v1.2-beta - Visual overhaul, JellyWave + more!

🚀 JellyFin PS3 v1.2-beta

🎨 The XMB Reborn

v1.2-beta is a huge visual and interaction overhaul for JellyFin PS3.

This release brings the UI much closer to the feel of the classic PlayStation 3 XMB, while adding a completely new visual identity built around JellyWave, reactive animation, particles, depth navigation and smoother transitions.

⚠️ Beta: v1.2 has only been lightly tested on real hardware so far. There may still be bugs, crashes or edge cases. Please report anything you find!

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✨ What's New

🌀 A Brand-New XMB Experience

The entire navigation system has been rebuilt around a consistent depth-based browsing model.

• 🧭 Depth navigation — every category now follows the same layered browsing model.
• 🪼 JellyWave — a bespoke take on the classic XMB wave, redesigned as a translucent, flowing "jelly" wave in Jellyfin colours.
• ❄️ Cold-boot animation — the Jellyfin logo lights up before the XMB rises into view.
• 🎮 XMB-style navigation — menu sounds and left-stick navigation bring back that familiar PS3 feel.
• 🔺 Triangle quick-peek — press Triangle anywhere to flip the poster and reveal its synopsis.
• ⏳ Loading & returning screens — opening details, albums and returning from playback now have dedicated transitions instead of leaving you staring at a frozen frame.

The goal was simple: make JellyFin PS3 feel like it belongs on a PS3.

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🎵 Music Player Overhaul

This is where JellyWave really comes alive.

🎧 Audio-Reactive JellyWave

The wave is now driven directly by the music.

Lows, mids and highs each control their own layer, creating different movement depending on what's actually happening in the song.

💥 Sub-bass hits can send ripples travelling across the wave.

🎶 Different tracks now produce noticeably different wave behaviour instead of simply animating to a generic timer.

✨ Particle System

Particles now flow across the entire screen and interact visually with the wave, making the player feel much more alive.

💤 Focus Mode

Stop touching the controls for a few seconds and the UI gets out of the way.

Up Next and playback controls fade out, leaving the artwork and JellyWave to take centre stage.

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🎬 Playback & Subtitles

🔎 Trickplay Previews

Scrubbing through video now displays thumbnail previews, making it much easier to find the exact moment you're looking for.

💬 Console-Rendered Subtitles

Subtitles are now rendered directly by the PS3.

Supports:

• 🟣 PGS subtitles
• 📝 Text subtitles
• 🔤 3 font choices
• 🎨 3 colour choices

Because subtitles are rendered locally by the console, they no longer break the lossless audio stream that had to be altered just to display subtitles.

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⚙️ Settings & Customisation

🎨 Themes

Choose from available themes or create your own with a custom .ini file.

✨ Menu Particles

Toggle particles behind the menus for an even more animated XMB experience.

📺 Screen Size / Overscan

Overscan handling has been reworked.

Instead of simply shifting the interface around, the UI can now scale itself to fit the visible area.

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⚡ Performance Improvements

A lot of work has gone into making the new visuals feel smoother on actual PS3 hardware.

• 🚀 Network requests moved off the render thread
• 🌀 Wave generation moved off the render thread
• 🖼️ Posters remain loaded after playback
• 🎮 Smoother menu navigation and transitions
• Support added for Jellyfin 12 servers.

The result is a UI that can do considerably more without making the render loop do all the work.

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🪼 Built for the PS3

v1.2 isn't just a cosmetic skin slapped over JellyFin.

The new interface, animations and JellyWave systems have been designed around the realities of PS3 hardware, with performance and memory constraints in mind.

The aim is to make JellyFin feel like the endgame proper PlayStation 3 media player experience.**

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📦 Installation

Install:

JellyFin-PS3-v1.2-beta.pkg

using Package Manager.

✅ The new version replaces the previous installation.
✅ Your existing settings are preserved.

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🐛 Beta Testing

This is still a beta release, so please expect a few rough edges.

If you find a bug, crash, visual glitch or something that just feels wrong on hardware, please report it!

Hardware testing and feedback will help shape the next release.

v1.1 — Dialogue fixed, 3x the buffer, settings that ask about speakers

🎧 JellyFin-PS3 · Lossless Audio Update

TL;DR — 🗣️ dialogue comes back to your centre speaker · ⚙️ three confusing audio settings become two plain ones · 🚀 3× bigger playback buffer for free · 🎚️ a quality list where every option actually works.

✅ Your existing settings carry over automatically. Nothing to reconfigure.

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🗣️ Dialogue that actually comes out of the centre speaker

The problem: on some HDMI chains the centre channel vanished — and with it nearly every word of dialogue.

Why: the PS3's audio engine is 8 channels wide, but HDMI out is 6. The console folds 8 → 6 on the way out, and on some receivers that fold quietly drops slot 2 — which is exactly where dialogue lives.

The fix: selecting 5.1 now makes the console route true 5.1, so the centre survives the trip. 🎯

• ✅ Still lossless — TrueHD and DTS-HD MA arrive uncompressed
• ✅ If a receiver ever accepts compressed audio for real, the app notices and reverts to LPCM rather than let your audio get squashed to 640 kbps

<details> <summary>🔬 How it was tracked down</summary>

The per-channel meter showed the centre leaving the app hot — loudest of the three front channels in 59% of samples, never once silent — while nothing reached the speaker. So the loss was downstream, not in the app.

Four fixes were tested on real hardware, one playback each. Three did nothing. The fourth and cleanest (a 6-channel audio port) the console rejects outright.

</details>

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⚙️ Settings asked in speakers, not codecs

Three rows used to decide how audio came out, along axes that didn't line up. Now there are two.

❌ Before	✅ After
Surround 5.1 — Off / AC-3 / HD	🔊 Audio Output — Stereo / 5.1 / 7.1
Dialogue — a downmix mixed in with a list of gains	🗣️ Dialogue Boost — Off / +3 / +6 / +10 dB

Note which way the throughput goes: asking for 30 delivers less than asking for 25. The 30.1 is the buffer topping up in bursts against a demand of only 25 — fill rate with headroom, not a sustained rate. A buffer can bridge a spike; it can't bridge a permanent shortfall.

The Max run above lasted eleven minutes with the buffer never empty and the audio cushion never dry. If you had 30 or Original selected you're moved to Max, and your per-title choices are preserved. 👍

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🧯 A throughput regression, caught before it shipped

An experiment gave the network stack a 4 MB memory pool instead of the stock 128 KB, on the theory that the pool was the receive ceiling. Measured on hardware, it:

• 📉 halved throughput — 25.0 → 12.0 Mbps median
• 💥 broke getsockopt outright
• 🔇 produced 2,854 audio dropouts where the shipped build has none

Reverted — and the theory is written down as wrong, so nobody retries it. 🪦

Startup now logs a socket health check, so this class of fault shows up in the first line of a log instead of an hour into a stuttering film.

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🧹 Smaller things

• 📊 Per-channel audio levels in the heartbeat — the thing that made the centre-channel bug diagnosable at all
• 🐛 Fixed a log line that truncated, and a garbage first heartbeat that opened every log with net=102924528.0M
• 🎛️ "Bitstream off" now genuinely makes no audio-output calls, so it works as a control
• 🔌 Stopped reconfiguring the audio output after every playback even when the feature was off — that's a shared console resource this app hadn't claimed
• 📦 Receive buffer set to 512 KB by measurement: the smaller, "more correct" size matched to the system pool measured worse (24.7 vs 31.1 Mbps; buffer empty 15% of the time vs never)

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💾 Install

1. Copy JellyFin-PS3.pkg to a USB stick
2. On the PS3: Game → Package Manager → Install Package Files

Or drop it in /dev_hdd0/packages/ and install with webMAN MOD.

Installing over an existing copy keeps your login and settings. ✅

Full changelog: v1.0...v1.1

Jellyfin PS3 Lossless

A Jellyfin client for the PS3 that plays HD audio losslessly and fixes 1080p playback.

Download

JellyFin-PS3.pkg (1.1 MB)

Copy it to a USB stick and install from the XMB (Game -> Package Manager -> Install Package Files), or drop it in /dev_hdd0/packages/ over FTP and use webMAN MOD's Package Manager. Installing over an existing copy keeps your login and settings.

Set these two things

Setting	Where	Value
Quality	Triangle on a title -> Quality row	1080p 25
Surround	Settings -> Surround 5.1	HD

For multichannel the PS3 itself must also be told your setup can take it: Settings -> Sound Settings -> Audio Output Settings -> HDMI -> Manual, then tick Dolby Digital 5.1 Ch and Linear PCM 5.1 Ch.

Why 25 Mbps and not higher: the console only receives about 20-25 Mbps over HTTP. Measured, not guessed - 9.4 Mbps PC->PS3 by FTP against 113 Mbps the other way, while the same Jellyfin server hands a PC on the same LAN 537 Mbps. A bitrate setting is a ceiling, not a constant, so 25 holds where 30 starves on demanding scenes. If playback stutters, drop to 1080p 20 before changing anything else.

What's in it

Audio

• TrueHD / Dolby Atmos - lossless 5.1 or 7.1 (bed; objects are not rendered)
• DTS-HD MA - lossless. The XLL extension is decoded, verified bit-exact against ffmpeg on x86 and on the PPU's own big-endian PowerPC, 806/806 frames
• DTS:X - 5.1 bed; DTS-HD HRA / DTS-ES - core, up to 1509 kbps
• AC-3 5.1 via server transcode, and a full stereo downmix for ARC-only chains

Video

• 1080p is stable to 25 Mbps. The old stalls were 512 KB PES/AU buffers silently truncating I-frames of a 53 Mbps remux - now sized from the H.264 Level 4.1 ceiling
• Constant judder on direct play is gone: the PS3's decoder reports no frame-rate code on a stream copy, and the fallback was pacing 23.976 fps film as 30. The rate now comes from the server

Other

• Quality is remembered per title
• The library bar self-heals if the network is slow after a console restart

Known limits

• Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) is not decoded; the server transcodes it to AC-3
• Atmos / DTS:X objects are not rendered - no free renderer exists
• 24 Hz output is not possible; tested on hardware and documented in the source
• Original / direct play of a 50 Mbps remux exceeds what the console can pull

Requires a PS3 on Evilnat CFW or HEN, and a reachable Jellyfin server.

Forked from MontyMcK/JellyFin-PS3.