v1.0.93 — Telling You What Actually Went Wrong

Also on Google Play — same app, auto-updating.

Three problems members could hit and had no way to understand. Each one used to look the same from the outside — a dead channel, a stuttering picture, a refused sign-in — leaving you to guess between your internet, your device and the app. Each now says which it actually is.

Fixed: a channel could be dead on arrival because the app picked a video decoder the device can't use. On some TVs the app asked for the decoder in a way that particular chipset cannot set up, the setup failed, and that was that — every channel showed the raw engine text "Could not open codec." and stopped. The device was never the problem: the same TV played fine the moment a different decoding route was used.

It now tries the next route by itself — hardware-on-screen first, software only if that fails too — and remembers which route this TV can't do, so it stops choosing it. If none of them work you get a plain explanation and a pointer to Settings › Playback › Video decoding instead of engine jargon. (From a member's Sony BRAVIA log.)

The app now says when a channel's own timing is broken, instead of letting you blame your internet. Some channels send timing information that doesn't add up. The picture skips badly even though everything has arrived and the buffer is full — so the connection looks fine, the app looks broken, and there's no way to tell which.

It's now recognised and named: the channel is at fault, not your connection and not your device, another channel from the same provider may be perfectly fine, and the other player engine may cope better. It only says so when the numbers can't mean anything else — more frames being thrown away each second than the channel can possibly contain, for a sustained stretch, while the buffer is healthy. A struggling TV, a slow connection, or one hiccup after re-buffering will never trigger it. Works on both player engines.

Sign-in tells you what actually went wrong, and what to do about it. "Check your internet connection" was the catch-all for every failure, and it was usually the wrong advice. The commonest cause by far is a network blocking KwickTV — ad-blocking or filtered DNS on the Wi-Fi (Pi-hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, some internet providers' own), or a router blocking the port. The rest of the internet keeps working perfectly, so it reads as "my account is broken".

It now names the likely cause and gives you the ten-second test that settles it: try mobile data or a phone hotspot, and if it works there the network is the problem and there is nothing wrong with your account. The real reason also goes into Export Logs, so a sign-in problem can finally be diagnosed instead of guessed at.

Sign-in also gives up about twice as fast when a server genuinely isn't answering. It used to try three times no matter what went wrong, and every attempt waits fifteen seconds for a connection that is never coming. A real server-side error still gets all three tries; a network that cannot even find the server fails straight away; anything else gets one retry, then stops.

Google Play users can leave a rating from inside the app — Play's own rating card, once, well after launch, for someone who has actually kept and used it. Never during startup, and at most twice ever. There's also a Rate Kwick Player entry in Settings › About for anyone who wants to without waiting to be asked.

Installing keeps all your profiles, favourites, and history.