IP cameras join Channels. Add ONVIF or RTSP cameras on the Server and watch them live on every device, with preview tiles and clean audio.
The Channels tab is now a hub. One card per channel type opens its own screen, and an empty type explains how to set it up.
The Server can notify you. Send maintenance reports and alerts to macOS Notification Center, Pushover, ntfy, Telegram, Discord, Slack, or a webhook.
Subtitle files beside your media now work. ShowShark finds .srt files, reads the language from the file name, and lists them with the embedded tracks.
Original playback handles more files. Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 Blu-ray audio, tightly cut files, and slow connections now play instead of failing or looping.
Network shares are faster and steadier. Videos on SMB and S3 locations start sooner, resume where you left off, and move far less data, and three Server crashes tied to network shares are fixed.
Recent searches follow your profile. The Server stores them, so every device signed in to the profile sees the same list.
Downloads can be shared and scrubbed. Export a downloaded video as a standard MP4 file, and see preview thumbnails while scrubbing offline.
IP Cameras
Admins can add ONVIF and RTSP cameras in the Server's Channels tab. ShowShark finds ONVIF cameras on the network. Cameras it cannot find accept an ONVIF address or a manual RTSP URL, and a Test Stream button checks the feed before you add it.
Cameras play live on every device. One camera connection feeds every viewer, and each viewer receives a stream tuned to its own connection. Picture quality now drops only with real evidence of network trouble, not on a healthy network.
Camera tiles show a recent preview image. Previews refresh about once a minute while someone is watching. A camera that fails to connect shows an Unavailable badge with a retry option, and the badge clears after the next good stream.
Camera audio no longer clicks. Some cameras report inaccurate audio timing, which produced rapid clicking. ShowShark now builds the timeline from the audio itself.
Camera passwords stay private. They live only in the Mac's keychain and never appear in logs, on the network, or on client devices. Profiles can allow or block cameras, and camera playback is not recorded in watch history.
The Server's Status tab lists active camera streams. Each row shows the camera, its source format, and the stream it is sending.
Cameras use a proper security-camera icon. It appears on the Channels hub card, the Cameras screen, and camera tiles without a preview.
Channels
The Channels tab is a category hub. One card per type shows a live count and opens a dedicated screen: Video Channels, Music Channels, Photo Channels, YouTube, Podcasts, Internet Radio, Cameras, and IPTV. Active Watch Parties still appear above the cards.
Empty channel types explain themselves. Every type is always listed. An empty one describes what it is and points to the Server's Channels tab, so a fresh setup is no longer a blank tab.
Adding podcasts and radio stations moved to their own screens. The add buttons and admin actions now live where those items are listed.
Channel lists are sorted alphabetically everywhere. Every list on every device and in the Server's Channels tab uses the same order.
Photo Channels play videos too. Folders and iCloud albums that mix photos and videos now play the videos at full length with sound, while photos keep the slide interval. Everyone watching sees the same moment, and a speaker button mutes the video for the rest of the session.
Photo channel cards fill their tiles. A slide no longer sits small in one corner of the card.
Apple TV cards look right. Card icons are no longer cropped, cards stand out from the background, and there is more room between them on the Discover and Channels tabs.
Subtitles
Subtitle files beside your videos appear in the subtitle picker. ShowShark finds .srt files next to a movie or episode, or in a subfolder such as Subs, and matches each one to the right video. It reads the language and the SDH or Forced flag from the file name.
Sidecar subtitles work everywhere. They play in Default and Original modes, on local, SMB, and S3 locations, and your selection is remembered per profile. Greek, Turkish, Central European, Cyrillic, and Japanese files that showed garbled characters now decode correctly.
A newly chosen external subtitle shows as selected. The checkmark could fail to appear the first time you picked an external subtitle.
Subtitle timing starts with no adjustment. The timing control defaulted to −2 seconds, which shifted correctly authored subtitles for everyone who never opened it.
Playback
Original playback supports Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 from Blu-ray remuxes. These tracks failed to start before. They now play with all eight channels, and the track list no longer shows a phantom extra track that shifted the commentary track.
Videos on network shares start faster and resume at the right spot. Original playback from an SMB or S3 location used to read to the end of the file for every few seconds of video, so large files timed out. It now reads only what it needs and shares repeated reads, which cuts transfer by more than a third and lowers S3 costs. Default playback from these locations could only start from the beginning; resume and seek now land where you expect.
Files with tightly spaced keyframes no longer stall in Original mode. Some Matroska files failed repeatedly on seek, resume, and stall recovery. Those segments are now grouped so audio is always present.
A slow connection no longer causes a restart loop. When Original playback is proven too slow for the file, ShowShark keeps the session running. It offers a one-tap switch to Default instead of restarting again and again.
Your playback mode choice is remembered. An explicit Default or Original selection is restored for later sessions. Temporary fallbacks do not overwrite it, and Default is used when Original is not available.
Scrub preview thumbnails now appear in Original modes and offline. Direct File and Remux HLS playback show the per-minute preview while scrubbing. Downloaded videos carry their own thumbnails, so the preview works with no Server connection. Older downloads pick them up on the next connection.
Search
Recent searches belong to your profile. The Server stores them, so every device signed in to the profile sees the same list, and the list survives reinstalling the app. Your existing recents join the first profile you use after updating. Recents are now per server and profile, and on a cold launch they appear once the profile loads.
You can clear or remove recent searches. A Clear button sits in the Recent header, and each entry has a Remove action.
The Search tab works on small iPhones. Recent searches now scroll with the genre and facet lists instead of taking a fixed band at the top. The lists below are usable again on an iPhone mini.
YouTube & Offline Downloads
Long YouTube videos play again. YouTube began refusing the access method used for large video files, so 1080p playback of long videos failed at start. The bundled downloader is updated, and it now prefers the original-language audio over auto-dubbed tracks.
The YouTube download button moved to the player screen. It sits in the pre-play toolbar beside Open Player, and in the Apple TV button bar, with the same status check, resume prompt, and quality picker. The episode page no longer has its own download button. Season downloads are unchanged.
A network drop during a download no longer marks it complete. A download from an SMB or S3 location that lost its connection mid-file could be saved as finished with parts missing. It now keeps the partial download and continues from where it stopped.
Downloaded videos can be shared as standard MP4 files. A Share button on the pre-play screen exports the download without re-encoding, in under a second for a full episode. It opens the share sheet for AirDrop or Messages, a save panel on the Mac, or the Files app on iOS. Apple TV has no share sheet, so the button does not appear there.
Server Notifications & Activity
The Server can send notifications. Add macOS Notification Center, Pushover, ntfy, Telegram, Discord, Slack, or a generic webhook in the Providers tab, and send a test message from each. Tokens and webhook URLs are stored in the keychain.
Nightly maintenance sends a report. After each run you get a summary of what changed: new movies, episodes, and songs, refreshed subscriptions, cleanup results, and any stage that failed. A quiet night sends nothing, with an optional daily or weekly "all quiet" message so you know the job runs.
Alerts warn you about problems and tell you when they clear. Alerts cover unreachable or low-space locations, a new device connecting, a Server relaunch after a crash, a missed nightly run, firewall issues, and available updates. They also cover invalid provider credentials, failing podcast or YouTube feeds, unavailable cameras, remote access failures, and lost photo library access. Each problem notifies once, reminds at most daily, and sends one recovery message.
Quiet hours hold routine messages overnight. Warnings and reports wait until the window ends, 22:00 to 07:00 by default. Critical alerts and local notifications are never held.
The new Activity tab shows what the Server has been doing. It lists the last maintenance run with per-stage results, a Run Now button, the next scheduled time, notification preferences, and recent events with delivery status.
Manual tools report their results. Running a scan, cleanup, validation, or refresh by hand produces the same report as the nightly run.
The Server tells you when macOS notifications are blocked. If notification permission was denied, the Providers and Activity tabs show a notice with a link to System Settings.
Library scans skip unreachable locations and report them. A disconnected drive no longer stalls a scan, and the Locations tab marks it Unreachable.
Server Library Tools
The Library tab has a Library Tools section. Intro Detection, Scrub Thumbnail Caching, Library Cleanup, and Library Validation each open on their own screen.
Extended validation checks every video end to end. It runs a full transcode and generates every Original-mode playlist and segment for each file, so playback problems surface before anyone presses play. It saves progress per file, resumes where it left off, pauses while someone is watching, and lets you inspect, retry, and clear failures.
Extended validation no longer uses gigabytes of memory. Large Matroska files previously pushed the Server above 4 GB during validation.
Library tool results appear on the screen you are on. On the Mac, "Cleanup Complete" and validation failures used to appear only after going Back to the Library root.
Library cleanup and validation no longer crash the Server. A cleanup or validation started by the nightly schedule or from a client could crash the Server while the Library tab was open.
Server & App Reliability
The Server no longer asks for the login keychain password. Camera, SMB, S3, connection, and other passwords now live in the data-protection keychain, so updates and re-signed builds keep silent access. Existing passwords move over automatically. If one cannot be read, the Server log names it so you can re-enter it in Settings.
Manual update checks always show a result. Check for Updates now opens the main window and brings the update window to the front. If a check is already in progress, it says so instead of ending in silence.
A network share that stops answering no longer crashes the Server. A request that timed out could be answered late on the same connection and corrupt memory. A timed-out request now closes its connection, and the next request reconnects.
FLV, AVI, and WMV files on network shares no longer crash the Server. Three crashes are fixed: one during scrub-thumbnail generation, one when seeking or resuming those files from an SMB or S3 location, and one when seeking an AVI file with an incomplete index.
Stopping a video that is still starting no longer crashes the Server. Closing the player, disconnecting, or a validation pause while Original playback was opening a file on a network share could bring the Server down.
Abandoned playback attempts no longer leave players running. When an app gives up waiting for a video to start, the Server now cancels that attempt instead of listing a phantom player in the Status tab.
One slow reader no longer interrupts other viewers. A slow folder during a library scan, or one slow stream, could disconnect healthy streams from the same SMB share. Each share also serves more viewers at once.
Sheets on the Mac open at a usable size. The music player's track list, the Search tab's file details, and the season download sheet no longer open as an empty window.