mpvRex v3.0.0

mpvRex v3.0.0 is a major release with new features, contributor additions, and significant UI and performance refinements across the player, browser, and discovery engine.

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🔥 Highlighting: Introducing "Shorts" Mode

RexShorts is a new vertical playback engine designed for short-form content.

• Vertical-First Experience: A dedicated player UI optimized for vertical videos and Reels.
• Auto-Swipe & Infinite Loop: Seamlessly move to the next video automatically or loop your favorite clips infinitely.
• Smart Discovery: Includes a weighted "Smart Feed" and session-based tracking to keep your viewing fresh.
• Advanced Filtering: Built-in "Blocked Video Manager" and non-recursive folder blacklisting to curate your feed exactly how you want it.

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✨ New Features

• Themed Player Controls: Adaptive interface that dynamically matches your system’s Material You accents or the app's internal theme.
• Tactile Animations: Experience fluid spring physics, squeeze, and bounce animations for the seekbar, volume, and brightness sliders. (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• Enhanced Thumbnail Engine: Support for network stream thumbnails, new extraction strategies, and a dedicated cache manager. (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• Floating AB Loop (#47): AB loop controls are now accessible via a floating overlay for a cleaner main interface. (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• In-App Updates: A refined update system integrated with GitHub to keep you on the latest version.

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🛠️ Fixed & Improved

Player & UI Refinements

• Improved: Background playback now transitions smoothly when switching to background. Video stream is suspended, reducing battery drain.
• Improved: Background playback button refactored. Now acts as a toggle for the "Background Playback" audio setting. Minimize the app and playback continues automatically.
• Improved: Replaced slot-machine animations with snappy jumping transitions, a more compact layout moved to the top of the screen (#33), and the ability to lock speed immediately via vertical swipe.
• Improved: Refactored the More Sheet and Frame Navigation menus for smoother transitions and design consistency.
• Improved: Unified drag handle styles and icon sizes across all bottom sheets and modes.
• Improved: List view density and typography have been refined for a cleaner browsing experience. (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• Fixed: Configure media buttons for next/previous (#41). (Thanks @Crandel!)
• Fixed: External subtitle selections and aspect ratio settings are now correctly saved and restored across sessions (#37). (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• Fixed: Resolved a race condition where visual resets would occur during media title updates. (Thanks @farhan112k!)

Browser & Discovery

• Fixed: Video grid thumbnail scaling and resolution in single-column mode (#29).
• Fixed: Folder text color dimming logic for watched vs. unwatched content (#30). (Thanks @farhan112k!)
• Fixed: "Auto-scroll to last played" now works reliably in both Folder and Tree views.
• Fixed: Resolved issues where the scroll position wouldn't reset when changing sort orders.

System & Performance

• Improved: Optimized Gradle build performance and enabled configuration caching for faster installs.
• Improved: Added an option to hide media info from system menus for better privacy.
• Added: Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation support. (Thanks @abc0922001!)

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Checksums

Variant	SHA-256
arm64-v8a	f5bcebd2f74b1320605cab09108cdf6e331ea86138dc68bb2873d14963d9459d
armeabi-v7a	d189fb440d13c5d559fd17a9aed2c492e728b901533483e4b9f77def6ac68e5c
Universal	47b692cd2f958d41010c29f80770a05b4a0918eae449a5a3ceb82618b3ef1572
x86	b020728396465d7ce371741a4090a8d266634d9dc302778bafdb5855ba64d192
x86_64	06c88d1468068f88961f1852f943c58f5fd50eac52429f44e5c10d3d6648ea57