Your Telegram films, on the TV, without downloading them first.
You have films sitting in Telegram channels. Watching one on the TV means downloading eight gigabytes to a phone, copying it across, and finding somewhere to put it.
TMPlayer skips all of that. Scan a QR code with your phone, pick a film, and it starts playing in a few seconds. Skip to the ninety-minute mark and it gets there in a few seconds too, because the download moves to wherever you are instead of grinding through everything before it.
It runs on an 8 GB TV stick with a gigabyte of RAM, because that is what it was built and tested on.
Signs in with a QR code. Open Telegram on your phone, go to Settings → Devices → Link Desktop Device, point it at the TV. No typing an email address with a D-pad. Two-step verification works.
Shows films, not messages. Every chat and channel you are in, listed as poster grids of the
videos inside them. Text messages never appear. Documents are matched by name and type, because
most films arrive as a plain .mkv rather than as a video.
Starts fast and seeks properly. Playback begins while the file is still arriving, and seeking re-aims the download rather than waiting for it. This is the whole reason the app exists. Bring the controls up and the corner says how much of the film has come down, and how quickly.
Or waits, if your connection would rather. Settings has a Download the whole film first switch, off by default. On, the film is fetched in full before it starts, which beats being stopped every few minutes on a line that cannot keep up with playback.
Handles the formats films actually come in. MKV, MP4, AVI, TS, and the rest. Embedded subtitles, including image-based PGS and VobSub. Dual audio tracks you can switch between mid-film. DTS, TrueHD and E-AC3 decode in software when the stick has no silicon for them, while video stays on the hardware decoder.
Remembers where you stopped. Every film, with a progress bar on its poster. Hold OK on one to forget it, or clear the whole Continue watching list at once from its heading or from Settings.
Keeps one film on the device. An 8 GB stick cannot hold a library. TMPlayer caches the film you are watching and clears the previous one, showing you exactly how much space that frees and asking before it does it.
Finds things by voice. Press Speak and say a channel or a file name. It uses the microphone already in your remote and asks for no permissions to do it.
Grab the APK from Releases and pick the one matching your device:
| Device | APK |
|---|---|
| Mi TV Stick, most 2018-2021 sticks | armeabi-v7a |
| Chromecast with Google TV, newer boxes | arm64-v8a |
| Emulators and x86 boxes | x86_64 |
Not sure which? Run adb shell getprop ro.product.cpu.abi.
On the TV, turn on Developer options (Settings → About → press Build seven times), enable network debugging, then:
adb connect <tv-ip>:5555
adb install TMPlayer-<version>-armeabi-v7a.apkINSTALL.md covers the sideloading steps in full, along with the remote-control reference and what to do when something misbehaves.
It hosts nothing, indexes nothing and uploads nothing. There is no server, no bot, and no account except your own. It shows you media from chats you already joined, and what you do with that is your responsibility.
It is also not a general Telegram client. You cannot read messages, reply, or send anything. It plays videos, and that is all it does.
TDLib, Telegram's own client library, handles the account, the chats and the files, through tdl-coroutines, which ships prebuilt natives for every ABI here.
The interesting part is a small Media3 DataSource
that maps ExoPlayer's reads onto TDLib's offset-based partial downloads. Seek to a new position and
it points TDLib at that byte instead of waiting for the intervening gigabytes. The window
arithmetic lives in one pure class with the awkward cases pinned down by unit tests, because that
is where a streaming player either works or does not.
The player itself is Media3's leanback integration: the standard Android TV transport controls, not a hand-rolled imitation of them.
You need JDK 17 or newer (21 is what this is built with) and Android SDK platform 36. The app itself runs on API 26 and up.
Telegram requires every client to identify itself, so you need your own credentials. They are free
and take about two minutes at my.telegram.org → API development
tools. Put them in local.properties at the repo root:
sdk.dir=/path/to/Android/Sdk
TG_API_ID=1234567
TG_API_HASH=your_api_hash
TMDB_API_KEY=optionalTMDB_API_KEY is optional. With it, choosing a film shows a poster, synopsis and cast from
The Movie Database; without it, that panel says the extras are
unavailable and everything else works unchanged. A key is free at
themoviedb.org/settings/api.
Then:
./gradlew test # unit tests
./gradlew assembleDebug # per-ABI debug APKs
./gradlew assembleRelease # signed release, needs keystore.propertiesThe build works without credentials; the app just says so on the login screen instead of drawing a QR code, which is what CI does on every pull request.
CONTRIBUTING.md has the details. The short version: keep it small, prefer an existing library to new code, put logic that can be tested behind a pure function and test it, and never paste GPL code into an Apache-2.0 project.
Some version constraints in this repo look arbitrary and are not. Each one is documented in CONTRIBUTING.md with the reason it exists. Please read that before bumping anything.
Unofficial client. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Telegram FZ-LLC. It uses the official Telegram API through TDLib with your own credentials, as permitted for third-party clients.
Film posters, synopses and cast come from The Movie Database. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Note that TMDB's free tier covers non-commercial use; shipping this commercially would need a separate agreement with them.
Apache-2.0 © 2026 dracu-lah
Player mark via SVG Repo, recoloured.