v0.5.0 — Auto
Until now you picked one quality and lived with the consequences: choose Original on a connection that cannot carry it and the film stalls. Auto measures the connection while you watch and moves between qualities as it changes. It is not on by default — Original still is, and you choose Auto per playback.
What's new
- Auto quality, in the playback menu. It starts at a quality it has evidence your connection can carry, watches how long each piece of video actually takes to arrive, and moves up or down as that changes. Moving up is tried in the background first: it fetches a sample at the higher quality and only switches if that sample arrives in time, so a quality your link cannot sustain is refused before you see it rather than after.
- It prefers your original file, and goes back to it. Auto is not a bitrate ladder with Original bolted on top. If the connection recovers enough to carry the file as it sits on your server, Auto returns to it — no re-encoding, the original picture and soundtrack, Dolby Vision and Atmos included. It only checks when it has enough buffered to pay for the check, so a marginal connection is not repeatedly interrupted by attempts to leave it.
- It will not switch for a change you cannot see. Most of the qualities it can choose between are the same frame size, and a switch costs a rebuilt picture — so a small gain late in a film is declined outright rather than paid for.
Original and the five fixed qualities are unchanged. If you never open the Quality menu, nothing in this release changes what your television does.
Fixed
- A quality change no longer stalls and then races. After switching down, playback could stop for a second, sprint through what it had missed, stop again, and repeat, sometimes for a minute — the switch spent the whole remaining buffer on its own transfer and handed the player an empty queue. On the case that reproduced it, the longest stall went from 8 seconds to none and the stutter from 14 affected seconds to 1.
- A failed transfer can no longer make your connection look faster than it is. An abandoned fetch was folded into the measurement as though it had completed, so the estimate rose at the exact moment the link collapsed and the next decision was made on a number that could be an order of magnitude too high.
Compatibility
- Plays video, verified by watching it — 2019 LG sets. One television: an LG 49SM9000PLA, which reports platform release 4.10.2 (LG markets this generation as webOS 4.5). The on-device suites run against a live Plex Media Server before every release, and a further tier exercises Auto over a deliberately throttled link.
- Plays video, reported by someone else — one 2021 set. mariotaku of webosbrew ran v0.2.1 on an LG 65UP7560AUD (platform release 6.5.2) on 2026-08-11 and got a picture: issue #22. Six of eight attempts played. That is one set, one firmware, one report, and it remains the only time video has been seen on anything but the developer's own television.
- Starts, and nothing further is known — every other firmware from webOS 4.0 up. The loader resolves this binary's libraries and symbols cleanly against all nine firmware images webosbrew has at 4.0 or newer, webOS 4.4.2 through 11.2.0. That grades startup and says nothing at all about whether video plays; the matrix is in the technical audit.
- Does not start — webOS 3.9.2 and older. Symbols the app needs are missing from those firmwares, so the process is killed before anything appears. Installing it there gets you a tile that does nothing.
If your set is in the middle two groups, tell us what happened. It working is as useful a report as it failing.
Known issues
- Every server transcode fails on platform release 10.3.1 — which means Auto and the five fixed qualities, leaving only Original. Measured on a rented set on 2026-08-27: that television refuses an H.264 stream at the dimensions the app declares, before a frame is decoded. HEVC at the same ceiling plays, so direct play of an HEVC file is unaffected. Not fixed in this release.
- Auto has only been exercised in a laboratory — one television, one server, and a link throttled on purpose. A link that degrades slowly, or a server already busy transcoding for somebody else, has not been observed anywhere.
- Playback on webOS 5, 7, 8, 9 and 11 is unverified. The app starts there and nobody has reported watching anything.
- Servers behind Plex's relay, and servers that require an encrypted connection, are reached but have not been watched end to end.
- The app ignores the frame-rate limit in your television's own codec table, so a set that decodes 4K only at 30 frames per second is not told about it.
Help test this release
If your connection to your server is slow, congested or over Wi-Fi, try Auto and say what you saw. Whether the picture settled, how long it took, and whether it ever went backwards are all useful — a real link is the one thing nobody here can reproduce. Open an issue. It working is as useful a report as it failing.
If a friend has shared a library with you, try it. Unchanged from v0.4.0 and still true: a share reached at a public address, one that requires an encrypted connection, one behind Plex's relay, and an account with several shares at once are all paths nobody here can reproduce.
Installing
Download com.beb.plxnative_0.5.0_arm.ipk and install it with the Homebrew Channel or dev-manager-desktop. You do not need a rooted TV.
Nothing in this distribution chain is signed, so this sha256 is what tells you the file you have is the file published here:
b1d01621d40b11518b9f9ecd6574d31f7b1ccf9357e05e02051d2c676c0048bb com.beb.plxnative_0.5.0_arm.ipk
Installing and checking a download covers the other assets, how to check the hash on each platform, and the Developer Mode expiry that uninstalls your apps. This package bundles FFmpeg under LGPL-2.1-or-later and its complete corresponding source is attached to this release. Exactly what was built, verified and shipped is in the technical audit for v0.5.0.