken or not great for you?

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The UI for selecting media only shows covers until you have your cursor over some specific media, which can leave you guessing if your album art isn't super descriptive.

Sync play is TERRIBLE with android TV. We tried watching a show over sync play on the LAN in two different rooms and it just constantly lost sync, commands didn't go through, etc. It was so bad we only tried it once.

Controlling the Android TV app from Jellyfin Mobile or web is awkward at best, basically unusable.

For me specific video files will freeze the app and render it unusable. It's really frustrating

If you encounter this, a good fix is to break out handbrake and to re-encode your files as web-optimized mp4. That helps with skipping video back and forth and quick loading.

The other thing to check is your transcoding setup. Sometimes the settings are not optimal and can cause playback issues.

I abandoned a Shield for Apple TV over the many issues on it. Should-be-supported codecs had problems that made many videos unusable. Plus bad UI jank in general, not just in Jellyfin. Shouldn’t have tried to cheap out, it’s not like I’ve never used Android before (I’ve developed for it… including for set-top devices) so I ought to have known better.

The only thing that does on my end is 4k HDR DolbyVision (no transcoding) and that is because it runs on a shitty firetv 4k max gen2. Kodi also cannot handle this on that device

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