Vimu Player for Android TV and Fire TV documentation

Overview: Vimu Player uses local storage of your device, connected USB devices (FAT, also NTFS on some devices), Windows shares (also known as SMB), WebDAV servers and UPnP/DLNA servers.

Setup is very easy!

USB Drives

To use Vimu Player with a USB drive, simply connect it to your Android TV or Fire TV device. The USB drive must have a FAT32 filesystem (some devices also support NTFS). Your USB drive will appear as a new tab in the interface.

Please note that Vimu only displays video and audio files. Other file types such as txt, doc, or pdf will not be shown.

You can also use an SD card if your device supports it (such as Nvidia Shield or Fire TV Gen 2).

UPnP/DLNA

UPnP/DLNA is the easiest way to play content on your Android TV or Fire TV over LAN with Vimu. You need to have a compatible server installed on your PC or NAS.

Tested Servers:

Plex Media Server
Kodi/XBMC
Twonky
TVMOBiLi
tversity
Serviio

Setup: Use the discovery service of Vimu Player (Network lookup) to add a UPnP/DLNA server. It will find all media servers on your local network. Click on the server you want to add. You can then bookmark the entire server (by pressing the Bookmark dir button) or navigate to a specific subdirectory to bookmark it directly. After pressing the bookmark button, you can set a custom name for your bookmark. NOTE: You will NOT see any media files at this stage. You must create a bookmark before you can play media files.

Windows Shares (SMB)

SMB is the protocol that enables Windows computers to share files with each other. Vimu Player can access shared directories on your Windows PC and play video files directly from them.

There are two ways to add SMB shares, depending on your network configuration.

WebDAV Servers

WebDAV is configured similarly to SMB. To add a WebDAV share, go to Network lookup and click "Add WebDAV server..."

When using WebDAV, you must always provide the IP address or domain, login, and password of your server. The advantage of WebDAV is that you can stream from a server over the Internet, not just via your home LAN.

NFS Servers

NFS is an excellent way to connect to a Linux PC or NAS. You need to provide the full path to an exported directory. For example, if your server has the address 192.168.1.2 and you have an exported path /home/user/video, then the NFS path should be: 192.168.1.2/home/user/video.

NOTE: Vimu will only connect successfully to exports with the "insecure" option enabled.

HTTP Streams

You can open various types of HTTP streams, including HLS video streams and HTTP progressive download streams (from apps like IceStream, for example).

To open an HTTP URL, go to Options → Add network resources and click "Open HTTP URL..."

Audio Tracks

Vimu Player supports containers with multiple audio tracks. To change audio track during playback, scroll down to Audio section. Now you can change audio track with left-right keys.

Subtitles

Vimu Player supports two types of subtitles: external SRT files and embedded subtitles.

To play a video with an external SRT file, you must name it correctly. The SRT file should have the same name as your video file, but with a .srt (lowercase) extension. For example: MyMovie.avi and MyMovie.srt.

When Vimu detects subtitles, it displays a "Subtitles detected" popup. To activate subtitles, press the "Abc" icon button on the media control panel.

Vimu can play Text/SRT, SSA/ASS, DVBSub, VobSUB, and PGS subtitles embedded in various container types.

To change the subtitle track during playback, scroll down to the Subtitles section. You can then change the subtitle track using the left-right keys.

Notes for UPnP/DLNA: MKV subtitles are usually displayed when streaming from a UPnP/DLNA server, provided the server does not transcode the video stream. External SRT subtitles are not supported by all servers. Twonky is one server that is confirmed to work with SRT subtitles.

Covers (Posters)

Vimu will attempt to extract posters from your media files (via SMB and USB). Posters are typically found embedded in MKV and MP4 files. If extraction fails, Vimu will generate a thumbnail based on the video stream.

You can customize posters by adding image files to your movie directories.

For images to display correctly, they must be properly named.

If you have a video file called MyMovie.avi, its cover should be named MyMovie.jpg.

NOTE: Custom covers are not supported for UPnP/DLNA streaming. However, Vimu will display any cover art or thumbnails provided by your server.

Vimu Engine

Vimu Engine is the decoder and playback engine of Vimu Player, designed to play the widest range of media formats and support all popular media containers, codecs, and protocols.

The engine is specially optimized for the most popular Android TV boxes, TVs, and all Fire TV devices.

It intelligently detects which codecs are supported by your hardware and utilizes the most efficient decoding method available.

There are currently two versions of Vimu Engine. The default version is v.2, which is recommended for most cases. It's based on the latest version of ExoPlayer.

You can also enable tunneling, which can significantly improve UHD video playback performance on some TV devices.

In rare situations—for older devices or files that require software decoding—the Legacy v.1 version (based on ExoPlayer 1) may be used.

You can completely disable Vimu Engine in the app's settings. In that case, Android's native MediaPlayer will be used, but audio track switching will generally not be available.

Display Refresh Rate and Resolution Adaptation

Vimu can adapt your display (TV) refresh rate to match the content's native refresh rate on compatible devices.

To check if your device supports refresh rate switching, go to Settings → Diagnostics. You will see a list of resolutions the app can switch to. If only one resolution appears in the list, this feature is not supported on your device.

If you see multiple refresh rates for a single resolution, you're ready to use this feature! Simply enable refresh rate adaptation in Vimu Preferences.

Vimu can also adapt the display resolution to match your content. For example, 1080p video will trigger 1080p TV mode, while 2160p (4K) video will trigger 2160p mode.

Vimu Settings

Show bookmark for Internal Storage: This will enable a special bookmark for "SDCard" (internal memory) of your devices. Usually Android TV devices do not use this memory for media storage.

Use Vimu Engine: Allows to disable Vimu Engine (see above).

Engine version: Selection of Engine version (see above).

HLS/DASH over ExoPlayer2: This allows bypassing Vimu Engine decoder and use pure ExoPlayer for decoding of adaptive streams like HLS and MPEG-DASH. This is the only way to get adaptive resolution playback.

Generate video thumbnails: Thumbnail generation can be disabled if device performance degrades significantly when thumbnails are being generated.

Use Texture video surface: Typically, TV and set-top box units display video content on a dedicated hardware video surface that renders separately from the Android user interface. This allows 4K devices to display the UI in 1080p while maintaining native 4K video quality. When Texture mode is enabled, Vimu renders video directly on the user interface. Performance in Texture mode is usually inferior, but enabling this option may help when aspect ratio selection doesn't work correctly or when visual artifacts appear.

Always use software decoding for video: TV and set-top box devices typically use hardware decoders for smooth video playback. Enabling this option may help Vimu play some legacy or low-quality videos (such as MS-MPEG4, 3GP, RealVideo, etc.) that modern hardware decoders may not support.

Enable surround sound pass-through: This will enable pass-through of compatible audio formats directly to your TV or AV receiver. Not all devices support all pass-through formats.

Pass-through mode: In most cases you'll need to keep it as Auto. It supports most popular surround formats. For some devices using Android 5-6, RAW PCM mode can help to pass basic Dolby and DTS.

Multichannel PCM: If pass-through is disabled or incompatible with the audio stream, it will be decoded to PCM. Audio streams with more than 2 channels can either be downmixed to stereo (multichannel disabled) or decoded as-is (multichannel enabled). Not all Android TV devices support multichannel PCM output.

Extract DCA Core: If your media contains DTS-HD audio, but your receiver (or device) can only pass-through standard DTS, this option will extract the DTS core from the DTS-HD bitstream.

Audio Gain: This function will increase or decrease volume of decoded sound.

Enable auto display refresh rate switch: See above about refresh rate switching.

Enable audio display resolution switch

Subtitle charset: In some cases Vimu can not detect character encoding for external SRT subtitle correctly. You can select encoding here.

Preferred audio language: You can select preferred audio language that will be used by default if media has different languages.

Subtitle size: Select default size of text based (SRT, ASS) subtitles from the list.

Subtitle color: Select default color of text based (SRT, ASS) subtitles from the list.

Stream buffer size: This is a critical setting for streaming high-bitrate media over a network. It determines the amount of memory (in megabytes) that Vimu can use to preload media. A larger buffer helps prevent network latency and brief connectivity issues from affecting playback. However, setting this to maximum may cause crashes on devices with less than 2GB of RAM.

Resume by filename only: This option may help correctly save your playback position when Vimu is launched from third-party applications.

Hide info bar by default: When enabled, the info bar is hidden immediately after media playback starts. When disabled, the info bar remains on screen for a few seconds.

Hide info bar after: Timeout in seconds for info bar to be hidden.

Exit player with double press of Back button: Enable this option to avoid spontaneous quit from playback.

Display clock: Enable this option to keep clock on screen during playback.

Developer API

For developers who want to integrate Vimu Player into their applications, we provide an API for controlling playback and managing playlists.

→ View API Documentation