Jellyfin’s Android TV Update Has a Big Upgrade for Music

Jorge A. Aguilar

Tue, October 28, 2025 at 3:22 PM UTC

The Jellyfin app icon surrounded by other streaming apps on a Google TV interface. — Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek

Jellyfin for Android TV has officially released its latest update, version v0.19.0, and it brings some fantastic changes, especially if you're a music lover. This time around, the music player finally lets you fast forward, rewind, or manually seek through your playing tunes.

The biggest win for music fans is the new level of control over playback. Before, if you wanted to jump to a specific part of a song or podcast, you were probably out of luck, but now you can scrub through the timeline just like you would a video.

The photo viewer is also much cleaner, giving it a fresh coat of paint and adding the file and album name to make it easier to see what you're looking at. What's interesting is that this likely gives us a glimpse of what the future video player interface might look like, and I really like the clean look.

The app's search function also got a big redesign to match the new look of the app. That on its own would be enough for an update, but the team also added a voice search. This is just the first step, though, as future updates plan to add search suggestions, in-library search, and a complete revamp of how results are shown. Moving forward, finding what you want to watch or listen to should be much faster overall.

Another change, which was apparently a popular request, is the new inactivity pop-up. We've all seen the "Are you still watching?" prompt whenever you use other streaming services, and it's here now. When you enable it in the app preferences, it'll pop up when it hasn't detected any input for a configurable amount of time or episodes. If you don't choose the option to keep watching, the app will automatically close the video player.

A person searching for Smurfs and Smurfs 2 on Jellyfin

Jellyfin put a lot of effort into improving the video player, too. One of the most significant changes is better detection of your device's HDR capabilities, which means more accurate transcoding or direct play of your content. The team has also added support for the VobSub and DVDSub subtitle formats without needing to transcode, which is a great move for compatibility.

I just want to point out that for Dolby Vision content, you'll need to be running the Jellyfin 10.11 server. You'll also have to rescan your media library for those changes to fully kick in, which can be a pain, but it's better than nothing.

To help users and the developers figure out what's going on with playback, there's a new troubleshooting mechanic. You can find a new button in the advanced playback preferences that lets you send a "media capability report" to the server. This report includes information about your device's capabilities and its "device profile," which helps the Jellyfin server decide the best way to stream your media.

You should also keep in mind that the 0.19.x releases will be the last ones to support Android 5 and Android 5.1. The developers mentioned that this change is due to updated vendor requirements. If you're on one of those older versions, you can still use Jellyfin, but you won't get future app updates.

Jellyfin for Android TV version 0.19.0 is available now, and if you're already using the app, it should auto-update through your device's app store. If you're a new user, you can find it in a platform's app store or on GitHub .

Source: Jellyfin

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