This release could almost be called a big one! To ease the maintenance of the current release branch we've backported some big changes originally intended for version 0.17.

Our default playback library is now upgraded to the new androidx.media3 library. Allowing us to keep up-to-date with the latest bugfixes and enhancements to the player, as the previous library is now deprecated. Additionally support for tunneling and audio offloading is now enabled.

In addition to these playback changes, we have addressed various reported issues (and crashes) related to trailers, remote control, images, search and more. You can see all of them in the changelog below.

🏗️ Enhancements

• Replace ExoPlayer with androidx.media3 #2826, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Support tunneling and audio offloading #3268, by @nielsvanvelzen

💥 Crash fixes

• Fix crash and inconsistent ordering when using ShuffleOrderIndexProvider #3250, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Fix crash when DISPLAY_CONTENT while playing #3284, by @3l0w
• Defer home initialization until user info is available #3291, by @nielsvanvelzen

🔧 Bugfixes

• Fix focus issue when pressing back in Fire TV soft keyboard #3245, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Fix opening collections via search results showing empty screen #3246, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Fix playing audio from search queues entire row #3247, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Disable SocketHandler when using RewriteMediaManager #3253, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Add <queries> element to Manifest for remote trailers #3265, by @nielsvanvelzen
• Disable crossfading for CardLegacyImageView to fix scaling issue #3286, by @nielsvanvelzen

Contributors

• @nielsvanvelzen
• @3l0w