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What a Telegram media player has to get right

Playing a file from a chat is the easy half. The rest of this list is the half that decides whether you use it twice.

What it does

Built for one television and one remote, and for one thumb.

Watching

  • Starts in seconds and seeks properly. Skipping ahead re-aims the download instead of waiting for it. A setting fetches the whole video first if your connection would rather.
  • Plays real-world media files. MKV, MP4, AVI and TS. Embedded subtitles, image-based ones included. Multiple audio tracks you can switch during playback.
  • Remembers where you stopped, video by video, with a Continue watching row waiting on launch.
  • Keeps one video on the device. An 8 GB stick cannot hold a library, so the previous one goes and the app tells you how much that freed. Coming back to a video you stopped half way through keeps the half already on disk.
  • Is a phone app on a phone. The same library, drawn the way Android draws things in the hand.

Browsing

  • Shows media, not messages. Open a chat or channel and TMPlayer filters it down to playable videos, including video files sent as documents.
  • Understands episode filenames. During playback, previous and next controls move between neighbouring episodes already present in the same chat, and when one finishes the next starts on its own after a countdown you can stop.
  • Forgives how you type. Search is matched word by word, so an accent nobody types, two letters the wrong way round, or one wrong keyword among right ones still finds the thing.
  • Search by voice, using the microphone already in your remote. Star the chats you watch from and they sit one press away.
  • Updates itself. It notices a newer release on GitHub and installs it, and signing out clears everything it ever kept.

What it looks like

Four screens, in the order you meet them. Every picture is the app itself, filled with demo content that belongs to nobody.

TMPlayer on a phone, listing demo chats: Weekend Clips, Home Projects, Recipe Notes, Travel Diary, Design Study and Family Archive.
Step one: pick a chatEvery chat and channel you are already in, as a list, with the ones you were last watching along the top. Text messages never appear anywhere in the app.
A dense grid of demo videos from a Telegram chat on a phone, each tile carrying its resolution and running time.
Step two: pick a videoThe chat's videos as tiles, with the running time and the resolution on each. Press one and it starts in seconds. Long file names are one tap away in the row arrangement.
The same chat list on a television, with a navigation rail down the left for Continue, Favourites, Recent, Channels, Groups, People and All chats.
The same account, on the televisionThe remote gets a rail instead of a hamburger, cards big enough to read across a room, and focus you can always see. Nothing needs setting up twice.
TMPlayer settings on a television, showing the video size limits, autoplay of the next episode and how much storage is free.
Settings, if you want themHide clips below a size, let the next episode start on its own, or fetch the whole video before playing when the connection is poor. Changes save as you make them.

Star it if it helped

Every feature above exists because somebody asked for it or hit the lack of it. A star is what keeps that loop running, and a fork is how the next feature arrives with the code already written.

GPL-3.0, and free for good