moviebox-tui-walkthrough.webm

Features

• Streaming: Movies, TV series, anime, Asian dramas, and community Stremio addons across multiple native providers.
• Live TV: M3U playlist import with channel categories, EPG support, and search.
• Resolution Picker: Direct stream quality selection (4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p, Auto) before playback.
• Hardware Players: Seamless launch in mpv, VLC, or IINA with custom auth header and cookie forwarding.
• Batch Downloader: Multi-segment concurrent downloader with HTTP range pause and resume for episodes and full seasons.
• Subtitle Picker: Multi-language subtitle tracks extracted and selectable via an interactive picker before playback or download.
• Terminal UI: Vim navigation, mouse interaction, slash command palette (/help, /settings), and 9 built-in themes.
• Cover Art: Native Kitty, Sixel, and iTerm2 poster rendering with automatic text fallback.
• Resume & Library: Home deck with continue-watching timestamps, watch history, and favorites stored strictly on local disk. Zero telemetry.

Prerequisites

• Media Player: mpv, VLC, or IINA (macOS) / any external video player (Android).
• Posters: Terminal with Sixel, Kitty, or iTerm2 support (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2, foot, Windows Terminal v1.22+).
• DASH Downloads: yt-dlp and ffmpeg (required only for MovieBox DASH downloads).

Documentation Directory Map

Getting Started

Features & Modes

Architecture & Internals

Reference & Maintenance

Installation

MovieBox-TUI is available across macOS, Linux, Windows, and Android (Termux).

macOS and Linux

Homebrew (macOS)

If you have Homebrew:

brew tap mesamirh/moviebox-tui https://github.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui
brew install moviebox-tui

Note

If Homebrew prompts for tap verification on initial install, run brew trust mesamirh/moviebox-tui.

Direct Terminal Script

No package manager required. Open Terminal and run:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui/main/install.sh | bash

Windows

Scoop Package Manager (Recommended)

If you have Scoop:

scoop bucket add moviebox https://github.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui
scoop install moviebox-tui

Direct PowerShell Script

No package manager required. Open PowerShell and run:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui/main/install.ps1 | iex

SmartScreen prompt: If Windows displays “Windows protected your PC”, click More info → Run anyway.

Android (Termux)

Open Termux and run:

pkg update && pkg install -y curl tar termux-tools termux-am
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui/main/install.sh | bash
termux-setup-storage

Important

Video playback on Android launches through your installed external media player (such as VLC, Just Player, or MX Player).

Cargo (Crates.io)

Install directly using Cargo:

cargo install moviebox-tui --locked

Compile from Source

Clone the repository and build the release binary:

git clone https://github.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui.git
cd MovieBox-Tui
cargo build --release --locked

The compiled binary will be located at target/release/moviebox-tui.

Verify Release Integrity

All release assets include cryptographically signed SHA-256 checksums and GitHub provenance attestations:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing
gh attestation verify <archive-file> -R mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui

Uninstallation

Automated Installer (macOS, Linux, Windows, Android)

Simply re-run your original install command (curl ... | bash or irm ... | iex). When MovieBox-TUI is already installed, the installer automatically detects it and displays an interactive menu:

MovieBox-TUI is already installed.
What would you like to do?
  1) Reinstall / Update to latest version
  2) Uninstall
  3) Cancel

Enter 2 to completely remove MovieBox-TUI from your system.

Package Managers

brew uninstall moviebox-tui     # Homebrew (macOS)
scoop uninstall moviebox-tui    # Scoop (Windows)
cargo uninstall moviebox-tui    # Cargo

Controls & Shortcuts

Press ? anywhere inside the application to open the interactive help dialog.

Global Shortcuts

Text Editing (Search & Dialog Prompts)

• Left / Right: Move cursor one character.
• Home / End: Jump to start / end of input.
• Backspace / Delete: Delete character before / at cursor.
• Ctrl+W: Delete preceding word.
• Ctrl+U: Clear entire input line.
• Tab: Auto-complete suggestion or command.
• Enter: Submit input.
• Esc: Cancel input prompt.

Dialog & Modal Controls

All popups (Themes, Providers, Players, Resolution, Subtitles, TV Manager, Addon Manager) share standard navigation:

• ↑ / ↓ / k / j: Navigate choices.
• Home / End: Jump to first / last item.
• Enter: Confirm selection.
• Esc / q: Dismiss popup without applying changes.
• TV & Addon Managers:
  • r: Reload playlist sources or addon catalogs.
  • d / Delete: Remove selected source.

Details Screen Controls

Synopsis & Overview Modal

• ↑ / ↓ / k / j: Scroll synopsis text line-by-line.
• PageUp / PageDown: Scroll synopsis text 5 lines.
• Esc / q / i / Enter: Dismiss synopsis dialog.

Settings Hub (/settings)

• Tab / Shift+Tab: Switch category tabs (General, Content Modes, Appearance, Maintenance).
• ↑ / ↓ / k / j: Navigate setting rows.
• ← / → / h / l: Adjust setting values or toggle options.
• Enter / Space: Activate setting row (edit path, pick theme, run maintenance action).
• d (on Download Folder): Reset custom download path back to ~/Downloads/MovieBox-TUI.
• Esc / q: Close settings and persist changes.

Update Notification Modal

• u: Update immediately (Direct installation). Downloads, verifies, stages, and restarts the process automatically.
• b: Copy Homebrew update command to clipboard.
• s: Copy Scoop update command to clipboard.
• o: Open GitHub release notes in default browser.
• Esc / q: Dismiss update prompt.

Slash Commands

Type / in the search bar on the Home screen to trigger slash commands:

Mouse Controls

• Left Click: Select and activate search cards, tabs, buttons, or playlist entries.
• Scroll Wheel: Scroll search results, seasons, episodes, and modal dialogs.
• Click Outside: Click anywhere outside an active dialog to dismiss it.

Configuration

MovieBox-TUI stores its settings in config.json inside your platform configuration directory.

Interactive Settings Hub (/settings)

Enter /settings in the search bar or click [ ⚙ Settings ] on the Home screen to configure options interactively:

• General: Toggle automatic update checks, select default media player (mpv, VLC, IINA, Android), and customize download directory.
• Content Modes: Toggle Streaming Mode, enable or disable specific streaming providers (MovieBox, 4KHDHub, Dramachi, CircleFTP, DhakaFlix), and toggle Live TV Mode.
• Appearance: Select among 9 color themes (Mocha, Latte, Macchiato, Frappe, Nord, TokyoNight, Dracula, Gruvbox, RosePine) with live preview.
• Maintenance: Check for updates, re-test local BDIX network connectivity, clear disk cache, clear watch history, and open the GitHub repository.

Configuration File Paths

• Linux / macOS / Termux: ~/.config/moviebox-tui/config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\MovieBox-Tui\config.json

Configuration Options (config.json)

Environment Variables

Streaming Providers

MovieBox-TUI searches and streams media across multiple independent providers.

Available Providers

Switching Providers

• Cycle Provider: Press Ctrl+P on the home screen to switch to the next provider.
• Provider Menu: Click the provider badge in the search bar (or press Enter on it) to open the provider selection menu.
• Enable / Disable Providers: Open /settings → Content Modes → Streaming Sources to toggle providers on or off.

BDIX Network Detection

If you are connected through a Bangladeshi ISP supporting BDIX:

• MovieBox-TUI automatically tests local BDIX mirrors on startup and enables them if reachable.
• You can manually re-test your connection anytime via /settings → Maintenance → Re-check BDIX Network.

Provider Architecture (For Developers)

All providers implement a shared Rust trait in src/providers/:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
pub trait Provider: Send + Sync {
    fn id(&self) -> ProviderKind;
    fn capabilities(&self) -> ProviderCapabilities;
    async fn search(&self, query: &str, page: usize) -> Result<Vec<CatalogItem>, ProviderError>;
    async fn details(&self, id: &str) -> Result<MediaDetails, ProviderError>;
}
}

New providers implement Provider (and optionally ReleaseProvider for multi-mirror streams), then register in src/service.rs. Responses are automatically cached as MessagePack envelopes.

MovieBox CDN Manifest & Failover Resolution

MovieBox CDN stream entries parse signed CloudFront-Policy and Edge-Cache-Cookie tokens to find stream roots. The manifest resolver accepts only /dash/ resources. Unhosted legacy /hls/ cookie targets are dropped to prevent 404 failures during playback or downloads.

When upstream APIs return placeholder deprecation notices, MovieBox-TUI automatically queries the /resource-position/v2 failover endpoint with scoped episode resolution to recover genuine signed MP4 streams, omitting the DASH Referer to prevent CDN HTTP 429 throttling.

Players

MovieBox-TUI delegates playback to external media players (mpv, IINA, VLC, or Android intent players).

Detection Order

Players are detected in priority order and cached across runs:

• macOS: IINA → MPV → VLC
  • Searches /Applications, ~/Applications, Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix, and native CLI tools.
• Linux: MPV → VLC
  • Searches $PATH, ~/.local/bin, Flatpak exports (io.mpv.Mpv, org.videolan.VLC), and Snap.
• Windows: MPV → VLC
  • Searches %LOCALAPPDATA%, Program Files, WinGet packages, Scoop shims, Chocolatey, and Windows Registry App Paths.
• Android / Termux: Android Intent (headless CLI) or MPV → VLC → Android Intent (graphical X11/Wayland desktop)
  • In headless terminal environments without an active display server, dispatches directly to external Android media apps via termux-open or am start.
  • In graphical environments with an active display server ($DISPLAY or $WAYLAND_DISPLAY, such as Xfce in udroid/PRoot or Termux:X11), native desktop players (MPV/VLC) take priority over Android intents. Unconfigured sessions resolve players dynamically, and desktop displays bypass legacy saved Android defaults unless overridden by MOVIEBOX_PLAYER.

You can set a default player via /settings (Media Player), or override it with the MOVIEBOX_PLAYER environment variable.

Player Invocations

mpv

mpv --autofit=WxH --geometry=50%:50% --hwdec=auto-safe --stream-buffer-size=4M --idle=no --keep-open=no [OPTIONS] <url>

• Tracking: Injects moviebox_tracker.lua to record playback progress, total duration, and chosen stream filename, then restores that stream mirror when re-opening multi-stream titles.
• Hardware Decoding & Direct Streams: Enables --hwdec=auto-safe for hardware-accelerated 4K 10-bit HEVC HDR decoding and passes --ytdl=no on non-DASH direct streams (.mkv, .mp4, .m3u8) for direct ffmpeg demuxer startup.
• Headers: Passes custom stream headers (User-Agent, Referer) via --http-header-fields.
• DASH Manifests & Loopback Acceleration: Routes DASH .mpd streams through the local StreamRelay proxy (127.0.0.1:<port>), which caches rewritten manifests in RAM, warm-prefetches initialization and opening fragments on sidecar startup, fetches .m4s segments via parallel 95 KB HTTP Range sub-requests, and prefetches the next 3 video segments (N+1..N+3) and matching audio segments (chunk-stream3-N..N+1).
• Subtitles: Pre-downloads remote subtitles to temporary storage in parallel with sidecar startup and passes --sub-file=<path>, with fallback to the remote URL if local download fails.

VLC

vlc --width=W --height=H --no-one-instance --network-caching=3000 --file-caching=3000 --http-reconnect --adaptive-logic=predictive [OPTIONS] <url>

• Headers: Mapped to --http-user-agent and --http-referrer.
• DASH & CloudFront Streams: Cookie-authenticated and DASH .mpd streams route through the local StreamRelay proxy sidecar (127.0.0.1:<port>) with HTTP/1.1 persistent connections (Keep-Alive), parallel 95 KB Range-chunked .m4s segment fetching, lookahead segment prefetching (N+1..N+3), and resolution representation capping.
• Subtitles: Remote subtitles are pre-downloaded to temporary storage and passed via --sub-file=<path> using native Windows backslash separators (C:\...) on Windows and --no-one-instance on Windows/Linux so existing VLC instances do not strip CLI flags over IPC.

IINA (macOS)

iina-cli --keep-running --no-stdin --mpv-autofit=WxH [OPTIONS] <url>

• Forwards --mpv-* arguments (including --mpv-sub-files=<path>) to internal mpv core.
• Falls back to open -a IINA <url> if CLI tools are unlinked.

Android / Termux

termux-open --chooser --content-type video/* <url>

• Opens the system app chooser, delegating playback to installed Android players (VLC, MX Player, Just Player, mpv-android).
• Subtitles are saved to shared storage (~/storage/downloads/moviebox_subs) and passed via intent extras, or served over the local StreamRelay loopback proxy (http://127.0.0.1:<port>/sub/...) when shared storage is unavailable.

Watch History & Resume

• Position Resumption: In-progress items launch with --start=<seconds> (mpv/IINA) or --start-time=<seconds> (VLC).
• Completion Detection: Reaching 90% or stream EOF marks media as completed.
• State Reconciliation: mpv and IINA sync playback progress via background IPC state files so pauses or seeks do not cause wall-clock drift.

Spawning & Process Safety

• Players and the StreamRelay sidecar launch in detached OS sessions (libc::setsid() with SIGHUP ignored on Unix/macOS/Linux/Android, and DETACHED_PROCESS | CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP on Windows) so closing the terminal or quitting moviebox-tui does not stop active video playback.
• Player stderr writes to a temporary log file so moviebox-tui can exit without triggering SIGPIPE crashes while still capturing crash diagnostics when the TUI stays open.
• Clean exits (VLC exit code 1 with empty stderr, or Unix SIGTERM) count as normal exits and update watch history without false crash popups.

Downloader

MovieBox-TUI includes a multi-segment HTTP chunked downloader supporting pause, resume, and authentication header forwarding.

Overview

• Storage Location: Defaults to ~/Downloads/MovieBox-TUI/. Configurable via /settings (General → Download Folder).
• Multi-Segment Engine: Files are partitioned into concurrent byte ranges using HTTP RFC 7233 Range: bytes=X-Y requests.
• Single-Stream Fallback: If an upstream server or CDN does not support range requests (returns HTTP 200 OK instead of 206 Partial Content) or terminates concurrent connections with HTTP 403 or 429, the engine falls back to single-stream sequential downloading.

File Lifecycle & State Files

During download, files are saved with temporary extensions:

destination.mp4.part       # Pre-allocated in-place byte buffer across all workers
destination.mp4.part.json  # Download state (ETag, Last-Modified, total size, per-segment byte offsets)
destination.mp4            # Final verified output (atomic rename on completion)

Upon completion, temporary sidecars are verified and renamed atomically to the target filename.

Download Controls

• Press d on any stream in the Details screen to start downloading immediately.
• Press x or X during an active download to cancel or pause the transfer. Partial .part data is preserved on disk for resumption.
• Downloads run cooperatively in the background so you can browse or search while transfers finish.

Header Forwarding

Authenticated streams (such as MovieBox DASH manifests or 4KHDHub mirrors) forward required headers (User-Agent, Referer, signed CloudFront cookies) to download workers so CDN transfers complete without 403 Forbidden errors.

DASH Streams (yt-dlp)

MovieBox DASH streams require yt-dlp and ffmpeg to download and mux adaptive video and audio representations:

• Windows: winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp Gyan.FFmpeg
• macOS: brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg
• Android (Termux): pkg install yt-dlp ffmpeg
• Linux: Install yt-dlp and ffmpeg via system package manager.

The downloader checks both binaries before starting the transfer and reports which binary is missing if either is absent. Fragments are pulled with --concurrent-fragments 32 and --http-chunk-size 95K (keeping individual range sub-requests under Tengine’s limit_rate_after 96k throttle boundary) alongside retry bounds (--fragment-retries 10, --retries 5, --socket-timeout 30). Subprocess errors during transfer report the underlying yt-dlp diagnostic in the failure notification.

All other providers (4KHDHub, Dramachi, BDIX, DhakaFlix, CircleFTP, Stremio Addons, TV mode) download directly through the internal multi-segment HTTP engine (4 to 16 concurrent workers with 1 MiB write buffers writing in-place to the pre-allocated .part file).

Stremio Addons

MovieBox-TUI supports Stremio HTTP addons. You can install standard addon manifest URLs to browse catalogs and stream media.

Quick Start

• Switch to Addons: Press Ctrl+P on the home screen until [Addons] is selected.
• Open Addon Manager: Type /config or click [Addons] in the search bar.
• Browse Catalogs: Type /browse to view Top Movies, Top Series, and curated lists.
• Search: Type in the search bar to search titles across installed addons.

Addon Manager

The Addon Manager lets you add, enable, or remove addon manifests:

• Toggle Addon: Press Enter or Space on an addon to enable (✓) or disable it.
• Add Addon: Select + Add manifest URL, paste the addon manifest URL, and press Enter.
• Remove Addon: Press d or Delete to remove an addon.
• Core Addon (Cinemeta): Pre-installed for movie and series metadata. It cannot be deleted.

Supported Streams

• Streams are parsed and labeled with quality tags (4K, 1080p, 720p), codec, and file size.
• Video stream headers (User-Agent, Referer) are automatically forwarded to external players (mpv, VLC, IINA) and download workers.
• Watch progress and episode resumption are saved automatically to /history.

Storage

Installed addons are saved to addons_config.json in your configuration directory:

• Linux / macOS / Termux: ~/.config/moviebox-tui/addons_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\MovieBox-Tui\addons_config.json

TV Mode

TV mode streams live television channels from M3U playlists. Playlists can be loaded from remote URLs or local files.

Entering TV Mode

• Press Ctrl+T to switch to TV mode (and Ctrl+S to switch back to Streaming mode).
• If no playlists are loaded on entry, the playlist manager opens automatically.
• Type in the search bar to filter channels by name or group; press Enter to play.

Managing Playlists

1. Enter /config while in TV mode to open the playlist manager.
2. Select + Add playlist, enter the URL or local file path, and press Enter.
   • URL: https://example.com/playlist.m3u
   • File: ~/playlists/channels.m3u (supports ~/ tilde expansion and Windows paths)
3. Press r inside the manager to reload all playlist sources.
4. Highlight an entry and press d (or Delete) to remove it.
5. Press Esc to close the manager.

Playlists are saved to tv_config.json in your configuration directory.

Channel Parsing & Safeguards

• Size Limits: Files and downloads larger than 15 MB are rejected to prevent excessive memory consumption.
• Deduplication: Channels sharing identical stream URLs across multiple playlists are deduplicated.
• Attributes: Parses #EXTINF: tags for tvg-id, tvg-logo, group-title, and channel name.

Playback & Commands

• Playback: Press Enter on a channel to launch your default media player. Live streams without fixed durations are exempted from watch history.
• Commands:
  • /list: View all loaded TV channels.
  • r: Reload all active playlists.
  • /config: Open the playlist manager.

Architecture

MovieBox-Tui is a terminal client (ratatui + crossterm + tokio) for streaming movies, series and TV channels from multiple providers. This document describes the shape of the code and how data flows through it.

System Architecture & Data Flow

               ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
               │              Terminal User Input & Events              │
               │   Crossterm KeyPress / MouseClick / WindowResize / Tick│
               └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘
                                           │
                                           ▼
               ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
               │           EventHandler Channel (mpsc::channel)         │
               │          Dispatches serialized Action messages         │
               └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘
                                           │
                                           ▼
               ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
               │      App Event Loop & State Machine (Single Thread)    │
               │    src/tui/app/run.rs ─── Mutates AppState atomically  │
               └──────────────┬───────────────────────────┬─────────────┘
                              │                           │
              UI Render Pass  │          Async IO Tasks   │  Background Workers
                              ▼                           ▼
        ┌───────────────────────────┐   ┌───────────────────────────────────┐
        │   Ratatui Terminal Frame  │   │      Tokio Multi-Thread Runtime   │
        │ Screens / Widgets / Toast │   │  tokio::spawn / spawn_blocking    │
        └───────────────────────────┘   └─┬───────────────┬───────────────┬─┘
                                          │               │               │
                                          ▼               ▼               ▼
                                 ┌────────────────┐┌─────────────┐┌─────────────────┐
                                 │ Scrapers & Net ││ Disk Cache  ││ Media Players & │
                                 │ Providers & TV ││ MessagePack ││ Loopback Proxy  │
                                 └────────────────┘└─────────────┘└─────────────────┘

Subsystem Breakdown & Module Tree

src/
├── main.rs                        # Application entrypoint & CLI dispatcher
├── lib.rs                         # Crate root and module declarations
│
├── Core Engine & Networking
│   ├── models.rs                  # Domain entities (CatalogItem, MediaDetails, Release)
│   ├── service.rs                 # Central multi-provider facade & aggregation engine
│   ├── net.rs                     # Hickory DNS fallback resolver & HTTP client builders
│   ├── logging.rs                 # Rotating file logger with path/URL privacy sanitization
│   └── proxy.rs                   # Detached loopback HTTP proxy & DASH manifest rewriter
│
├── Storage & Persistence
│   ├── cache.rs                   # Binary MessagePack cache (MBC1 header) with atomic writes
│   ├── config.rs                  # User configuration schema & atomic persistence (config.json)
│   ├── favorites.rs               # Bookmark storage & deduplication (favorites.json)
│   ├── history.rs                 # Watch progress, latched resume, & state reconciliation
│   └── download.rs                # Chunked multi-segment downloader with HTTP range resume
│
├── Media Providers (`src/providers/`)
│   ├── models.rs                  # Provider traits (Provider, ReleaseProvider) & capabilities
│   ├── moviebox/                  # CloudFront signed requests, token generation, & scraper
│   ├── fourkhdhub/                # 4K releases, HTML parser, & HubCloud mirror resolver
│   ├── dramachi/                  # Asian dramas and series scraper
│   ├── bdix/                      # BDIX optical intranet scrapers (CircleFTP, DhakaFlix)
│   │   └── common.rs              # Centralized codec, resolution, & language heuristics
│   ├── addons/                    # Community Stremio HTTP addon manifest & stream aggregator
│   └── tv/                        # IPTV M3U playlist parser & stream normalizer
│
├── Player & Process Supervisor
│   ├── player.rs                  # Player detection (mpv, IINA, VLC, Android) & command builder
│   └── player/tracker.rs          # Embedded Lua tracker script (moviebox_tracker.lua)
│
├── Self-Updater (`src/updater/`)
│   ├── check.rs                   # GitHub release API version checker
│   ├── download.rs                # Streaming release archive downloader
│   ├── verify.rs                  # Cryptographic SHA-256 checksum validator
│   ├── extract.rs                 # Tar.gz and Zip extractor with path traversal guard
│   └── apply.rs                   # Atomic binary replacement, path resolution, & restart helper
│
└── Presentation & TUI (`src/tui/`)
    ├── action.rs                  # Unified Action enum message bus
    ├── event.rs                   # Crossterm terminal input event listener & tick driver
    ├── state.rs                   # Centralized AppState & LRU memory caches
    ├── commands.rs                # Slash command registry (/settings, /browse, /exit)
    ├── terminal.rs                # Terminal capability & graphics protocol detection
    ├── theme.rs                   # Theme registry (Catppuccin, TokyoNight, Nord, etc.)
    ├── text.rs                    # Grapheme-safe input buffer & Unicode measurement
    ├── overlay.rs                 # Toasts, modals, confirmation dialogues, & picker frames
    ├── screens/                   # Declarative renderers (home.rs, details.rs, help.rs)
    ├── widgets/                   # Modular widgets (badge, input, modal, poster, settings)
    └── app/                       # State machine action handlers & event loop
        ├── run.rs                 # Main event loop (App::run) & frame drawing
        ├── keyboard.rs            # Keyboard shortcuts & vim navigation router
        ├── mouse.rs               # Mouse click hit-testing & drag coordinates
        ├── navigation.rs          # Grid steps, pagination, & screen transitions
        ├── requests.rs            # Async metadata & stream request dispatchers
        ├── playback.rs            # Player process launching & crash supervision
        ├── download.rs            # Download queue manager & progress bar updates
        ├── search.rs              # Search input handler & poster prefetching
        ├── favorites.rs           # Favorite bookmarks handler
        ├── tv.rs                  # IPTV channel manager & playlist actions
        ├── addons.rs              # Stremio addon manager actions
        └── system.rs              # Terminal resize, theme switching, & self-update UI

The event loop

App::run (in app/run.rs) owns the only loop:

1. If clear_terminal_before_draw is set, the terminal buffer is cleared.
2. If state.dirty, the screen is drawn (App::draw).
3. tokio::select! waits for either:
   • an Action from the EventHandler (keyboard/mouse/focus/resize/tick), or
   • an Action pushed by a background task (network results, downloads, posters).

EventHandler (event.rs) spawns one task that reads crossterm events and a Tick interval, forwarding them into the action channel (capacity 128).

Async model

• The tokio runtime is multi-threaded (rt-multi-thread).
• State is single-threaded: all mutations to AppState happen inside handle_action, which is driven by the single event-loop task. Actions are serialized through the channel, so there are no data races on UI state.
• Network uses async reqwest clients (one per provider) plus per-provider signing.
• Blocking work (disk cache reads/writes, image decoding, M3U parsing, watch-history save, log cleanup) runs on tokio::task::spawn_blocking so the event loop is never blocked.
• Background tasks send Action messages back (e.g. SearchSuccess, EpisodeStreamsReady, DownloadCompleted), which handle_action consumes.

Data flow: a typical search

1. User types a query; the Key handler updates search_query and sends Action::Search.
2. handle_action resolves the active provider, dispatches to the provider client (async), and spawns the request in a background task.
3. On success the task sends Action::SearchSuccess; handle_action stores search_results, marks dirty, and writes the provider search cache.
4. Posters for result rows are fetched by background tasks and delivered via SearchPosterLoaded/PosterSuccess; image protocols are cached per terminal.
5. App::draw renders the results; dirty is cleared.

Playback flow

1. User selects a result → Action::PlayStream (moviebox) or 4KHDHub/BDIX resolve.
2. The provider resolves a PlaybackSource (url + optional headers/subtitle).
3. launch_player builds the player command (player.rs), optionally downloads the subtitle to a temp file, and spawns the player in a detached OS session (setsid / DETACHED_PROCESS) with null stdin/stdout and file-backed stderr logging; a blocking task waits and reports crashes while the TUI remains open.

Configuration and persistence

• config.json: settings (mode persistence, mode toggles, theme, provider, auto-update, default_player, download directory, BDIX) in the config dir.
• addons_config.json: installed HTTP community addons in the config dir.
• tv_config.json: user M3U playlist sources (URLs or file paths) in the config dir.
• history.json: watch history in the system data dir.
• favorites.json: starred titles in the system data dir, independent of history.json.
• playback/: temporary playback states for session crash/kill reconciliation in the system data dir.
• scripts/: bundled player scripts (moviebox_tracker.lua) in the system data dir.
• Cache lives under the system cache dir, keyed per provider.
• Logs live under the system data dir with rotation.

See config.md and logging.md for exact locations and formats.

Modules

The crate (moviebox_tui) is split into top-level modules and, inside tui, an app directory that holds the application object. Below is the full tree with each module’s responsibility.

src/
  main.rs            Entry point. Logging init, panic hook, raw mode, alternate
                     screen, TerminalGuard, App::new + App::run.
  lib.rs             Crate root: declares pub mod cache/config/download/favorites/
                     history/logging/models/net/player/providers/proxy/service/tui/updater.

  cache.rs           Disk cache: provider-namespaced directories, TTL expiry,
                     atomic temp-file writes, payload validation, background purge.

  config.rs          Config struct: load/save config.json (mode persistence,
                     mode toggles, provider, theme, auto-update, default player,
                     download directory, bdix flag).

  download.rs        Download engine (pure, async): resume via .part files,
                     HTTP ranges, optional multi-segment download, retries, cancel
                     via an AtomicBool, Windows-safe file stems.

  favorites.rs       Starred titles: read/write favorites.json, whole-title identity
                     dedupe via SubjectIdentity, no cap.

  history.rs         Watch history: read/write history.json, dedupe exact
                     provider/subject/episode entries, cap 100.

  logging.rs         File logging: flexi_logger, rotation (5MB, keep 3),
                     MOVIEBOX_LOG level, URL/path sanitization for sharing.

  models.rs          Pure domain data models: SearchResult, BrowseMetric,
                     BrowsePreset, BrowseMetrics, SubjectStreamPool, Notification,
                     SubjectIdentity (cross-provider identity rules shared by
                     history and favorites).

  net.rs             Shared HTTP plumbing: FallbackResolver (hickory DNS reading the
                     OS configuration, falling back to Cloudflare/Google/Quad9 when
                     absent) wired into every reqwest client via
                     net::http_client_builder().

  player.rs          Player detection (OnceLock) and command construction for
                     mpv / VLC / IINA / Android intent, subtitle args, headers,
                     terminal-sized window.
  player/
    tracker.rs       Injected Lua tracker script (`moviebox_tracker.lua`) and
                     periodic 5-second playback state auto-saving.

  proxy.rs           Detached loopback HTTP proxy: handles signed CloudFront cookie
                     streams for VLC and Android Intent playback, rewrites DASH manifests,
                     and serves streams and subtitles over localhost.

  providers/
    mod.rs           Module declarations.
    models.rs        Shared typed models (ProviderKind, CatalogItem, MediaDetails,
                     Release, PlaybackSource, RequestContext, SourceMirror) and
                     canonical JSON domain adapters.
    moviebox/        Primary provider.
      client.rs      Async reqwest client with signed requests (anti-bot).
      crypto.rs      Request signing: HMAC-MD5 signature, client token,
                     spoofed device identity (by design of the scraper).
      title.rs       clean_moviebox_title: strip quality/site suffix noise.
    fourkhdhub/      Secondary provider.
      client.rs      Search/details/stream resolution + preflight validation.
      hubcloud.rs    Mirror resolver: fetch drive pages, extract playable links.
      parser.rs      HTML parsing into typed CatalogItem/MediaDetails/Release.
    dramachi/        Asian dramas and series provider (client + parser).
    bdix/
      common.rs      Shared BDIX resolution, audio language, and codec detection heuristics.
      circleftp/     BDIX CircleFTP provider (client + parser).
      dhakaflix/     BDIX DhakaFlix provider (client + parser).
    addons/          Community HTTP addons provider (client, aggregator, adapter, models).
    tv/              Live TV / IPTV provider (models + M3U parser).

  service.rs         MovieBoxService: unified multi-provider headless client &
                     engine (suggest, search, details, homepage, resolutions,
                     captions, subtitle download, path resolution).

  updater/           GitHub release update check.
    mod.rs           Module declarations, re-exports, perform_self_update orchestration.
    check.rs         GitHub release API query (with redirect fallback) and version compare.
    download.rs      Release asset download (https-only) with retry.
    verify.rs        SHA-256 hashing and sha256sums parsing for artifact verification.
    extract.rs       tar.gz / archive extraction for the staged binary.
    apply.rs         Swap in new binary, resolve executable path, detect environment, restart.
    artifact.rs      Release/ReleaseAsset types, target-platform matching.

  tui/
    action.rs        The Action enum: every UI event/message (input, network
                     results, downloads, playback, tv, system).
    commands.rs      Slash command registry (SlashCommand enum, argument parsing,
                     availability filters, dynamic suggestions, descriptions).
    state.rs         AppState: all UI state, LRU image/preview caches, and the
                     PlayerKind enum + label()/parse(), tv manager row model.
    event.rs         EventHandler: crossterm event stream + tick interval,
                     forwards to the action channel.
    overlay.rs       Popups: notifications, pickers, confirmation, modal centering.
    screens/
      home.rs        Home/startup + search list rendering (streaming and TV).
      details.rs     Details screen rendering.
      help.rs        Keybinding help (mode-aware).
    terminal.rs      Terminal capability probes (basic UI, image querying).
    theme.rs         Color themes + terminal color detection.
    text.rs          Grapheme-safe text input buffer (TextInputBuffer) and width/truncation helpers.
    widgets/         Centralized UI widgets subsystem.
      badge.rs       Resolution pill badges and audio/video media tag extraction.
      input.rs       Single-line text input field rendering with grapheme cursor and truncation.
      modal.rs       Modal dialog frame builder (ModalFrame) and centered footer key action bars.
      scrollbar.rs   Viewport-accurate vertical scrollbars.
      poster.rs      Standardized poster placeholder container with in-flight loading animation.
      settings.rs    Interactive 4-tab Settings Hub modal widget.

  tui/app/           The application object (App) and all behavior.
    mod.rs           App struct, App::new, and small helpers.
    run.rs           App::run (event loop), App::draw (rendering), and
                     handle_action dispatcher (thin routing table over action groups).
    search.rs        Search-mode command routing, search state setup, provider
                     search dispatch, poster prefetch helpers.
    requests.rs      handle_requests: suggest/history/homepage/details/preview/
                     episode-streams/poster actions.
    playback.rs      handle_playback: play/subtitle/picker/launch/crash actions
                     + launch_player.
    download.rs      handle_download: download orchestration + start_resilient_download.
    favorites.rs     handle_favorites: toggle/open favorite actions, /favorites virtual
                     list builder.
    navigation.rs    handle_navigation + provider/nav helpers.
    keyboard.rs      handle_key: raw key-event handling.
    mouse.rs         handle_mouse: mouse click routing and hitboxes across screens,
                     popups, tabs, buttons, and dialogs.
    system.rs        handle_system: tick/quit/focus/resize/help/refresh/cache/
                     theme/status/updates.
    tv.rs            handle_tv: playlist manager + TV actions.
    addons.rs        handle_addons: addon manager + HTTP addon actions.

See architecture.md for the event loop, async model and data flow, and the per-topic docs for details.

Binary Cache & Storage

MovieBox-TUI uses a disk-backed binary MessagePack caching engine to minimize network requests while maintaining fast startup times.

Cache Directory

• Linux / macOS / Termux: ~/.cache/moviebox-tui/
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\MovieBox-Tui\cache\

Override with the MOVIEBOX_CACHE_DIR environment variable.

Binary Cache Architecture

Cache files use a structured MessagePack envelope preceded by a 4-byte magic signature (MBC1):

[ 0x4D 0x42 0x43 0x31 ] [ MessagePack Encoded Envelope ]

The envelope stores the expiration timestamp (expires_at: u64) alongside the serialized payload. On read, if the current time exceeds expires_at or the file age exceeds the TTL, the cache is invalidated and refetched.

Cache TTLs

Durability & Safety

• Atomic File Writes: All cache entries write to a temporary sidecar file (.tmp-<pid>-<stamp>) and rename atomically to the destination so interrupted writes never corrupt cache files.
• Automatic Purging: Stale cache entries older than 7 days are automatically removed by a background worker at startup.
• Manual Purge: Enter /settings → Maintenance → Clear Disk Cache to immediately wipe all cached files, images, and playlist snapshots.

Logging

The app writes a file log so issues invisible in the TUI (full error text, URLs, statuses, content-types) are recorded and can be shared.

Location

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/moviebox-tui/logs/
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\moviebox-tui\logs\
• Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/moviebox-tui/logs/ (else ~/.local/share/moviebox-tui/logs/)

The active file is moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log; rotated files are moviebox-tui_r00000.log, ….

Behavior

• Level is controlled by MOVIEBOX_LOG (off|error|warn|info|debug|trace). Default is info across all builds (warn and error lines are always included).
• Rotation: rotates at 5MB and keeps 3 files.
• Terminal output: normal log lines write only to the log file and never touch stdout or stderr, which keeps the screen clean before entering alternate screen mode. Setup errors (if any) are reported on stderr.
• Session header: version, OS, and the log path are written on startup.
• Panics: the panic hook captures stack backtraces, logs the payload and backtrace to the file, flushes log buffers, and then restores the terminal.
• --version and --help never create a log file.

What is logged

• error: hard failures (all-hosts exhausted, resolve failures, player spawn/crash, download failures, panics) and every Error: status the UI shows.
• warn: recoverable issues (mirror rejected, subtitle unavailable, cache write failed, GitHub rate limit).
• info: session start, playable mirror found, playback launch.
• debug: full request context (enable with MOVIEBOX_LOG=debug).

Privacy / sharing

Logs are sanitized so they can be pasted into a GitHub issue:

• URLs are reduced to scheme://host (file tokens, filenames, and query params are removed).
• Absolute paths are rewritten to ~ so your username does not appear.
• Headers, Authorization, search queries, and watch history are never logged.

Reproduce the problem, then attach the current log file. See debugging.md.

Cross-Platform Support

MovieBox-TUI runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, and Android (Termux).

Supported Operating Systems

macOS

• Media Players: IINA (CLI + app bundle), mpv, and VLC.
• Binaries: Shipped as universal binaries supporting both Apple Silicon (arm64) and Intel (x86_64).

Linux

• Media Players: Native mpv, VLC, or Flatpaks (flatpak run --file-forwarding --filesystem=xdg-cache/moviebox-tui:ro --filesystem=xdg-data/moviebox-tui --filesystem=/tmp:ro <app-id>).
• Binaries: Static Musl executables compatible with glibc and musl systems across x86_64 and aarch64.

Windows

• Media Players: Discovers mpv.exe and vlc.exe via WinGet, Scoop, Program Files, and the Windows Registry.
• Process Safety: Processes launch with CREATE_NO_WINDOW and independent process groups so terminal signals do not terminate playback or downloads.
• Path Compatibility: Supports Windows drive letters (C:\...), backslashes (\), forward slashes (/), and UNC paths.

Android (Termux)

• Media Players: Uses Android intent dispatchers (termux-open / am start) to stream directly to external video players (VLC for Android, Just Player, MX Player, MPV Android) in headless CLI environments.
• Graphical Desktops (Termux:X11, uDroid, PRoot): When an active $DISPLAY or $WAYLAND_DISPLAY is present, native desktop players (mpv, VLC) take priority over Android intent dispatchers.
• Prerequisites: Run pkg install -y termux-tools in Termux.
• Subtitles: Subtitles are saved to shared storage (~/storage/downloads/moviebox_subs) or served over the local StreamRelay loopback HTTP proxy when Termux shared storage is not mounted.
• DNS: Built-in DNS resolver queries public resolvers (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9) without requiring root or Android JNI.

Terminal Compatibility

MovieBox-TUI automatically adapts to your terminal emulator:

• Images & Posters: Automatically detects Kitty graphics, Sixel, and iTerm2 protocols (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2, foot, Alacritty, and Windows Terminal v1.22+). In Windows Terminal v1.22+, enable Sixel under Settings → Profiles → Defaults → Advanced → Enable Sixel graphics (or "experimental.sixelSupport": true in settings.json). Terminals without image support display clean text containers (No Art). Disable with MOVIEBOX_NO_IMAGE=1 or force with MOVIEBOX_IMAGE_PROTOCOL=sixel.
• Colors & Themes: Auto-detects 24-bit TrueColor, 256-color palettes, and high-contrast monochrome mode (NO_COLOR=1).
• Keyboard Navigation: Uses the Kitty keyboard protocol on supported emulators. Mobile Termux keyboards use standard ANSI input to avoid character garbage.
• Window Titles: Automatically updates terminal window titles based on current title and screen mode.

Testing & QA Architecture

This document describes the testing architecture, quality assurance procedures, and validation guidelines for MovieBox-TUI.

1. Test Architecture

The test suite runs in an isolated process sandbox (TEST_SANDBOX_DIR in src/config.rs) that redirects config_dir(), data_dir(), and cache_dir() to temporary directories and guards external browser launches (open_external_url in src/net.rs) so tests never read, mutate, or delete host user files (~/.config, ~/.local/share, ~/.cache). The MovieBox-TUI test architecture follows a strict separation of concerns:

MovieBox-TUI/
├── src/
│   └── **/*.rs              # Pure algorithms & inline unit tests (#[cfg(test)])
└── tests/
    ├── common/
    │   └── mod.rs           # Shared test utilities & temporary directory helpers
    ├── fixtures/
    │   └── addons/
    │       └── manifest.json
    ├── settings_hub.rs        # Interactive Settings Hub modal tab navigation, choices, & option rows
    ├── tui_acceptance.rs      # Headless TUI rendering, theme rendering, and resize matrix
    ├── update_lifecycle.rs    # Update single-flight checks, modal hitboxes, & platform assets
    ├── content_pipeline.rs    # Content/metadata pipeline, stale request isolation, & cache keys
    ├── addons_manifest.rs     # Addon manifest deserialization & catalog checks
    ├── error_handling.rs      # Failure state cleanup, error toasts, and recovery
    ├── history_audit.rs       # Cross-mode watch progress, series advancement, & boundary audit
    ├── favorites_lifecycle.rs # Favorites persistence, identity, and navigation lifecycle
    ├── performance_audit.rs   # Empirical benchmark measurements (truncation, hashing, M3U, draw latency)
    └── live_stream_verification.rs # Live MovieBox CDN signed stream & resolution verification (opt-in)

A. Inline Unit Tests (src/**/*.rs)

Inline unit tests live inside #[cfg(test)] mod tests blocks within their respective modules. They verify:

• Title normalization (clean_moviebox_title)
• HMAC-MD5 cryptographic signing and token generation (generate_x_client_token, generate_x_tr_signature)
• Segment partitioning math and byte range calculations
• Internal helper logic, parsing functions, and release asset matching
• Update modal layout geometry calculations and semver comparisons

B. Subsystem Integration Tests (tests/*.rs)

Integration tests live in the tests/ directory and test externally observable behaviors without mocking internal types:

• settings_hub.rs: Validates the interactive Settings Hub modal tabs, choices, dynamic player detection refresh, mode toggles, and appearance settings.
• tui_acceptance.rs: Validates headless TUI rendering, all theme palettes, end-to-end user journeys (search, details, navigation, mode switching), mouse click and scroll interactions, modal dismissals, and terminal resize matrices across 8 standard and boundary dimensions without panics.
• update_lifecycle.rs: Validates update single-flight concurrency barriers, error recovery on network failure, modal actions, checksum integrity verification (valid, mismatch, missing, multi-format), archive extraction with strict path traversal rejection (..), active work protection (playback and download guards), environment detection (Homebrew, ReadOnly, DirectReplace), and safe atomic binary replacement/rollback.
• content_pipeline.rs: Validates stale metadata response protection (request_id validation), cache key dimensional isolation, search failure vs empty result status distinction, mode-switch stale response isolation, poster image identity mapping, and search preview fallback metadata isolation.
• addons_manifest.rs: Validates deserialization of Cinemeta/Stremio addon manifests, multi-season episode decomposition, episode stream isolation (parse_season_episode), token and codec parsing, core Cinemeta protection, and addon enabling/disabling lifecycle.
• error_handling.rs: Validates active player session lifecycle, playback debounce guards, search failure cleanup, stream and download resolution failure notifications, URL scheme rejection, and authoritative player bypass protections.
• history_audit.rs: Validates cross-mode watch progress, series advancement and completion tracking, threshold boundaries for in-progress states, history disk persistence roundtrips, Lua tracker reconciliation, update precision preservation, repeated play deduplication, and /history search list integration.
• favorites_lifecycle.rs: Validates Favorites persistence boundaries, identity deduplication, /favorites loading, landing-row navigation, and independence from watch-history clearing.
• performance_audit.rs: Validates empirical performance benchmarks and regression thresholds across algorithmic hot paths (SIMD text truncation, MD5 hex table lookup, M3U capacity preallocation, and headless frame draw latencies).
• live_stream_verification.rs: Validates real-world stream link resolution across MovieBox signed CDN endpoints, 4KHDHub multi-mirror releases, and Dramachi streams. The tests are #[ignore]-gated for offline execution; opt in with cargo test --test live_stream_verification -- --ignored.

2. Running Automated Tests

Run the full test suite (all unit and integration tests):

cargo test --all-features --locked

Run only unit tests:

cargo test --lib --all-features --locked

Run a specific integration test:

cargo test --test settings_hub --all-features --locked
cargo test --test tui_acceptance --all-features --locked
cargo test --test history_audit --all-features --locked

Run the opt-in live-network stream verification suite:

cargo test --test live_stream_verification --all-features --locked -- --ignored

3. Code Hygiene and Static Analysis

Every commit and pull request must pass all hygiene checks:

# Check formatting
cargo fmt -- --check

# Compiler check
cargo check --all-targets --all-features --locked

# Clippy linter with warnings treated as errors
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --locked -- -D warnings

# Security vulnerability scan
cargo audit

4. Manual QA Matrix

Because TUI and media player interactions depend on terminal capabilities and external processes, manual QA testing covers:

Terminal Emulators

• Ghostty (Primary testing terminal)
• macOS Terminal.app
• iTerm2
• Windows Terminal
• Linux VTE / Alacritty / Kitty
• tmux session & pane switching

Supported Media Players

• mpv (Full IPC tracking, script options, state reconciliation)
• VLC (Local playback and stream forwarding)
• IINA (macOS native player integration)
• termux-open / Android Intents (Android Termux)

Key Flows to Verify

1. Search & Browse: Type queries, switch between MovieBox, 4KHDHub, BDIX, Addons, and Live TV.
2. Playback Launch & Return: Launch stream in player, exit player, verify terminal state is cleanly restored without residual escape sequences.
3. History & State: Verify playback progress and watched checkmarks update accurately.
4. Downloads: Test single episode and batch season download queuing.

5. Performance Verification & Benchmarking Guidelines

All performance optimizations in MovieBox-TUI must be backed by empirical before-and-after measurements. Changes without quantitative verification must be classified as refactors or code cleanups, not performance improvements.

A. Required Benchmark Measurements

When submitting or claiming a performance improvement, measure and report exact deltas:

1. CPU & Algorithmic Hot Paths:

   • Measure wall-clock duration using std::time::Instant across ≥ 1,000 iterations.
   • Run benchmarks on release builds (cargo test --release or isolated binary harness) to reflect production compiler optimizations.
   • Report: Baseline vs. Optimized duration in microseconds (µs) or milliseconds (ms), plus relative speedup (N×).

2. Memory & Allocations:

   • Count heap allocations and memory footprint deltas on hot paths (e.g., zero-copy slices vs. cloned String or Vec).
   • Report: Total allocations eliminated or reduction percentage.

3. TUI Render Latency:

   • Measure full frame draw cycles using headless TestBackend:

     #![allow(unused)]
     fn main() {
     let backend = TestBackend::new(120, 30);
     let mut terminal = Terminal::new(backend).unwrap();
     let start = std::time::Instant::now();
     for _ in 0..1_000 {
         terminal.draw(|f| app.draw(f)).unwrap();
     }
     let avg_us = start.elapsed().as_micros() as f64 / 1_000.0;
     }

   • Report: Average draw duration per frame across standard terminal dimensions (80x24, 120x30).

4. I/O & Syscalls:

   • Quantify eliminated filesystem operations (e.g. cache lookups, redundant directory reads) or network roundtrips.
   • Report: Number of disk reads/writes or HTTP requests saved per action.

5. Release Binary Footprint:

   • Measure stripped release binary size (target/release/moviebox-tui).
   • Report: Baseline size, optimized size, and exact byte/kilobyte delta.

B. Standard Performance Reporting Format

Document benchmark results in PR descriptions, commit messages, or changelog entries using this structured format:

Benchmark: [Subsystem / Hot Path Name]
- Baseline:   [value] [unit] (e.g. 142.3 µs / op, 84 allocs)
- Optimized:  [value] [unit] (e.g. 12.1 µs / op, 2 allocs)
- Delta:      [multiplier]x faster (-[percentage]% allocations)
- Target:     [Architecture / OS, e.g. Apple M3 / arm64-darwin, release profile]

Debugging

The app writes a sanitized file log so full errors are available even though the TUI only shows a short status line. See logging.md for location and settings.

Reproducing an issue

1. Run with debug logging: MOVIEBOX_LOG=debug moviebox-tui
2. Reproduce the problem (search, open details, play, download, TV).
3. Grab the current log file (path printed at startup, and in the log’s session header):
   • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/moviebox-tui/logs/moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log
   • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\moviebox-tui\logs\moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log
   • Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/moviebox-tui/logs/moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log (else ~/.local/share/moviebox-tui/logs/moviebox-tui_rCURRENT.log)
4. Include it when opening an issue.

What to include in a GitHub issue

• The version (moviebox-tui --version).
• Operating system and terminal (e.g. macOS + iTerm2, Windows + Windows Terminal, Termux).
• The player used, if the issue is playback.
• The log file (sanitized and safe to share; URLs and paths are redacted).

Reading the log

Each line is [timestamp] LEVEL [module:line] message. Focus on ERROR lines first; WARN lines explain recoverable fallbacks (e.g. a 4KHD mirror rejected, subtitles unavailable). With MOVIEBOX_LOG=debug you also get request context.

Known quick checks

• “Player unavailable” → no mpv/VLC/IINA detected; set MOVIEBOX_PLAYER or install one.
• “no playable mirrors” on 4KHD → all mirrors were rejected by the preflight; the log lists each mirror and the reason.
• TV mode “no channels” → playlists failed to load; the log names the failing source.

Release Checklist

Use this before calling a new build production-ready. Static gates are necessary but not sufficient for this project because player launch, terminal rendering, and Termux chooser behavior depend on the real runtime environment.

1. Static gates

Run the repository checks first:

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --locked -- -D warnings
cargo check --all-targets --all-features --locked
cargo test --all-features --locked
cargo audit
cargo package --locked

Confirm the entire unit and integration test suite passes on the CI host matrix (docs/testing.md). Release targets that are cross-compiled must at least build cleanly and pass the release workflow’s target-binary --version smoke test; they still require native player/runtime checks before release certification. A local host without the target C/linker toolchain cannot substitute for that runner result. Known gap: the Windows ARM64 binary is built and published but never executed by the release workflow (x64 runners cannot run it); smoke-test it manually, e.g. under Windows on ARM emulation or a native ARM64 device, before certifying a release.

Confirm the main GitHub Actions workflows are green:

• CI
• Release
• Publish to Crates.io when applicable
• Update Homebrew Formula when applicable

If you manually dispatch Publish to Crates.io or Update Homebrew Formula, run them against the explicit release tag, not a branch head.

2. Desktop playback checks

Verify at least one real playback launch on each supported desktop OS:

• macOS: IINA and/or mpv/VLC
• Linux: mpv and/or VLC
• Windows: mpv and/or VLC

For each checked platform, confirm:

• the player launches from MovieBox-Tui
• the window size is reasonable
• playback works for a source with no extra headers
• playback works for a source carrying Referer / User-Agent
• subtitles still attach for mpv / VLC / IINA

3. Terminal rendering checks

Verify poster rendering on the terminal families the docs claim to support:

• Kitty protocol terminal
• Sixel-capable terminal
• iTerm2 protocol terminal
• Non-graphics basic terminal (clean text placeholder)

Confirm:

• posters appear on search/details screens
• resize redraw still works
• focus loss/gain redraw does not corrupt the screen after returning from playback

4. TV mode checks

Verify TV mode with both supported playlist source types:

• remote http(s) M3U
• local file M3U

Confirm:

• playlist import succeeds
• broken playlists report an error without breaking the app
• dedupe by stream URL still behaves correctly
• /config and /list work in TV mode
• channel playback launches the player

5. Termux / Android checks

Verify on a real Termux device before calling the desktop release production-ready:

• app starts normally
• app does not reproduce the historical rustls-platform-verifier initialization panic
• Play opens the Android chooser through termux-open or /system/bin/am
• chosen player starts playback
• downloads still go where the docs describe

This remains mandatory because chooser behavior is device/environment dependent.

6. Release artifact checks

Verify the published release contains:

• expected archives for macOS, Linux x64, Linux arm64, Android arm64, Windows x64, and Windows arm64
• SHA256SUMS
• working install scripts / formula references

Spot-check:

• install.sh
• install.ps1
• Homebrew formula install path

Exit criteria

Only call the release production-ready when:

• all static gates pass
• the relevant GitHub Actions workflows pass
• the runtime checks above were performed on real target environments
• no open blocker remains in docs/known-issues.md for the release target

Known issues and limitations

Tracked here so future work and issue reports reference the same facts.

Latent / by-design

• supports_headers routes authenticated streams via loopback proxy. Sources that carry authentication headers (e.g. MovieBox CloudFront signed cookies) automatically route through the local detached HTTP loopback proxy (src/proxy.rs) for both VLC and Android Intent playback, streaming video chunks over localhost without requiring player-side cookie support.
• MovieBox request signing hardcodes an API secret and spoofs a device identity in crypto.rs. This is inherent to the scraper; treat the module as one unit.
• Android intent playback forwards User-Agent, Referer, and subtitles (subtitles_location/subs) when using am or termux-am. Chooser-based launches via termux-open open the raw video URL directly.

Environment-dependent

• 4KHDHub mirrors rotate and can be expired on upstream hosts. Direct streams are resolved concurrently across all available release mirrors using prioritized scoring (Cloudflare R2 / S3 / Seekable Streams → Storage → PixelDrain API → Google UserContent / Direct Attachments) and bounded concurrency (select_ok in chunks of 3). When all upstream mirrors for an older release are dead/expired (e.g. 404 or expired tokens), the resolver fails fast (<4.5s) and guides the user to select another release.
• Termux playback depends on Android intent dispatchers: Verify termux-open / am availability and the Android player chooser behavior on target devices.
• Windows 11 Smart App Control (SAC) restricts untrusted web downloads. Unsigned binaries downloaded via web browsers are tagged with ZoneId=3 (Mark of the Web), causing Windows 11 SAC to block launch without a standard “Run anyway” button. The official installer (install.ps1) strips this tag automatically using Unblock-File. For manual ZIP downloads, users must unblock via file properties or Unblock-File moviebox-tui.exe.

Verification

• Automated testing is enforced via cargo test --all-features --locked covering 530 unit and integration tests across 12 test suites (see docs/testing.md). The count is updated when tests change; it does not replace real-player and real-device verification.
• Static correctness is enforced by strict compiler type checking, the lint gate (cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --locked -- -D warnings), formatting (cargo fmt --check), dependency vulnerability scanning (cargo audit), and packaging verification (cargo package --locked).
• Runtime and platform-specific behavior (terminal resize, focus handling, external player launch, and Termux chooser) are verified through the release checklist in release-checklist.md.

Contributing to MovieBox-Tui

Thanks for taking the time to contribute. Bug reports, ideas, docs improvements, and pull requests are all welcome.

If you’re planning a large or breaking change, please open an issue first so we can talk it through before you invest significant time.

Getting set up

You’ll need Rust 1.90 or newer (edition 2024). Install it via rustup.rs.

# Fork on GitHub, then clone your fork
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/MovieBox-Tui.git
cd MovieBox-Tui

# Add the upstream remote to keep in sync
git remote add upstream https://github.com/mesamirh/MovieBox-Tui.git

# IMPORTANT: Enable our pre-commit hooks to ensure your code formatting and lints pass
git config core.hooksPath .githooks

# Build and run
cargo run --release

To test playback and download features locally, install mpv (see Media Players).

Project layout

The app is message-driven and organized into focused modules. Full maps live in docs/architecture.md and docs/modules.md.

Short version:

• src/tui/app/: The application object (App). run.rs holds the thin handle_action dispatcher that routes every Action to a handle_* method in its module (run.rs, requests.rs, search.rs, playback.rs, download.rs, favorites.rs, navigation.rs, tv.rs, addons.rs, keyboard.rs, mouse.rs, system.rs, network.rs).
• src/tui/: UI state, event loop plumbing, slash commands (commands.rs), screens, themes, and widgets.
• src/providers/: HTTP clients for streaming sources (moviebox, fourkhdhub, dramachi, bdix), community HTTP addons (addons/), and Live TV playlists (tv/).
• src/service.rs: Unified headless multi-provider client & engine.
• src/proxy.rs: Local loopback HTTP proxy for authenticated CloudFront streams.
• src/download.rs: Background multi-segment media downloading.
• src/cache.rs: Local binary MessagePack disk caching. The app is message-driven. User input and background tasks produce Action values, handled by the dispatcher in src/tui/app/run.rs. When adding behavior, prefer adding a new Action variant over blocking the UI thread.

Workflow

1. Create a branch off main:

   git checkout main
   git pull upstream main
   git checkout -b feat/short-description
   

2. Make your change in small, logical commits.
3. Push and open a pull request against main.

Local Checks & Pre-Commit Hook

Formatting and linting are enforced automatically: the pre-commit hook (enabled during setup with git config core.hooksPath .githooks) runs cargo fmt --check and cargo clippy --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings on every commit, and the commit is rejected if either fails. You do not need to run them manually before every commit, but you should still run the full local/CI parity checks before opening a PR or cutting a release.

If the hook rejects a commit, run cargo fmt to auto-fix the formatting, then stage and commit again.

For release readiness, static checks are not enough on their own. Before declaring a release production-ready, work through docs/release-checklist.md.

Guidelines:

• Follow idiomatic Rust and standard rustfmt defaults. Don’t hand-format.
• Keep the async, message-passing architecture intact.
• Avoid panics on paths that handle network or user input.
• Don’t add new dependencies without a good reason. Mention it in the PR if you do.

Commit messages

Follow Conventional Commits. Keep the subject concise and in the imperative mood.

Examples:

• feat: add support for custom mpv arguments
• fix: prevent panic when clipboard is unavailable
• docs: document /browse categories
• refactor: extract stream resolution into helper

Common types: feat, fix, refactor, docs, style, perf, chore.

Pull requests

• Keep PRs focused on a single concern. Large PRs mixing unrelated changes may be asked to be split.
• In your PR description, explain what changed and why. Link related issues (Closes #12) and include screenshots or recordings for anything visible in the UI.
• Never commit target/, editor settings, or debug dump files.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache-2.0 licenses, consistent with the rest of the project.

Changelog

[Unreleased]

[0.1.27] - 2026-10-23

Fixed

• Media Playback & Subtitle Engine:
  • Removed --play-and-exit from VLC player invocations so the player stays active across adaptive and HLS chunk transitions.
  • Reset legacy Android player defaults in graphical X11 and Wayland sessions so native Linux players take precedence over external Android intent dialogs.
  • Prioritized native Linux media player paths over foreign container fallbacks on Linux systems and preserved dynamic auto-player resolution for unconfigured sessions.
• Providers & Stream Resolution:
  • Recovered playable signed MP4 streams via /resource-position/v2 when MovieBox returns deprecation notice clips, querying exact seasons and episodes and reporting accurate file sizes.
  • Stripped the DASH Referer header on direct MP4 streams to prevent CDN HTTP 429 throttling.
  • Bumped the MovieBox stream cache schema to v2_ to discard stale cached deprecation notices.
  • Filtered out unhosted MovieBox /hls/ signed cookie targets in manifest resolution, which stops unplayable H.264 stream entries from failing with HTTP 404 during downloads or media playback.
• Download Engine & Batch Queue:
  • Fixed season batch downloads by arming is_waiting_for_download_stream during queue steps, eliminating immediate empty-list download calls that aborted multi-episode queues.
  • Reset the download resolution state lock on 4KHDHub resolver timeouts and errors so failed mirror resolutions do not block subsequent download attempts.
  • Added sequential single-connection fallback to the internal HTTP downloader when multi-worker segmented range requests receive HTTP 403, 429, or network disconnects.

Added

• In-App Updater Lifecycle:
  • Tracked target executable path before staging updates and resolved deleted inode suffixes ( (deleted)) on Linux to restart the new binary automatically after popup self-update.
  • Scoped Snap package detection to SNAP_NAME matching moviebox-tui to prevent false positive Snap environment detection when launched inside unrelated host sandboxes.

Changed

• Dependencies & Build Infrastructure:
  • Upgraded zip to 9.0.5, rustls to 0.23.46, quinn-proto to 0.11.19, rustls-webpki to 0.103.16, and webpki-roots to 1.0.10, resolving RustSec security advisories.
  • Upgraded sha2 to 0.11 with chunked streaming hash updates, preserving non-blocking checksum verification for release archives.
  • Upgraded dirs to 7.0, futures to 0.3.34, and zip to 8.6 across platform config paths, async tasks, and updater archive extraction.

[0.1.26] - 2026-10-01

Fixed

• Media Playback & Subtitle Engine:
  • Preserved native Windows \ path separators for --sub-file in VLC (C:\...) and passed --no-one-instance on Windows and Linux so running VLC windows keep subtitle, header, and resume flags.
  • Stripped query strings and fragments before parsing subtitle extensions (.srt, .vtt, .ass, .ssa, .sub) so signed CloudFront and OSS URLs keep their true format and DASH MIME type.
  • Pre-downloaded subtitles locally for mpv with remote URL fallback, parallelized subtitle downloads with StreamRelay sidecar startup, appended an 8-char URL hash to subtitle filenames, and sanitized commas in --script-opts.
  • Mounted xdg-cache/moviebox-tui:ro, xdg-data/moviebox-tui, and /tmp:ro in flatpak run while keeping custom user Flatpak flags so sandboxed mpv and VLC can read subtitles and write watch progress.
  • Served Termux private-storage subtitles over the local StreamRelay /sub/ loopback endpoint when Android shared storage is unavailable, and restricted startup subtitle cleanup to internal cache and temp folders.
  • Parsed player stderr and exit codes to report specific failure reasons (HTTP 403, HTTP 404, HTTP 410, timeout, connection refused), and added deterministic cross-platform contract integration tests (tests/player_contract.rs) asserting VLC Win32/UNC paths, IINA CLI option schemas, and header support across OSes.
  • Unified IINA command construction with standard --mpv-* argument schemas across platforms, and restricted macOS IINA header disqualification to GUI app fallbacks missing command line tools.
  • Standardized player display labels to uppercase acronyms (MPV, IINA, VLC) across player selection popups, settings, and notifications.
• StreamRelay Proxy & Downloader:
  • Forwarded User-Agent and Referer while isolating stream cookies (Cookie: Edge-Cache-Cookie=...) to same-host requests across StreamRelay, subtitle pre-downloads, and media downloads.
  • Capped .m4s segment chunk fetching in StreamRelay to batches of 16 concurrent Range requests, registered in-flight segment wait futures under lock, and required http:// or https:// schemes on /proxy?url= routes.
  • Increased MovieBox DASH yt-dlp --concurrent-fragments from 8 to 32 (3.77 MiB/s -> 11.13 MiB/s, +195% live CDN throughput) and scaled the direct HTTP multi-segment engine to 4 to 16 workers with Range: bytes=0-0 size discovery, 1 MiB write buffers, and a single end-of-file sync_data flush.
  • Reported specific subtitle and DASH download errors (HTTP status, timeout, missing yt-dlp vs ffmpeg) and matched "at" after "of" in yt-dlp progress lines.
• Providers & Disk Cache:
  • Removed the broad "notice" substring filter in MovieBox stream adaptation while keeping /notice.mp4 and known deprecation hashes, which restores streams for titles like Red Notice and Burn Notice.
  • Advanced the active MovieBox host index immediately on connection or HTTP retry errors, removed the duplicate /subject-api/resource preflight round-trip in InitStreamPool, and removed the 120ms delay on cached episode switches.
  • Streamed 4KHDHub mirror resolution directly into preflight probes via FuturesUnordered without waiting for slow mirrors, cached fetched detail pages across details and releases in 4KHDHub, Dramachi, and CircleFTP, and bounded CircleFTP HEAD size probes to 1.2 seconds.
  • Required a leading 'S' prefix in 4KHDHub season count parsing so release years after "Score" do not parse as season counts, and cached static HTML selectors in 4KHDHub parsers.
  • Matched Dramachi episode numbers across Unicode boundaries and quality suffixes, parallelized Stremio addon movie/series catalog searches and M3U playlist loads, and inserted /manifest.json before query parameters in addon URLs.
  • Evicted cached poster images only when file age exceeds the 30-day TTL so valid cache files survive minor clock skew.
  • Replaced synchronous fsync barriers on ephemeral cache writes with atomic temp-file renames, cached default directory paths via LazyLock, reused a static HTTP client in probe_url, and shared Arc<[u8]> poster buffers across disk caching and decoding.
  • Centralized Termux platform detection in core configuration and deduplicated base64 manifest policy parsing.
• TUI Navigation, Themes, Modals & Mouse:
  • Validated Details and stream responses against each item’s own provider so cross-provider items opened from Continue Watching, Favorites, /history, or /favorites load without hanging.
  • Aborted in-flight caption and 4KHDHub mirror resolution tasks on Esc or GoBack so stale subtitle popups or players do not launch after leaving Details.
  • Processed active Picker and Subtitle popups before the background loading guard on Enter, cleared queued season downloads when cancelling the download subtitle prompt or on stream failure, and reset TV input focus on overlay dismissal.
  • Enabled /browse for Stremio Addons, reused in-memory addon state during stream resolution, skipped search pagination on active addon catalogs, and clamped initial cursor selection in empty TV and Addon manager modals.
  • Synchronized Home and Details mouse hitboxes with the 3-row download gauge, narrow < 85 col selector panes, compact < 76 col bottom bar buttons, non-Stream footer [Enter] Select actions, and outside-click theme preview revert.
  • Downgraded named themes in Theme::from_kind on 16-color (Basic) and NO_COLOR terminals, improved Latte light-mode contrast on selected badges and modal rows, and added ALACRITTY_SOCKET, KONSOLE_VERSION, TERMUX_VERSION, WT_SESSION, and TERM_PROGRAM graphics/TrueColor detection.
  • Shortened toast notifications to show filenames instead of full paths and removed duplicate status-bar and toast alerts on compact terminals.
  • Pruned conversational filler from terminal size warnings, language selection prompts, and package manager upgrade notices.

[0.1.25] - 2026-09-27

Fixed

• Search Navigation & Pagination Engine:
  • Gated background search pagination in src/tui/app/navigation.rs so arrow navigation on result sets smaller than the visible viewport never triggers background page fetches.
  • Added search_exhausted tracking in src/tui/state.rs and src/tui/app/requests.rs, stopping pagination crawls when provider search returns fewer than 15 items or zero query-matching results.
  • Preserved stable card slot positions during search pagination in src/tui/app/requests.rs by appending subsequent page items to the list rather than re-sorting the entire array out from under the cursor.
  • Removed redundant “Provider: {name}” status message override from the search bar on provider switch in src/tui/app/navigation.rs, preserving the clean search placeholder while the active provider pill displays on the right.
• Media Playback & Buffering Engine:
  • Prioritized native desktop media players (mpv, VLC) over Android intent openers in src/player.rs when an active X11/Wayland display server ($DISPLAY, $WAYLAND_DISPLAY) is detected, preventing Ubuntu Xfce (udroid/PRoot) and Termux:X11 desktop sessions from dispatching playback to external Android app choosers.
  • Routed DASH .mpd streams through the local StreamRelay proxy (src/proxy.rs, src/tui/app/playback.rs) across all media players (mpv, IINA, VLC, AndroidIntent), caching rewritten .mpd manifests in RAM, warm-prefetching initialization and opening segments on sidecar startup, fetching .m4s segments via concurrent 95 KB HTTP Range sub-requests (0.286s per segment vs 3.120s), and prefetching both the next 3 video segments (N+1..N+3) and synchronized audio segments (chunk-stream3-N..N+1).
  • Tuned mpv and IINA playback flags (--hwdec=auto-safe, --stream-buffer-size=4M, --cache-secs=120, --cache-pause-wait=3, --cache-pause-initial=no, and --ytdl=no on non-DASH direct streams) in src/player.rs, reducing 1080p cold-seek latency at 01:00:00 from 11.96s to 3.87s and boosting read-ahead buffer fill rate from 1 MB (9.3s) to 7 MB (53s).
  • Replaced aggressive VLC buffering flags (--network-caching=10000, --adaptive-logic=nearoptimal) with --network-caching=3000, --file-caching=3000, --http-reconnect, and --adaptive-logic=predictive in src/player.rs to stop demuxer stream restarts and reconnect cleanly on dropped HTTP streams.
  • Enforced max_height resolution limits in the loopback stream proxy manifest rewriter (src/proxy.rs, src/main.rs, src/tui/app/playback.rs), pruning representations exceeding the chosen ceiling so Android players and VLC respect 480p and 720p selections.
  • Parsed signed expiration timestamps (:t=) from MovieBox Edge-Cache-Cookie headers in src/cache.rs alongside CloudFront policies, automatically invalidating stale stream cache entries within 60 seconds of expiration to prevent HTTP 403 playback crashes.
  • Persisted selected stream filenames (stream_filename) in watch history (src/history.rs, src/player/tracker.rs, src/tui/app/playback.rs) and auto-focused matching stream rows on load (src/tui/app/requests.rs, src/tui/app/system.rs), restoring the user’s previously chosen quality mirror when resuming multi-stream releases.
  • Enabled TCP nodelay (stream.set_nodelay(true)) and per-chunk immediate flushes on the local StreamRelay proxy in src/proxy.rs, eliminating 100–300ms time-to-first-frame buffering delays on loopback sockets.
  • Implemented negative caching (Option<Option<String>>) for media player detection (MPV_CACHED, VLC_CACHED, IINA_CACHED) in src/player.rs, eliminating redundant filesystem scans and registry lookups when players are absent.
  • Throttled Lua tracker periodic disk sync in src/player/tracker.rs when playback is paused or positional change is sub-second, cutting SSD writes by up to 90% during playback pauses.
  • Removed duplicate redundant history.save() calls in src/tui/app/playback.rs upon marking items watched.
  • Defined local now = os.time() in src/player/tracker.rs before formatting playback state JSON in moviebox_tracker.lua and scoped initial PendingPlaybackState seed writes in src/tui/app/playback.rs strictly to PlayerKind::Mpv, preventing VLC, IINA, and AndroidIntent watch progress from resetting to 0 on player exit.
  • Detached spawned media players and the StreamRelay sidecar into independent OS sessions via configure_detached_process (libc::setsid() + SIGHUP ignore on Unix, DETACHED_PROCESS | CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP on Windows) in src/player.rs, src/proxy.rs, and src/tui/app/playback.rs, redirected player stderr to temporary log files instead of parent pipes to prevent SIGPIPE crashes when the terminal closes, and reaped the sidecar immediately when desktop players exit while the TUI is open.
• Download Engine & Subprocess Diagnostics:
  • Added preflight verification for ffmpeg alongside yt-dlp in src/tui/app/download.rs, failing fast with installation guidance when media muxing tools are missing.
  • Captured child process stderr lines during DASH transfers to surface concrete yt-dlp error diagnostics instead of bare exit codes.
  • Accelerated MovieBox DASH stream downloads from ~0.92 MiB/s to ~10.29 MiB/s by passing --http-chunk-size 95K and --concurrent-fragments 8 to yt-dlp with resilient retry policies (--fragment-retries 10, --retries 5, --socket-timeout 30) in src/tui/app/download.rs, resetting Alibaba Cloud Tengine’s per-request limit_rate_after 96k rate-limiter across persistent Keep-Alive sockets.
  • Refactored the direct HTTP multi-segment downloader in src/download.rs to pre-allocate the .part file and write segments in-place via positional SeekFrom::Start offsets (scaling concurrency to 4–12 workers down to 16 MB files), eliminating temporary .part.N files and the post-download .assembling full-file disk copy.
• TUI Rendering & Event Loop Performance:
  • Expanded terminal standard output BufWriter capacity from 64 KB to 256 KB in src/main.rs, enabling atomic frame flushes and eliminating visual tearing during graphical Sixel and Kitty poster transfers.
  • Replaced allocating to_string() hash set checks in src/favorites.rs with zero-allocation borrowed string comparisons in is_favorite, eliminating 400+ heap allocations per second during search grid rendering.
  • Eliminated redundant 100ms idle tick redraws on static home screens in src/tui/app/system.rs, dropping idle CPU consumption to zero.
  • Replaced per-card Layout::split invocations in src/tui/screens/home.rs with direct row arithmetic calculations, avoiding repeated layout solver overhead across search result slots.
  • Rendered stream media tags (HDR, ATMOS, 5.1, HEVC, AV1, WEB-DL) in src/tui/screens/details.rs using styled surface pill spans and unified background modal dimming to theme.muted across render_media_tag_spans, resolution_badge_spans (src/tui/widgets/badge.rs), render_poster_placeholder (src/tui/widgets/poster.rs), Details headers (src/tui/screens/details.rs), and Home search result bars, cards, ratings, and history progress rows (src/tui/screens/home.rs).
  • Replaced linear index iteration with exact O(1) HashSet lookups in FavoritesManager::is_favorite (src/favorites.rs).
  • Guarded PopKeyboardEnhancementFlags in restore_terminal (src/main.rs) against Termux environments (!is_termux_environment()), preventing stray ANSI escape sequences from leaking into the Android Termux shell on exit.
  • Routed Warning: and non-Home Action::SetStatus messages through toast notifications in src/tui/app/system.rs, src/tui/app/playback.rs, and src/tui/app/requests.rs, ensuring subtitle fallback notices, missing iina-cli warnings, and addon installation statuses remain visible on the Details screen and modal overlays.
  • Unified notification card geometry and line-wrapping calculations in compute_notification_cards (src/tui/overlay.rs), eliminating duplicate layout passes between frame rendering and mouse click hit-testing.
• Provider Scraping & Concurrency Engine:
  • Replaced chunked mirror resolution barriers in 4KHDHub (src/providers/fourkhdhub/client.rs, src/providers/fourkhdhub/hubcloud.rs) with HTTP 206 Partial Content seekability verification (preflight_with_seekable) and score-prioritized early termination (is_seekable && score <= 1), ensuring byte-range-seekable 10Gbps/R2/FSL mirrors are selected over unseekable HTTP 200 mirrors or quota-exhausted workers.dev links.
  • Centralized disk-cached caption lookup and storage in MovieBoxService::get_ext_captions (src/service.rs) and parallelized primary and sibling dub caption fetches via tokio::join!, eliminating duplicate cache wrappers in src/tui/app/playback.rs and src/tui/app/requests.rs.
  • Bound individual Stremio addon stream fetches in src/providers/addons/aggregator.rs with a 5-second timeout, preventing unresponsive third-party addons from blocking stream aggregation.
  • Capped initial search poster scraping in DhakaFlix (src/providers/bdix/dhakaflix/client.rs) to the first 20 items, eliminating dozens of blocking HTTP POST requests on large catalog searches.
  • Centralized MediaDetails::sibling_ids, human-readable file size parsing (parse_size_bytes), DASH URL detection (is_dash_url), yt-dlp format selectors (ytdlp_format_selector), download target path resolution (resolve_media_target), and cached poster fetching (MovieBoxService::fetch_and_decode_cached_poster) in their owning domain modules (src/providers/models.rs, src/player.rs, src/download.rs, src/service.rs), and removed src/tui/app/network.rs.
  • Streamed poster HTTP responses via bounded chunk accumulation (5 MiB cap) in MovieBoxService::fetch_poster_bytes (src/service.rs) and added FallbackResolver DNS + Range: bytes=0-0 bounds to probe_url (src/net.rs).
• Storage & Disk Cache Engine:
  • Optimized typed cache serialization in src/cache.rs using direct in-place encoding (rmp_serde::encode::write) into pre-seeded magic header buffers, eliminating intermediate vector allocations and duplicate memory copies.
  • Pre-allocated file buffer capacity from file metadata in get_typed_cache in src/cache.rs, eliminating repetitive vector reallocations during cache reads.
  • Offloaded atomic_write_file_async in src/cache.rs to tokio::task::spawn_blocking, switched src/logging.rs to WriteMode::BufferAndFlush with a LazyLock cached home directory path, centralized corrupt JSON file rotation (rotate_corrupt_file) in src/config.rs, and enabled cross-platform stale update artifact cleanup in src/updater/apply.rs.
  • Isolated all unit and integration test runs into a per-process temporary sandbox (TEST_SANDBOX_DIR in src/config.rs) and guarded external browser launches (open_external_url in src/net.rs), preventing tests from modifying real user configuration, watch history, favorites, or disk cache files.
  • Added unit and mock-server test coverage for 4KHDHub HTTP 206 seekable mirror prioritization, CircleFTP catalog mapping, DhakaFlix stream extraction, Addons concurrent stream aggregation and torrent filtering, TV UTF-8 BOM / HLS M3U parsing, IINA command construction, StreamRelay DASH sidecar warmup, non-mpv watch progress retention, and Action::SetStatus warning/modal toast routing.

Changed

• TUI & Ergonomics:
  • Remapped q / Q on Screen::Details in src/tui/app/keyboard.rs from application exit to Action::GoBack, preserving active search results and returning to the home screen without unexpected process termination.
  • Standardized modal and popup dismissal across Settings, Providers, Browse Presets, Sources, Themes, Addons, and TV Config overlays to dismiss on both Esc and q.
  • Reordered episode list label formatting in src/tui/screens/details.rs to compute prefix and progress badge widths before truncating episode titles, strictly preventing list item text overflow and jagged multi-line wrapping.
  • Replaced ambiguous " ... [i]" plot synopsis truncation with an explicit " ... [i: More]" indicator in src/tui/screens/details.rs.
  • Optimized stream table column constraints for ultra-compact terminals (<65 columns) in src/tui/screens/details.rs, compacting SIZE to 7 characters and reclaiming columns for release title readability on mobile viewports.
  • Rendered cached IMDb rating badges across all visible search cards in src/tui/screens/home.rs by peeking preview_cache, enabling at-a-glance quality comparison across the grid without manual card-by-card selection.
  • Collapsed empty [No Art] poster placeholder columns when image_supported is false in src/tui/screens/home.rs, expanding search card text and metadata across the full available column width on non-graphical terminals.
• Documentation & Cross-Platform Terminal Compatibility:
  • Documented native Windows Terminal Sixel image support requirements (v1.22+ via Microsoft Store) in docs/cross-platform.md and README.md, clarifying that no third-party terminal or configuration is required on Windows.

[0.1.24] - 2026-09-24

Added

• Scoop Package Manager Distribution:
  • Added native Scoop manifest in bucket/moviebox-tui.json supporting Windows x64 and arm64 architectures with automated hash verification.
  • Automated Scoop manifest synchronization alongside Homebrew in .github/workflows/manifests.yml from release SHA256SUMS.
  • Added InstallationEnvironment::Scoop detection in src/updater/apply.rs with update prompt shortcuts ([s]).
• Adaptive Stream Resolution Picker:
  • Decomposed multi-bitrate DASH streams in src/providers/moviebox/adapt.rs into selectable quality rows (1080p, 720p, 480p).
  • Threaded quality constraints to player builders, injecting --ytdl-format for mpv/IINA and --adaptive-maxheight for VLC.
• Custom Player Executable Path Configuration:
  • Added vlc_path, mpv_path, and iina_path fields to Config in src/config.rs and src/tui/state.rs.
  • Supported persisted custom player paths with automatic static path cache invalidation upon configuration updates.

Changed

• Streamlined Download Failure Notifications:
  • Replaced verbose, truncated DASH download failure guidance with terse, actionable commands (Run: winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp Gyan.FFmpeg).
  • Removed misleading “Partial file preserved” prefix on pre-download failures in src/tui/app/download.rs.
  • Scaled notification toast card width to the widest line across multi-line messages in src/tui/overlay.rs.
  • Threaded selected stream resolution constraint (bestvideo[height<={h}]...) to yt-dlp in src/tui/app/download.rs, ensuring DASH downloads fetch the highlighted quality rather than forcing 1080p.

Fixed

• Streaming Proxy & Sidecar Lifecycle:
  • Enforced fail-closed target host verification in src/proxy.rs, rejecting requests with 403 Forbidden if target_host is missing or unverified.
  • Detached proxy sidecar child handles via std::mem::forget, preventing defunct zombie process leaks on Unix.
  • Removed 60s request deadline on upstream proxy client and added 128KB tokio::io::BufWriter for sustained chunk throughput.
  • Deferred status line emission until manifest sizing is verified, returning 502 Bad Gateway on oversized payloads.
• Download Engine & Subprocess Safety:
  • Re-canonicalized created download directories within background tasks in src/tui/app/download.rs, verifying real paths against download roots to prevent symlink traversal.
  • Sanitized provider HTTP header keys and values passed to yt-dlp, stripping CRLF and control bytes to prevent header splitting.
  • Removed global 60s transfer timeout and buffered single-connection file writes with 256KB tokio::io::BufWriter.
  • Added fast-fail fallback to single-stream downloads when segment workers receive 200 OK responses.
  • Sanitized download failure notices via DownloadError::user_message(), replacing raw error dumps with clean user guidance.
• Media Playback & Progress Tracking:
  • Configured high-throughput stream buffering in src/player.rs for mpv and IINA (8s cushion, 120s readahead, 256MB demuxer cache) to eliminate rebuffering loops.
  • Set 10s network cache floor and nearoptimal adaptive logic for VLC, preventing playback stalls on DASH jitter.
  • Recorded elapsed watch progress for VLC code 1 exits and routed IINA through wall-clock progress tracking.
• TUI Layout & Modal Ergonomics:
  • Deduplicated movie title repetition in Details screen streams table (src/tui/screens/details.rs), displaying source/CDN instead of identical media titles across rows.
  • Streamlined download progress dock in src/tui/app/run.rs to a sleek, minimal header showing queue position and metrics without redundant title repetition.
  • Isolated TV mode search dispatch in src/tui/app/requests.rs and balanced landing search input width to 48 columns.
  • Auto-sized /settings modal height dynamically to category row counts and balanced modal width to 60 columns.
  • Dimmed background deck items, suggestions, and provider pills when modal popups are active in src/tui/screens/home.rs.
  • Reorganized Details screen footer action hierarchy, lowered split threshold to 80 columns, and synchronized mouse hitboxes.
  • Factored ListState::offset() into Details pane row hitboxes for scrolled season and episode lists.
  • Unified streams table highlight symbol under modals in src/tui/screens/details.rs, preventing table header and column horizontal shifts.
  • Reset show_overview_modal on mode transitions in src/tui/app/tv.rs and top-aligned metadata paragraphs in src/tui/screens/details.rs.
  • Streamlined TV playlist management popup to match Addons mode design with dynamic sizing and clean status indicators.
  • Replaced Action::ToggleTvMode with idempotent Action::SwitchToTvMode and protected Ctrl+T/Ctrl+S against unintended flips.
• Network, Upstream & Concurrency:
  • Bound parallel sibling provider queries in get_ext_captions (src/service.rs) with individual 8s timeouts to prevent stalls.
  • Tracked in-pool cached stream tasks in request_tasks.streams in src/tui/app/requests.rs, ensuring active tasks cancel on navigation.
  • Removed 30s deadline and added 3-attempt exponential backoff chunk retry for release binary downloads in src/updater/download.rs.
  • Added 5 MiB ceiling to fetch_poster_bytes in src/service.rs and referenced dynamic CARGO_PKG_VERSION in APP_HTTP_USER_AGENT.

Changed

• Direct Download Triggering:
  • Streamlined download initiation by starting stream and season downloads immediately upon pressing d on the details screen.
  • Pruned intermediate confirmation dialogs, transient state flags (show_episode_download_confirm), and confirmation render helpers.
• Deep Module Architecture & Task Encapsulation:
  • Encapsulated async task lifecycle in RequestTaskHandles (src/tui/app/mod.rs), consolidating cancellation, task spawning, and abort handle tracking behind dedicated dispatch methods.
  • Encapsulated download destination directory creation, UNC normalization, and sandbox boundary checks into prepare_target_dir in src/tui/app/download.rs.
  • Added render_modal_frame in src/tui/overlay.rs combining area clearing with Clear, inner rectangle calculation, and modal frame border rendering.
• Terminal Image Picker & Opener Caching:
  • Consolidated fallback and custom cell size image picker creation in src/tui/app/run.rs through create_picker_with_font_size.
  • Cached Android opener detection via std::sync::LazyLock in src/player.rs.
• CI/CD Quality Gates & Tooling:
  • Added Linux musl target compilation verification in .github/workflows/ci.yml.
  • Migrated CI test matrix to parallel, process-isolated cargo-nextest execution.
• Documentation Overhaul:
  • Streamlined all user and technical guides in docs/ (players.md, controls.md, tv-mode.md, config.md, addons-mode.md, providers.md, cross-platform.md, cache.md, downloads.md), cutting redundant tables and dense text walls.
  • Documented environment variables (MOVIEBOX_LOG, MOVIEBOX_IMAGE_PROTOCOL, MOVIEBOX_CELL_SIZE, NO_COLOR).

[0.1.23] - 2026-09-21

Fixed

• MPV Player Header & Cookie Flag Construction:

  • Replaced comma-joined --ytdl-raw-options header strings in src/player.rs with dedicated --ytdl-raw-options-append arguments for non-UA/referer headers (e.g. CloudFront Cookie).
  • Preserved native --user-agent and --referrer flags, eliminating mpv option parsing aborts (code 1) from commas inside browser User-Agent strings while ensuring DASH manifest requests receive authentication cookies (preventing code 2 playback errors).

• Details Header Synopsis Click Hitbox:

  • Constrained the overview modal mouse trigger to the actual rendered synopsis text lines (synopsis_area) rather than the entire top header box, preventing accidental popup triggers when clicking posters, title text, metadata badges, or empty border padding.

• Details Screen Modal Backdrop Dimming:

  • Dimmed empty stream placeholder and status messages (e.g. “Choose an audio track to load streams.”) to theme.muted when any modal or synopsis overlay is open, matching the dimmed backdrop styling of the rest of the details screen.

• Concise Actionable Playback Error Notifications:

  • Mapped player exit codes to short, direct notices in src/tui/app/playback.rs (Stream Dead: Link expired or unreachable. for code 2, Player Error: Check player configuration. for code 1), replacing cryptic raw process exit strings (Player exited (code 2).).

[0.1.22] - 2026-09-21

Added

• Dramachi Native Streaming Provider:
  • Integrated Dramachi as a native streaming provider for Asian dramas, K-dramas, C-dramas, anime, and movies via https://api.nodeobjects.com/.
  • Added direct HTTP byte-range video streaming support (direct_file: true) bypassing CloudFront proxies and authentication overhead.
  • Added multi-dub and language rip resolution supporting original, English, and localized dubs with composite subject ID routing ({title_id}::{rip}).
  • Added ProviderKind::Dramachi support across MovieBoxService, TUI search, details, stream resolution, downloads, settings, and badges ([Dramachi]).

Fixed

• Human-Readable Subtitle Filenames & Intent Storage:
  • Formatted subtitle filenames with media titles and season/episode tags (e.g. <Title> - S<N:02>E<E:02>.<ext>) in src/service.rs and src/tui/app/playback.rs, replacing random process/timestamp IDs for easy identification in external player file pickers (moviebox_subs/).
• Concise Stream Failure Messages:
  • Simplified verbose stream failure messages (Provider is temporarily unavailable: No stream sources available) across the details screen (src/tui/screens/details.rs) and notification bar (src/tui/app/requests.rs) to concise, direct notices (No streams available on <Provider>.).
• Stream Proxy Subtitle Whitelist & Scope Isolation:
  • Permitted external subtitle CDN hosts in src/proxy.rs proxy connection validation, preventing HTTP 403 errors when media players fetch external subtitle tracks alongside DASH stream manifests.
  • Scoped authentication headers exclusively to target video hosts, preventing credential spillage to subtitle CDNs.
• Stremio Addon Mode Series Metadata Resolution & Episode Picker:
  • Encoded media type hints into Addon catalog and search results (series:{id} and movie:{id}) in src/providers/addons/adapter.rs, preserving search intent across preview prefetching and details resolution.
  • Hardened metadata probing in AddonClient::details (src/providers/addons/mod.rs) to prioritize series queries and check for episode videos (!videos.is_empty()) before falling back to movie, resolving an issue where series (e.g. Breaking Bad) fell back to corrupted movie metadata (“Mirror”) lacking episode lists.
  • Normalized subject IDs in src/providers/addons/aggregator.rs before constructing stream query IDs ({clean_id}:{season}:{episode} for series, {clean_id} for movies), including support for Season 0 (Specials).
  • Fixed Season 0 episode count and index calculation in season_confirm_summary (src/tui/screens/details.rs).
  • Replaced verbose stream failure and missing addon messages with concise status notices in src/tui/app/requests.rs.
  • Aligned Addon Mode empty search results with Streaming Mode by returning Ok(vec![]) on zero-result queries instead of triggering a boxed Search Request Error, restoring the standard no-results view with [ Try on MovieBox (^P) ] and [ Clear Search (c) ] pills.
  • Returned Ok(vec![]) on empty addon catalogs in MovieBoxService::fetch_addon_catalog (src/service.rs), preventing empty catalog views from raising false search failure errors.
  • Reset active_screen to Screen::Home in reset_mode_state (src/tui/app/tv.rs), preventing orphaned Details screen states when switching between TV and Streaming modes.
• Logging Engine, Crash Diagnostics & Backtrace Capture:
  • Added stack backtrace capture (std::backtrace::Backtrace::capture()) and immediate log buffer flushing (moviebox_tui::logging::flush()) to std::panic::set_hook in src/main.rs, ensuring crash locations and backtraces are committed to disk before terminal restoration and process termination.
  • Standardized default file log level to info across all builds in src/logging.rs, ensuring session startup metadata, player lifecycle commands, and exit durations are consistently captured without requiring manual MOVIEBOX_LOG configuration.
  • Retained LoggerHandle globally in src/logging.rs with graceful fallback to default logging levels if MOVIEBOX_LOG contains an invalid level specification.
  • Re-routed Windows logs directory (crate::config::logs_dir()) to Local AppData (%LOCALAPPDATA%\moviebox-tui\logs) to align with documentation and avoid roaming enterprise profile sync issues.
  • Hardened sanitize_url in src/logging.rs to redact embedded user/password credentials (user:pass@host), preserve original URI schemes, and retain port numbers for localhost and custom IPTV ports.
  • Sanitized and bounded player crash error messages (clean_player_error) in src/tui/app/playback.rs, preventing unbounded stderr streams and CDN auth tokens from leaking into error logs.
  • Added desktop player launch banners and clean exit logs with duration tracking to src/tui/app/playback.rs.
  • Added HTTP status code validation (error_for_status()) in DramachiClient and CircleFtpClient, preventing HTTP 403/502/Cloudflare errors from masquerading as misleading JSON parse failures.
  • Added diagnostic logging for system DNS fallback to public resolvers and probe failure statuses in src/net.rs.
  • Added warning logs for disk write and serialization failures in src/cache.rs::set_typed_cache.
• BDIX DhakaFlix Configuration Persistence:
  • Loaded bdix_dhakaflix_enabled from saved configuration in App::new (src/tui/app/mod.rs), preventing DhakaFlix provider toggle from resetting to disabled upon restarting the application.
• M3U Playlist Parser Async Cache Probing:
  • Replaced blocking synchronous file_path.exists() check in M3UParser::fetch_playlist with non-blocking tokio::fs::try_exists in src/providers/tv/parser.rs, eliminating async event loop stalls during remote playlist caching.
• HTTP Client Builder Timeout Floors:
  • Enforced baseline connection (15s) and request (60s) timeout floors in http_client_builder (src/net.rs) to prevent stalled HTTP connections across external providers without explicit timeouts.
• Pruned Dead BDIX Release Stubs:
  • Removed unused resolve_release identity functions from CircleFtpClient and DhakaFlixClient (src/providers/bdix/).
• Hardened Issue Templates & Automated Triage:
  • Added Android (Termux) option, mandatory pre-flight checklist, and sanitized terminal log output requirement to .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/bug_report.yml.
  • Added direct links to GitHub Discussions and Termux setup documentation in .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/config.yml.
  • Added automated incomplete-issue.yml workflow to flag and comment on vague issue reports lacking diagnostic context.
  • Added automated stale.yml workflow to close unresponsive needs-info issues after 7 days.
• Security & Terminal Signal Hardening:
  • Enforced host authority whitelist validation against target_host in local proxy sidecar handle_connection (src/proxy.rs), returning HTTP 403 Forbidden on host mismatch to prevent Server-Side Request Forgery and unauthorized auth header leakage.
  • Enforced HTTP and HTTPS scheme validation on percent-decoded subtitle URLs in proxy extract_target_url (src/proxy.rs), preventing arbitrary URL scheme forwarding.
  • Registered Unix SIGTERM and SIGHUP signal handlers in EventHandler::new (src/tui/event.rs) routing to Action::Quit, ensuring proper terminal de-initialization and alternate screen restoration via TerminalGuard on process termination.
  • Replaced silent reqwest::Client::new fallbacks with explicit builder expect assertions in MovieBoxClient, DhakaFlixClient, and CircleFtpClient, preventing silent networking degradation without shared DNS and connection pooling configurations.
  • Added canonical path containment checks in start_resilient_download (src/tui/app/download.rs) ensuring download target paths resolve within the configured download directory tree.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility & Player Integration:
  • Stripped Windows extended-length verbatim prefix (\\?\) in start_resilient_download (src/tui/app/download.rs), preventing false-positive download containment failures when comparing canonicalized base directories with un-canonicalized target paths.
  • Added environment variable expansion for REG_EXPAND_SZ values in Windows registry queries (src/player.rs), allowing automatic discovery of player binaries configured with %USERPROFILE%, %SystemRoot%, or %LOCALAPPDATA% paths.
  • Retained downloaded local subtitle files for Android intent launches in src/tui/app/playback.rs without premature process-exit deletion, avoiding loopback proxy URLs (http://127.0.0.1:<port>/sub/...) and allowing external players (VLC, MX Player) to load subtitles from shared storage before background cleanup.
  • Gated Kitty keyboard enhancement protocol flags (PushKeyboardEnhancementFlags) behind !is_termux_environment() in src/main.rs, preventing unsupported escape sequence noise on mobile touch terminals.
  • Restricted Termux shared storage subtitle directory probing (~/storage/downloads/moviebox_subs) to verified Termux environments in src/main.rs and src/cache.rs.
  • Added Flatpak @@ file forwarding markers for local file and file:// URLs in mpv_command and vlc_command (src/player.rs), ensuring Flatpak Document portal exports media and subtitle files into sandboxed player containers.
• Audio Track Switch Metadata & Synopsis Preservation:
  • Preserved rich metadata (duration, synopsis, genres, cast, crew, and clean title) when switching audio dubs on the Details screen in src/tui/app/requests.rs.
  • Resolved an issue where selecting an audio track (e.g. Hindi dub) caused duration (2h 20m) to disappear and replaced the multi-line synopsis with a title placeholder (Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat), breaking visual balance against the poster.
  • Sanitized window title in contextual_title (src/tui/app/run.rs) using clean_moviebox_title to prevent raw dub tags ([Hindi]) from leaking into the terminal window title.
• MovieBox Edge-Cache CDN Stream Manifest Resolution:
  • Added Edge-Cache-Cookie urlprefix Base64 decoding in resolve_dash_manifest_from_policy (src/providers/moviebox/adapt.rs).
  • Resolves active multi-quality MPEG-DASH manifests (https://sbcdn*.hakunaymatata.com/dash/.../index.mpd) generated under MovieBox’s updated CDN token structure.
  • Fixes playback and stream resolution failure (No stream sources available) across movies and episodic series where previous parser only checked for CloudFront-Policy.
• Settings Sub-Popups & Picker Dialog Anchoring:
  • Unified sub-popup positioning (Streaming Sources, Default Media Player, Theme, Browse) to anchor directly inside Settings & Preferences (settings_picker_layout in src/tui/overlay.rs) rather than floating into empty screen space on tall terminal windows.
  • Stabilized Settings & Preferences modal height across all category tabs (General, Content Modes, Appearance, Maintenance) to 9 rows, eliminating dialog jitter when cycling tabs.
  • Synchronized mouse click detection in src/tui/app/mouse.rs with settings_picker_layout and browse_picker_layout.
• Update Modal Minimalist Redesign & Single-Surface Card:
  • Redesigned update popup from a multi-compartment divided box into a clean, single-surface dialog card (src/tui/overlay.rs and src/tui/app/run.rs).
  • Embedded version directly in the top title frame (Update Available: vX.Y.Z) and docked primary actions directly into the bottom border ([u] Update ──── [o] GitHub), eliminating all internal divider lines and wasted vertical padding.
  • Unified modal positioning by anchoring both update notification and in-progress update modals directly at the landing search bar position (home_search_y), keeping the dimmed ASCII logo visible above while focusing full attention on update progress.
  • Integrated category badges inline with release highlights ([Added], [Fixed], [Changed], [Perf]) while retaining full Markdown compatibility with GitHub release notes.
  • Streamlined in-progress update modal into a compact 42-column status pill (Updating: vX.Y.Z) displaying active mechanical stage (Downloading release, Verifying checksum, Installing binary) without noisy warning labels or type mixing.
• Details Poster Geometry Stability Across Dub Synopsis Lengths:
  • Locked content_rows to 6 in DetailsLayoutTier::header_height (src/tui/screens/details.rs) when show_poster is active, maintaining consistent 8-row header height and 6-row poster container dimensions.
  • Prevented poster image shrinking and header layout shifts caused by variable synopsis text lengths across audio dubs and releases.
• Single-Line Input Windowing & Overflow Prevention:
  • Fixed text overflow in render_single_line_input (src/tui/widgets/input.rs) where appending ellipsis (...) without sufficient budget caused line length to exceed modal width and trigger word wrapping onto a second line.
  • Reserved 3 columns for trailing ellipsis when characters remain past the cursor and removed Wrap on single-line input widgets, keeping prompt symbols and text strictly single-line across all cursor movements.
• Addons Manager Search Bar Anchor & Overlay Isolation:
  • Anchored Addons Manager popup directly in place of the landing search bar using unified home_search_y geometry in src/tui/overlay.rs.
  • Gated the landing search bar, search suggestions, provider pill popup, and discovery decks in src/tui/screens/home.rs during active Addon Manager sessions, preventing background search bar leakage.
• MovieBox Deprecation Notice Stream Filtering:
  • Filtered deprecation notice video URLs (macdn.aoneroom.com/other/, notice video hash b164fbfb4347792950bdfbfb563d39d9) from community resource releases in src/providers/moviebox/adapt.rs.
  • Prevented 21-second upgrade announcement video placeholders from leaking into stream selection as playable releases when episodes lack official DASH streams.
• Audio Dub Label Sanitization & Stream Quality Deduplication:
  • Prevented blank audio track gap in episode details by mapping standalone "Dub" version tags to "English Dub" in clean_language_name (src/tui/screens/details.rs).
  • Added native 540p resolution badge mapping in src/tui/widgets/badge.rs to distinguish true 540p media encodes from 480p.
  • Deduplicated episode entries in src/providers/dramachi/client.rs across multi-resolution manifests, preventing duplicate episode rows while sorting available streams in descending resolution priority.
• 4KHDHub Resolution Detection & Numeric Sorting:
  • Expanded detect_quality in src/providers/fourkhdhub/parser.rs to detect 4K, UHD, 2160, 1080, FHD, 720, HD, and 480 tokens.
  • Replaced ASCII string sorting with numeric resolution sorting (resolution_u64() descending, then size_bytes descending) in parse_releases, ensuring 4K UHD BluRay REMUXes prioritize ahead of lower-resolution streams.
• MovieBox High-Bitrate Server Catalog Merging:
  • Merged mobile DASH manifests (/subject-api/play-info/v2) and full-bitrate server files (/subject-api/resource) concurrently in MovieBoxClient::episode_streams (src/providers/moviebox/mod.rs), deduplicating stream links and sorting releases by numeric resolution and size.
• External Player Adaptive Quality Optimization:
  • Added --ytdl-format=bestvideo+bestaudio/best and --hls-bitrate=max to mpv command invocation in src/player.rs to prevent adaptive demuxers from locking into low-bitrate streams.
  • Added --adaptive-logic=highest to VLC invocation in src/player.rs.

Changed

• Minimalist Addon Manager Modal Redesign & Balanced Geometry:
  • Streamlined Addon Manager popup into a content-fitted modal matching the provider popup design language, eliminating empty right-side letterboxing and arbitrary vertical blank gaps.
  • Replaced noisy capability bracket badges ([Core], [Meta], [Streams], [Catalog]), button bracket wrappers ([ Add Manifest URL ]), and arbitrary gap rows with continuous list rhythm, clean checkmarks (✓) for active addons, symmetric 2-cell horizontal padding, and full-width background highlight bars (highlight_symbol("")).
  • Aligned mouse click hitboxes and keyboard navigation with simplified two-variant row indexing (Addon(usize) and AddUrl).
• Contextual /config Command Separation & Slash Command Cleanup:
  • Promoted /config to a dedicated slash command rather than an alias for /settings.
  • Restricted /config suggestion visibility to contexts where a configuration modal exists: TV mode (playlist manager) and Addons provider (manifest manager).
  • Added a contextual guidance notification when /config is entered while MovieBox or 4KHDHub is active, prompting users to use /settings for preferences or switch to Addons (Ctrl+P/^P) to configure addons.
  • Restored missing /browse description in SlashCommand::description_for to display proper annotations in search suggestions.
  • Added contextual /config command row to in-app help overlay (?) under TV Mode and Addons provider.
  • Pruned redundant and confusing slash command aliases (/pref, /preferences, /options, and /fav), establishing /settings and /favorites as single canonical commands while retaining universal terminal conventions (/? for /help, /q//quit for /exit).

Refactored

• Streamlined MovieBox Episode Stream Resolution:
  • Replaced speculative parallel get_resources and secondary fetch_resource_page fallbacks in providers/moviebox/mod.rs with direct play-info/v2 resolution.
  • Eliminated sprawling 60-page background resource pagination loop in src/tui/app/requests.rs, cutting redundant network requests and preventing dead community upload parsing.

[0.1.21] - 2026-09-19

Added

• Automated Issue Quality, Version Validation, and Duplicate Management:
  • Modernized GitHub issue templates (.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/) to link directly to official mdBook documentation site guides (mesamirh.github.io/MovieBox-Tui/).
  • Added .github/workflows/incomplete-issue.yml with semver release validation checking user versions against latest GitHub releases and printing platform upgrade commands.
  • Implemented automated OS labeling (os: android, os: linux, os: macos, os: windows), title sanity validation, and Termux player setup guidance.
  • Added automatic removal of needs-info and stale labels when the issue author provides responses.
  • Added .github/workflows/duplicate-detector.yml using actions-cool/issues-similarity to flag and cross-reference duplicate issue submissions.
  • Added .github/workflows/stale.yml to automatically close abandoned needs-info issues after 7 days of inactivity.

Security

• Dependency Advisory Remediation:
  • Updated rustls to 0.23.45 and rustls-webpki to 0.103.15, resolving security advisory RUSTSEC-2026-0285 (TLS 1.3 handshake boundary handling).

Performance

• TUI Landing Frame Latency & Allocation Pruning:
  • Reduced landing frame draw latency from 28.95 µs to 23.03 µs (-20.4%) by eliminating per-frame heap allocations (logo_text: &'static str, zero-copy &rows.rects borrowing) and caching search result metrics across unscrollable viewports.
• Zero-Copy Title Normalization (clean_moviebox_title):
  • Converted clean_moviebox_title from an allocating String generator to a pure zero-copy slice parser (&str -> &str), replacing allocating .to_lowercase() substring searches with in-place ASCII case-insensitive matching (rfind_ignore_ascii_case).
  • Achieved sub-microsecond parsing latency: 191.43 ns/op over 10,000 operations with zero heap allocations.

Changed

• Windows Installer Terminal Lifecycle and Environment Propagation:
  • Replaced process-terminating exit statements with scoped return in install.ps1, preventing host terminal windows and tabs from abruptly closing during piped iex execution or on preflight warnings.
  • Added Win32 WM_SETTINGCHANGE environment broadcast via SendMessageTimeout, forcing Windows Explorer and newly launched terminals to immediately refresh PATH without requiring a system sign-out.
  • Removed buffer-wiping [Console]::Clear() from installer header initialization to preserve user terminal diagnostic history.
  • Stripped Unix $ shell prompt prefix from streaming launch guidance and added direct binary execution fallback path (& "$ExePath") for existing terminal windows.
• Concise Error and Status Messaging:
  • Streamlined ProviderError::user_message to output compact, high-signal status messages under 40 characters for mobile and compact viewports.
  • Replaced sprawling raw socket errors and leaked endpoint URLs with clear failure reasons (CircleFTP unreachable: requires BDIX network., MovieBox timed out., Cannot reach 4KHDHub., No results found.).
  • Shortened 4KHDHub playback and download resolution timeout messages to fit single-row status lines (4KHDHub timed out.).
  • Sanitized subtitle download/write error strings to prevent raw filesystem/network error leaks.
  • Compacted addon torrent stream warning to Blocked {} torrent streams. HTTP only..
  • Streamlined player crash fallback diagnostic to Player exited (code {code})..

Fixed

• In-Flight Notification Replacement & Compact Stream Errors:
  • Generalized notification category matching in AppState::notify across stream and playback domains, ensuring stream resolution errors replace in-flight “Preparing playback” toasts in-place instead of creating visual overlapping.
  • Compacted 4KHDHub stream error messages from 135-character redundant text blocks to concise messages under 30 characters (Mirrors dead or expired.).
• 4KHDHub Mediator Redirector Resolution:
  • Implemented automatic mediator unpacker in src/providers/fourkhdhub/hubcloud.rs supporting greenmotors.club and greenmountmotors. intermediate redirector domains.
  • Implemented multi-stage decoding pipeline (double Base64, ROT13, JSON extraction) to transparently recover downstream HubCloud and HubDrive mirror endpoints without external browser dependencies.
  • Excluded mediator domains from direct file classification in parser.rs and added mediator domain rejection to validate_playback_url.
• Playback vs Download Mirror Resolution Separation:
  • Introduced ResolutionIntent (Playback vs Download) in src/providers/models.rs and wired through resolve_release.
  • For playback, prioritized seekable multi-connection video CDNs (pixel.hubcloud. -> Google Video CDN, Cloudflare R2, PixelDrain API) while deprioritizing single-use download workers (workers.dev).
  • Added downloadQuotaExceeded and Access Denied error body detection in FourKHdHubClient::preflight to instantly reject exhausted worker links and prevent IINA HTTP authentication dialogs.
• 4KHDHub Multi-Stream Deduplication:
  • Fixed an issue where 4KHDHub stream releases were prematurely collapsed into a single item by scoping query-string-insensitive URL deduplication strictly to MovieBox CDN streams.
  • Upgraded 4KHDHub stream cache schema to v4_ to invalidate stale single-stream caches.
• Terminal Color Support Environment Isolation:
  • Scoped process environment lookups (ALACRITTY_WINDOW_ID, WEZTERM_EXECUTABLE, TILIX_ID, VTE_VERSION) strictly to ColorSupport::current() rather than the pure classify_terminal helper.
  • Eliminated host environment variable leakage where running tests inside Alacritty or WezTerm falsely forced 256-color and basic terminals to report Truecolor support.
  • Extracted pure is_vte_version_truecolor validator, eliminating non-thread-safe std::env::set_var test mutations.
• Android Termux Intent Opener Resiliency & Socket Fallback:
  • Implemented multi-opener resolution in src/player.rs returning ordered candidate commands (termux-am → termux-open → termux-open-url).
  • Added automatic in-flight fallback in src/tui/app/playback.rs: if termux-am exits with am.sock / socket connection failure on Android 12+, MovieBox-TUI automatically retries with termux-open without halting playback.
  • Replaced long and inaccurate "Run: pkg install -y termux-am" notifications with concise mobile-formatted messages under 32 characters (Termux Setup: Run 'pkg install termux-tools'., No Player: Install a video player., CLI mpv: Switch to Android Player in /settings.).
• tmux Poster Image Passthrough:
  • Replaced the hard-coded $TMUX detection block in src/tui/terminal.rs with an outer terminal graphics capability probe (GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR, KITTY_WINDOW_ID, WEZTERM_EXECUTABLE, ITERM_SESSION_ID, ALACRITTY_LOG, ALACRITTY_WINDOW_ID, foot).
  • Enabled automatic poster graphics queries and DCS passthrough inside tmux sessions running within Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2, foot, and Alacritty, eliminating empty “No Art” placeholders.
• Legacy Windows Console Compatibility (Windows 8.1 & conhost):
  • Eliminated unsupported underline-color control codes from ratatui crossterm backend, restoring full TUI rendering on Windows 8.1 and legacy Windows console hosts where SetUnderlineColor causes draw frame errors.
  • Pruned unused all-widgets, widget-calendar, and macros feature dependencies from ratatui build graph.
• Update Modal Geometry & Symmetrical Border Padding:
  • Eliminated unnecessary dead vertical gap below action buttons in “Update Available” dialog by calculating exact rendered line heights (update_modal_layout_with_env) accounting for installation environment notices.
  • Symmetrized vertical padding with balanced 1-row margins above the version header and below the action button row, eliminating bottom-heavy content displacement.
  • Aligned inner horizontal margins to a uniform 2-column padding on both left and right borders, preventing premature right-side text truncation.
  • Synchronized mouse click hitbox (button_row_y) with rendered action buttons across all package environments (DirectReplace, Homebrew, Termux, Flatpak, Snap).

[0.1.20] - 2026-09-14

Added

• Overview and Synopsis Modal with Stremio Episode Summary Support:

  • Implemented a centered, scrollable Overview/Synopsis dialog (draw_overview_modal in src/tui/overlay.rs) for inspecting full, unwrapped descriptions of movies, TV shows, and episodes without layout distortion.
  • Added keyboard shortcut i / I and footer action [i] Info in the Details screen to toggle the overview dialog, with ↑/↓/j/k/PageUp/PageDown content scrolling and Esc/q/Enter/i dismissal.
  • Added mouse interaction opening the overview modal when clicking the header metadata card, dismiss-on-outside-click, and mouse wheel scrolling.
  • Appended ... [i] truncation indicator in header synopsis rendering when text exceeds the bounded header row budget.
  • Extended canonical Episode data model (src/providers/models.rs) with pub overview: Option<String> and updated the Stremio Addons metadata adapter (src/providers/addons/) to deserialize and forward episode descriptions and titles from MetaVideo.

• Modal Picker Navigation & Page Scrolling Unification:

  • Added j and k vim key navigation across Browse Categories, TV Playlist Manager, and Stremio Addon Manager popups, unifying list navigation bindings across all modals.
  • Added PageUp and PageDown 5-item stepping to Provider menu and Player picker popups, and Home / End boundary jumping to Player picker.
  • Fixed PageUp and PageDown in Help overlay to scroll by dynamic visible terminal page height instead of single-line stepping.
  • Directly confirmed or canceled download confirmation dialogs via y/Y and n/N only when active, preventing dead branches on the Details screen.

• Named Constants & Path Centralization:

  • Extracted canonical TERMUX_PREFIX_USR constant in src/updater/artifact.rs and refactored scattered Termux binaries and library path probes across src/player.rs.
  • Extracted STANDARD_UNIX_BIN_DIRS in src/player.rs consolidating repeated /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, and nix profiles.
  • Extracted MAX_PLAYLIST_BYTES (15 MiB limit) in src/providers/tv/parser.rs replacing 4 duplicate inline checks.
  • Added total_duration() on NotificationKind in src/models.rs, eliminating duplicated duration matching in src/tui/overlay.rs.
  • Extracted ENV_MOVIEBOX_PLAYER, STREAM_REFERER, SESSION_CACHE_FILE, APP_HTTP_USER_AGENT, release_tag_url, and CIRCLEFTP_BASE_URL into canonical module constants.

Changed

• Modal Geometry and Margin Symmetrization:
  • Balanced four-sided padding in draw_updating_modal (“Self-Update in Progress”), standardizing outer dimensions to 50x7 columns with equal 1-row top and bottom margins and symmetrical side margins.
  • Symmetrized “Update Available” modal layout in src/tui/overlay.rs by calculating exact rendered line heights instead of over-allocating fixed header and footer rows, eliminating empty vertical gaps above the button row.
  • Removed premature text truncation in update modal bullet items, allowing release notes to span the full available width of the inner frame.
  • Synchronized mouse click hitbox for update modal action buttons (button_row_y) with rendered button coordinates.
  • Stripped redundant "Press [o] to read full changelog on GitHub" line from release note bodies to avoid duplicating the bottom [o] Open Release Page action button.

Fixed

• Codebase Production-Readiness & Reliability Hardening:

  • Fixed UTF-8 byte boundary slicing panic in download path input rendering (src/tui/widgets/settings.rs) by computing grapheme-to-byte offsets via input.cursor_byte_offset().
  • Prevented playback lockups when stream resolution fails or times out in background resolution tasks (src/tui/app/playback.rs) by dispatching Action::PlayerExited to reset is_resolving_playback and is_playing.
  • Resolved permanent Flatpak player cache miss loop (src/player.rs) by checking command string prefixes ("flatpak run ") alongside filesystem path probes.
  • Prevented GNU Automake /usr/bin/am on desktop Linux from being falsely detected as the Android Activity Manager (src/player.rs) by strictly gating system am probes behind target_os = "android".
  • Isolated Details screen keyboard handling from background pane cycling and conflicting modal actions when is_download_subtitle_popup is active (src/tui/app/keyboard.rs).
  • Cleared stale modal overlay flags on provider switches and view resets (src/tui/app/navigation.rs and src/tui/state.rs).
  • Detached Windows self-updater helper process (src/updater/apply.rs) using DETACHED_PROCESS and CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP, preventing console termination on exit from aborting in-flight binary replacement.
  • Isolated background yt-dlp downloads on Windows (src/tui/app/download.rs) in a separate process group (CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP), preventing terminal Ctrl+C interrupt signals from prematurely killing active downloads.
  • Restricted Android ~/storage/downloads directory path overrides (src/service.rs) strictly to verified Termux environments (is_termux_environment()), preserving standard desktop Downloads paths on Linux and macOS.
  • Exempted live TV streams and media lacking duration (duration_seconds: None) from the Continue Watching shelf (src/history.rs), preventing infinite in-progress shelf entries.
  • Enforced 15MB file size limits (MAX_PLAYLIST_BYTES) on local M3U playlist file reads (src/providers/tv/parser.rs), preventing memory exhaustion when reading oversized local files.
  • Suppressed background list scrollbars on Details screen (src/tui/screens/details.rs) and Home search results (src/tui/screens/home.rs) when modal overlays (such as synopsis description, download confirmation, or settings) are active, preventing bright purple scrollbar tracks from bleeding onto dimmed backdrop panes.
  • Fixed subtitle proxy header duplication and conflicting MIME type bug (src/proxy.rs) by writing Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * and subtitle Content-Type outside the upstream header loop, stripping query parameters and case-normalizing URLs (.srt/.vtt) to override upstream generic content types and ensure clean single-header responses across media players.
  • Corrected BDIX network probing in src/tui/app/system.rs by querying CircleFTP’s active API route (/api/posts) instead of unrouted 404 /api, concurrently evaluating all DhakaFlix mirror endpoints (172.16.50.7/14/12/9), and preserving existing user-enabled mirror states across startup probes.

• External Player Launch Reliability & Crash Normalization:

  • Filtered false PlayerCrashed notifications when VLC exits with status code 1 and empty stderr (VLC normal exit / end of stream with --play-and-exit), and treated Unix SIGTERM signal termination as a clean user/OS-initiated quit.
  • Eliminated process pipe deadlock and blocking thread leaks when media players spawn persistent background subprocesses by reading stderr concurrently with child.wait() and applying a 2-second drain timeout.
  • Removed Windows Store App Execution Alias (Microsoft\WindowsApps\vlc.exe) from VLC candidate paths, preventing 0-byte reparse points from hijacking detection and failing launch.
  • Emitted separate, independent --http-header-fields CLI arguments for mpv and IINA instead of comma-joining them, preventing header values with commas (cookies, MIME types) from being parsed into corrupted fragments.
  • Added ~/Applications/IINA.app/Contents/MacOS/iina-cli candidate path probe and surfaced diagnostic status warning when IINA falls back to open -a IINA without CLI argument support.

• Text Input Widget Cursor Truncation & Ellipsis Normalization:

  • Fixed double-ellipsis rendering ("......") in single-line text inputs when text exceeds boundaries by retaining single-ellipsis trailing truncation and implementing reverse cursor-adjacent prefix truncation from the cursor backwards.

• Help Screen Scroll Indicator Math & Home Multi-Column Thumb Tracking:

  • Corrected denominator in single-column scroll position display in src/tui/screens/help.rs from scroll + 1 / max_scroll to scroll + 1 / max_scroll + 1, eliminating 11/10 display anomalies at bottom scroll boundaries.
  • Synchronized search results scrollbar thumb position and viewport bounds in src/tui/screens/home.rs with calculated row coordinates (div_ceil(columns)) rather than raw linear item counts.

• Provider Quality Parsing & DhakaFlix ID Port Robustness:

  • Handled "4k" and "2160p" explicitly in Release::resolution_u64 in src/providers/models.rs, preventing BDIX 4K releases from falling back to 1080p sort priority.
  • Replaced colon-splitting in DhakaFlix ID parsing with rfind(":/") delimiter slicing in src/providers/bdix/dhakaflix/client.rs, preventing base URLs with explicit ports (:8080) from corrupting API path requests.

• Windows Process Group Isolation & Unix Signal Reporting:

  • Configured CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP on Windows in external player spawning (playback.rs), preventing terminal interrupt signals (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+Break) from terminating active external players.
  • Inspected Unix exit status signals in clean_player_error when exit code is None, reporting informative diagnostics (Player terminated by signal {sig}.) instead of generic failure messages.
  • Added AppState::reset_details_view() to reset selector panes, season/episode selections, and modal state when leaving Details screen, and aborted pending stream pool and episode prefetch tasks.

Performance

• Action Enum Footprint Reduction (73.6% Memory Reduction):

  • Boxed MediaDetails in Action::PreviewSuccess and Action::DetailsSuccess, and boxed WatchHistoryItem in Action::MarkWatched and Action::UpdateProgress, reducing Action enum memory footprint from 424 bytes to 112 bytes across all event queues and channel messages.

• Zero-Allocation Addons Catalog Parsing & Stream Deserialization:

  • Centralized fallback catalog parsing in parse_catalog_metas in src/providers/addons/client.rs using Value::take, eliminating intermediate array cloning during catalog and stream deserialization.

• Theme ColorSupport Environment Probe Memoization:

  • Cached ColorSupport::current() via std::sync::LazyLock in src/tui/theme.rs, eliminating repeated inspection of terminal environment variables on every theme load and swatch render.

• Overview Modal Text Wrapping Deduplication:

  • Consolidated layout calculation and line wrapping in draw_overview_modal into a single pass, eliminating redundant duplicate text wrapping passes per frame.

• Browse Preset In-Place Sorting & Mouse Event Allocation Pruning:

  • Replaced full clone of AppState::browse_metrics during search result sorting with disjoint field borrows, eliminating heap allocations during browse ranking.
  • Replaced deep clone of MediaDetails on every mouse event in the Details screen with borrowed field inspection.

Removed

• Dead Code and Obsolete Action Variants:

  • Removed unused Action::LaunchPlayer (consolidated into Action::LaunchPlayback), removed dead selection_symbol in Details screen, removed obsolete _fourk_release legacy check in MovieBox adapter, and replaced runtime b64_decode in MovieBox signing with a pre-computed byte literal.
  • Consolidated duplicate text buffer keyboard navigation branches across download dir, addon URL, and TV playlist inputs into TextInputBuffer::handle_key.

• README Walkthrough Media Asset and Donate Anchor Focus:

  • Updated the WebM walkthrough video attachment link to the latest asset URL across all localized READMEs and documentation.
  • Moved the #optional-support anchor target inside the collapsible <details> container with tabindex="-1", enabling native browser ancestor-revealing and keyboard focus navigation to automatically expand the crypto donation section when clicking the Donate badge.

• Termux Android Player Prioritization and Compact Error Diagnostics:

  • Prioritized PlayerKind::AndroidIntent at index 0 in player::detect() when running inside Termux, preventing auto-selection of headless CLI mpv or vlc when CLI packages are installed without an active X11/Wayland display server.
  • Piped stdout in addition to stderr for AndroidIntent process spawning in src/tui/app/playback.rs, capturing intent dispatcher errors (ActivityNotFoundException, no activity found to handle Intent, am.sock socket connection failures) previously discarded by Stdio::null().
  • Replaced generic Crash code: 1 modals with compact, player-neutral diagnostics for missing video player apps (No Video Player: Install a video player on Android.), unconfigured Termux intent tools (Termux Setup Needed: Run: pkg install -y termux-am), and headless mpv execution in Termux (CLI mpv Unsupported: Switch to Android Player in /settings.).
  • Tuned mobile toast message height constraints in src/tui/overlay.rs (max_msg_lines = 2 when area.height >= 20 and area.width < 65), ensuring two-line diagnostics are rendered without premature truncation on mobile portrait screens.

[0.1.19] - 2026-09-13

Added

• VLC MovieBox DASH and Signed Cookie Streaming Compatibility:

  • Added a detached loopback HTTP sidecar proxy (--proxy-for-vlc) enabling VLC playback for MovieBox MPEG-DASH and MP4 streams protected by AWS CloudFront signed cookies (CloudFront-Policy, CloudFront-Signature, CloudFront-Key-Pair-Id).
  • Implemented hierarchical path proxy routing (/https/<host>/path and /http/<host>/path) in src/proxy.rs; VLC’s adaptive demuxer resolves relative segment URLs against the proxy path, eliminating query-string stripping that caused 400 Bad Request on DASH segment fetches.
  • Added in-flight DASH manifest rewriter targeting origin CDN hosts to rewrite relative and absolute segment URLs to route through the local proxy.
  • Added zero-copy chunked streaming using reqwest::Response::bytes_stream() for constant-memory chunk forwarding without buffering full segments in RAM.
  • Configured platform process detachment via process_group(0) on Unix and DETACHED_PROCESS with CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP on Windows, ensuring streaming survives terminal window closure.
  • Updated supports_headers and header_capable_players in src/player.rs to allow VLC as a supported player for all streaming sources.

• Android Intent MovieBox Playback via Loopback Proxy:

  • Extended loopback HTTP sidecar proxy (src/proxy.rs) to support PlayerKind::AndroidIntent for streams requiring CloudFront signed cookies.
  • Enabled AndroidIntent in supports_headers and header_capable_players, allowing external players on Android (VLC, MX Player, Just Player) to play MovieBox streams without header compatibility errors.
  • Added proxy route /sub/<encoded_url> with CORS headers and proper MIME typing (application/x-subrip, text/vtt), injecting WebVTT adaptation sets into MPEG-DASH manifests.

Fixed

• Crash Hardening & Bounds Safety:
  • Fixed potential usize arithmetic underflow on empty search results in navigation handler (.saturating_sub(1)).
  • Fixed potential usize arithmetic underflow on empty player picker navigation.
  • Guarded JWT token split indexing with safe .get(1) pattern matching in MovieBox session parser.
  • Hardened string slicing against non-ASCII UTF-8 character boundary hazards in DhakaFlix title/year parsing.
  • Bounded help modal line-window slicing index to prevent out-of-bounds panics under constrained terminal heights.
  • Clamped confirmation dialog action-row coordinate calculation to modal bounds on small screens.
• UI Layout & Mouse Synchronization:
  • Extracted shared split_main_and_download layout helper, eliminating constraint divergence between mouse hit testing and rendering passes.
  • Synchronized details screen workflow step mouse hit-detection with dynamic text layout bounds.
  • Replaced byte length count with display Unicode width for notification toast badge column derivations.
  • Fixed addon manager badge column calculation to derive from visual Unicode width.
  • Fixed provider selection popup list scroll state retention in Home screen rendering.
• Concurrency, Architecture & Network Safety:
  • Resolved architectural layer violation where provider modules directly imported text utilities from TUI presentation layer.
  • Tracked pagination search, stream pool initialization, and episode prefetch tasks in RequestTaskHandles for prompt cancellation on navigation.
  • Offloaded synchronous filesystem writes and directory creations in playback, download, and startup paths to background threads.
  • Throttled high-frequency download progress channel event dispatch to 100ms intervals.
  • Filtered forwarded Stremio addon stream HTTP headers against strict allowlist to prevent SSRF or credential leakage.
  • Hardened network URL reachability probe to enforce HTTP 2xx/3xx status verification.
  • Enforced response body size limits on remote IPTV M3U playlists (15 MB).
  • Propagated DhakaFlix network errors instead of silently swallowing empty streams.
  • Fixed next_provider navigation to handle currently disabled active providers correctly.
  • Consolidated /exit slash command in autocomplete candidate suggestions.
  • Centralized BDIX codec, resolution, and audio language heuristics into shared module.
  • Pruned unused structs and dead code in CircleFTP and Addon models.
• VLC Sidecar Proxy Correctness:
  • Replaced reqwest::Client::timeout(30s) (a hard deadline over the entire response body) with connect_timeout(15s) only; per-chunk idle timeout (60s) now signals stalled transfers without terminating long-running video streams mid-playback.
  • Introduced a ConnectionGuard RAII wrapper ensuring active_connections is atomically decremented even when a connection handler task panics, eliminating a counter leak that kept the sidecar alive indefinitely under 24/7 operation.
  • Set watchdog idle threshold to 10 minutes (600s) with a 15-second polling interval; removed parent-PID liveness polling — the sidecar is fully detached and exits cleanly after 10 minutes of inactivity with no active connections.
  • Fixed host-authority extraction to preserve explicit port numbers (e.g. cdn.example.com:8080) in DASH manifest segment URL rewriting; previously the port was stripped, routing manifest-relative segments to the wrong CDN endpoint and causing 400/403 errors.
  • Capped HTTP request-line and header reads at 8 KiB per line and 64 headers per request, preventing unbounded read_line memory growth from malformed or adversarial clients.
  • Added child.wait() after child.kill() on proxy spawn failure to reap the child process and avoid zombie accumulation.
• Search Poster Loader: Cleared in_flight_posters when navigating back from the Details screen (GoBack → Screen::Details path) so that poster fetch tasks cancelled mid-flight no longer leave permanent “Loading…” placeholders on the next visit.
• Stream Cache TTL: set_provider_stream_cache_typed now parses DateLessThan / AWS:EpochTime from the CloudFront-Policy Base64 payload embedded in release Cookie headers and caps the on-disk cache TTL to min(2h, cf_expiry_remaining) (floor 60s), preventing stale cached stream URLs from being served after CloudFront signed-cookie expiry.
• Process & Task Lifecycle Resilience:
  • Configured kill_on_drop(true) on tokio::process::Command when spawning yt-dlp in start_resilient_download, preventing orphaned download worker processes from continuing in the background if tasks are cancelled.
  • Added JoinHandle tracking for active download workers in RequestTaskHandles, pairing it with an asynchronous watcher that catches background worker panics and dispatches Action::DownloadFailed to prevent permanent state lockup.
  • Hardened loopback proxy sidecar accept loop to catch transient I/O and network errors (EMFILE, ECONNABORTED, EINTR) with a 50ms backoff sleep, preventing premature daemon exit under socket pressure.
  • Ensured fetch_cancel Arc is rotated to a fresh instance and active stream/details fetch tasks are explicitly aborted upon navigating back from the Details screen (GoBack), preventing subsequent searches from being poisoned by aborted states.
  • Wrapped Action::CheckForUpdates in a strict 15-second timeout, preventing indefinite UI loading states during transient network drops or GitHub API stalls.
  • Threaded explicit task cancellation across RequestTaskHandles, download cancellation tokens, and search fetch tokens upon receiving Action::Quit, ensuring all background I/O operations terminate before the terminal exits.
  • Replaced detached spawned tasks in AddonClient::fetch_addon_streams with direct futures via futures::future::join_all, ensuring that cancelled stream lookups immediately drop pending addon network requests.
  • Added sandbox environment detection for Flatpak (FLATPAK_ID, /.flatpak-info) and Snap (SNAP) in src/updater, preventing corrupt in-app self-update writes on read-only mountpoints and guiding users to their package managers.
  • Staged update binaries in the directory adjacent to current_exe rather than a temporary filesystem mount, ensuring atomic replacement across distinct storage partitions (EXDEV).
  • Fixed Windows update helper double-spawn race condition by ensuring the parent process terminates immediately without invoking redundant exec/spawn wrappers.
  • Added root uid check (libc::getuid() == 0) before probing /system/bin/am on Android outside Termux, preventing SELinux exit code 126 crashes on modern Android releases.
  • Gated Android /storage/downloads subtitle path probing with is_termux_environment(), preventing non-Android systems with ~/storage from misrouting subtitle files.
  • Updated config_dir() and data_dir() to fall back to std::env::temp_dir() with an explicit warning when user directories cannot be resolved.
  • Updated install.sh to provide clear guidance when invoked on Windows MINGW/MSYS/Cygwin environments, and hardened SHA256 checksum parsing against leading asterisk formatting.
• TUI & Render Hot-Path Efficiency:
  • Added id_index (HashSet<(String, String, i64)>) to FavoritesManager, eliminating $O(N)$ linear scans across visible result cards on every render frame.
  • Bound window title recomputations in contextual_title() to dirty frame updates or initial launches, eliminating per-tick allocations.
  • Added active screen and editing mode guards to search suggestion debounce in Action::Tick, skipping redundant string operations when not actively typing queries.
  • Consolidated duplicate theme picker keyboard navigation actions (Up, Down, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown) into a single state change handler.
  • Pruned unused scaffolding structs (UiState, CatalogState, PlaybackState, DownloadState) from src/tui/state.rs.
  • Pruned obsolete and unused action variants (ProbeTerminal, ShowSettingsPopup, CloseSettingsPopup) from src/tui/action.rs and consolidated settings handlers.
  • Consolidated all video playback launches through canonical LaunchPlayback actions, removing misleading and redundant LaunchMpv aliases.
  • Prioritized termux-am ahead of termux-open in Android opener probing to preserve HTTP request headers and subtitle arguments.

Changed

• Symmetrical Popup and Picker Margin Alignment:

  • Eliminated lopsided right-side dead space across all floating popup pickers (Theme Picker, Streaming Sources, Media Player, Subtitles, Catalog Browse, and Provider Popup), aligning borders to provide equal horizontal padding on both sides (│ content │).
  • Corrected picker_layout width calculation to content_width.saturating_add(2) (accounting for left and right border glyphs) rather than over-allocating + 6, eliminating 4 phantom trailing empty columns.
  • Standardized symmetrical 2-space padding across all popup picker lines and hit-testing rectangles in src/tui/app/mouse.rs.
  • Updated overlay::picker to automatically apply uniform 2-space left and right margins to dynamic items.

• Linux ARM64 Production Portability & Installer Hardening:

  • Removed Android Bionic TLS assembly hacks (__bionic_tls_align_anchor) and Python PT_TLS byte-patching from the generic Linux aarch64-unknown-linux-musl target, isolating Android Bionic requirements to the dedicated build-android (aarch64-linux-android) NDK pipeline.
  • Configured -C link-arg=-Wl,-z,max-page-size=65536 on aarch64-unknown-linux-musl, aligning ELF PT_LOAD segments to 64KB to guarantee execution compatibility across 4KB kernels (Raspberry Pi 4B), 16KB kernels (Raspberry Pi 5 / BCM2712), and 64KB kernels (AWS Graviton, enterprise Linux ARM64).
  • Added a QEMU (qemu-user-static) execution smoke test gate in the release CI pipeline for aarch64-unknown-linux-musl, actively booting the compiled AArch64 Linux binary and verifying --version before packaging.
  • Enhanced install.sh to proactively detect 32-bit Raspbian userland (getconf LONG_BIT == 32) on 64-bit ARM hardware, providing an actionable native cargo install path rather than attempting incompatible 64-bit binary execution.
  • Improved install.sh smoke test failure diagnostics to capture and print explicit non-zero exit codes when binary execution fails without output.

• Modal and Overlay Declutter — Keyhint Footer Removal:

  • Removed redundant boilerplate footer keyhint bars (render_modal_footer / render_footer) and top divider borders across all modal dialogs and overlay pickers (Settings, Streaming Sources, Themes, Players, Subtitles, TV Config, Addon Manager, Provider popup).
  • Removed duplicate and truncated popup title headers on option-selection pickers (Media Player, Themes, Sources) so they cleanly present options without repeating row labels.
  • Compacted Settings modal vertical geometry to snap directly to the search bar row position and eliminated dead spacer gaps between category tabs and content rows.
  • Added background dimming overlays behind all modal pickers to prevent background text bleed-through.
  • Streamlined Settings rows into single-line entries with aligned label and value spans, removing redundant explanatory subtexts.
  • Expanded Settings → Content Modes from a coarse global toggle to individual provider controls covering MovieBox, 4KHDHub, CircleFTP (BDIX), and DhakaFlix (BDIX) alongside Streaming and Live TV mode toggles.
  • Added an active provider guard ensuring at least one streaming provider remains enabled at all times and automatically falling back to the next available source if the currently active provider is disabled.
  • Preserved backward compatibility with legacy bdix_enabled configs by automatically migrating enabled BDIX state to both CircleFTP and DhakaFlix flags on startup.

• Automatic BDIX Network Availability Probing:

  • Added non-blocking HTTP network probes (probe_url) on first application startup with a 3-second timeout against CircleFTP and DhakaFlix endpoints, automatically enabling accessible optical mirrors on local networks while disabling unreachable ones.
  • Added a dedicated “Re-check BDIX Network” action in Settings → Maintenance allowing users to manually re-probe and refresh BDIX provider availability at any time.

• Watch History Clearing and Item Management:

  • Added a dedicated “Clear Watch History” action row in Settings → Maintenance, allowing users to wipe all watch history records and saved playback positions in one action.
  • Added individual item deletion via d and Delete keybindings when browsing /history results or the Home screen Resume deck, updating disk storage and notifying immediately.

• Unified Streaming and Stremio Addons Engine:

  • Merged separate Addon Mode into standard Streaming Mode; Stremio Addons (ProviderKind::Addons) is now a first-class streaming provider selectable directly via Ctrl+P.
  • Simplified application state model by removing AppMode::Addon and AppState.is_addon_mode, making navigation two-mode (Streaming and Live TV).
  • Routed Addon Manager dialog access through /config when the active provider is Addons.

• Theme Color and Contrast Hardening:

  • Added typed background and surface color helper methods on Theme (surface0_color, surface1_color, surface2_color, crust_color, mantle_color) extracting underlying foreground colors with graceful base fallback.
  • Replaced hardcoded Catppuccin Mocha RGB values across badge, home screen pill, confirmation modal, and settings input backgrounds with dynamic theme color helpers, ensuring correct contrast across all dark and light themes.
  • Fixed resolution badge text on active rows to dynamically derive contrast foreground from theme.crust_color() rather than hardcoded Mocha crust RGB (17, 17, 27).
  • Fixed inactive modal badge text style from theme.muted to theme.overlay1, eliminating low-contrast illegibility on surface1 backgrounds.
  • Hardened Catppuccin Latte light theme tokens (sapphire, lavender, highlight, success, shortcut, rating, teal), achieving WCAG AA contrast (≥4.5:1 on base, ≥3.0:1 on surface1) without sacrificing hue recognition.

• Terminal Color Quantization and Standard Detection Fixes:

  • Fixed rgb_to_xterm256 color quantization to compute squared Euclidean distance to both the nearest 6×6×6 cube entry and the nearest 24-step grayscale ramp, preventing dark and low-saturation palette backgrounds (such as Mocha base, Nord base, and Dracula base) from crushing to pure black or wrong-hue cube cells on 256-color terminals.
  • Aligned NO_COLOR environment variable checks with the no-color.org specification by checking non-empty values (is_ok_and(|v| !v.is_empty())), ensuring empty strings do not disable color support.
  • Constrained VTE_VERSION truecolor capability detection to VTE versions ≥ 3600, correctly identifying older VTE terminals as 256-color rather than truecolor.
  • Replaced hardcoded fallback colors (Color::Rgb(69, 71, 90) and Color::Rgb(116, 199, 236) on landing overflow pill, and Color::White on details metadata) with dynamic theme palette colors (theme.base).

• Notification System Overhaul and Adaptive Layout Polish:

  • Added instant Esc key dismissal for active notification toasts across home and details screens when no popup modals or text input fields are active.
  • Replaced fixed 3-card stack with terminal dimension-adaptive budgets: compact/Termux displays ($H < 20$ or $W < 65$) show at most 1 toast capped at 42 columns and 1 line of message; standard displays ($H < 30$) show up to 2 toasts capped at 2 lines; large displays show up to 3 toasts.
  • Added in-place category lifecycle replacement and de-duplication in state.notify(): notifications in the same category (e.g. Playback, Download, Updates, Cache) or matching title supersede prior in-flight stages and reset the countdown timer rather than spawning redundant stacked cards.
  • Compressed notification copy into terse, high-density phrasing, ensuring status transitions (e.g. playback prep, favorite toggle, cache clear, updates) fit cleanly into single-line messages without multi-row wrapping.

• OS-Aware Header-Capable Player Feedback:

  • Replaced hardcoded multi-line player incompatibility warning paragraphs with concise single-line notifications dynamically listing supported header-capable players for the user’s OS (mpv and IINA on macOS; mpv on Linux and Windows).
  • Eliminated speculative hardcoded provider hints in playback rejection notifications.

• Help Modal Alignment and Shortcut Declutter:

  • Added help_modal_layout in overlay.rs snapping the Help modal directly to the search bar vertical position (search_y), eliminating vertical misalignments where the search bar previously peaked through above or behind the dialog.
  • Added render suppression in home.rs ensuring the search bar, landing deck, and suggestions are completely hidden while Help is active.
  • Migrated Help dialog rendering to ModalFrame with standard backdrop clearing and theme.lavender borders, removing redundant manual block construction.
  • Lowered two-column layout threshold from 102 to 78 columns, enabling clean dual-column layouts on standard 80×24 terminals without scrolling.
  • Streamlined shortcut descriptions: removed non-existent [s] subtitles hotkey, corrected Ctrl+W label, eliminated duplicate /list command in TV mode, and stripped noisy brackets.
  • Pruned dead Theme.bg field and obsolete SlashCommand::PRIMARY array.

• Landing Deck Minimalist Declutter (Resume & Favorites):

  • Replaced wordy “Continue Watching” label with concise “Resume” (reducing header width from 34 to 24 characters) and restyled tab navigation with discrete keyhint syntax ([Tab]).
  • Streamlined in-progress watch metadata from redundant triplets (S01E01 · 5% · 42m left) to clean time-to-finish tags (S01E01 · 42m left), falling back to percentage only when stream duration is absent.

• Details Screen UX Polish and Layout Space Reclamation:

  • Dynamically capped selector_height to the item count of visible selector panes, eliminating excessive empty vertical rows when selector panes have few items.
  • Dynamically capped streams_area height to the exact settled stream count (streams_count + 3), eliminating the massive blank dead space below the stream table on titles with few streams.
  • Formatted Season list items as full descriptive Season N labels and Episode list items as Episode 01 · Title (or Episode 01 fallback), ensuring clear context.
  • Left-aligned data cells in the SIZE column to start at index 0, aligning the size value (1.4GB) directly beneath the SIZE column header.
  • Added symmetric 1-character horizontal padding (Padding::horizontal(1)) to the streams panel container block, preventing text and resolution badges from touching the outer border lines.
  • Replaced heavy filled ● focus markers in pane titles with a minimal › (single chevron) glyph.
  • Removed noisy pane position counters (1/4) from focused pane titles in favor of clean item count badges (› Audio (4)).
  • Deduplicated Audio: metadata badge from the top header line when dedicated dub/audio selector panes are visible below.
  • Replaced legacy middot (·) separators in the header metadata line with clean two-space spacing.
  • Suppressed missing/N/A release years in the metadata badge row.
  • Dropped redundant no-op highlight_style/highlight_symbol calls from selector List widgets.

• Search Results Layout Top Margin and Metadata Alignment:

  • Added dedicated top breathing margin (search_results_layout) above the search bar on non-compact viewports (area.height >= 14), moving the search bar down from row 0 to row 1 to prevent it hugging the top window border.
  • Synchronized mouse click geometry in handle_home_mouse with search_results_layout, keeping search bar and results list hitboxes aligned.
  • Balanced search result card layout across three vertical rows: Row 1 displays title and resolution badge, Row 2 displays rating, release year, and media type, and Row 3 displays provider badge and genres/loading state.
  • Aligned all 3 rows of text with the 3 rows of the poster placeholder (╭──────╮ on Row 1, │ No Art │ on Row 2, ╰──────╯ on Row 3), eliminating the hanging bottom border and empty-line visual disconnect.

Fixed

• History and Favorites Search Settle State:
  • Set has_search_settled to true when querying /history, /favorites, and TV /list, preventing an empty watch history or favorites list from being permanently trapped in a Searching for “...” loading spinner.
  • Suppressed search action pills entirely on empty /history and /favorites views, cleanly presenting the empty state message without clutter.
  • Shortened and streamlined notification copy across commands (Unknown command '{cmd}'. Type '/' for list.), mode switches, playback guards, and settings actions to fit cleanly into compact notification cards.
• Details Screen Selector Panes Tight Label Highlighting:
  • Replaced wide full-width block highlight bars across Audio, Seasons, and Episodes selector panes with compact, text-bounded highlight pills, eliminating awkward empty horizontal background strips across the lists.
• Stream Table Migration to Native Ratatui Table Architecture:
  • Replaced legacy dual-widget hack (Paragraph header + List items) with native ratatui::widgets::Table and Row/Cell primitives, guaranteeing 100% mathematical column synchronization between table headers (RES, SIZE, MEDIA TAGS, SOURCE, RELEASE) and data cells across every terminal dimension tier.
  • Replaced wide string space hacks with declarative Constraint column widths (Length(8), Length(9), Length(18), Length(16), Min(24)), eliminating column drift and text overlap.
  • Added active-selection awareness to resolution_badge_spans: badges render with subtle dark surfaces and theme accent text when unselected, cleanly switching to bold high-contrast foreground badges when the stream row is highlighted. Added automated cross-theme test verifying contrast and legibility across all 9 built-in themes.
  • Filtered out redundant codec and resolution labels in the SOURCE column (e.g. Multi-Res hevc or 1080p), falling back to clean provider origin names (MovieBox CDN) when no distinct third-party upload source exists.
• Subtitle Episode Mismatch on MovieBox Series:
  • fetch_resource_page now accepts season and episode parameters and appends se=/ep= to the API URL.
  • Added robust string and integer parsing for se and ep payload values and matched resource items in episode_streams and service.rs sibling fallback explicitly by item.se == season && item.ep == episode rather than unconditionally taking .first(), preventing episode 1 resource IDs from being assigned to later episodes.
  • Fixed playback.rs using selected_details.id.value (root series ID) instead of state.active_subject_id (dub-aware active ID) as the subject key for caption requests; for dubbed variants the two diverge, causing a cache miss and wrong-subject subtitle fetch.
  • Updated all call sites (download.rs, requests.rs prefetch and season-queue spawns, playback.rs) to capture and forward the current selected_season/selected_episode before spawning async subtitle tasks.
  • Users with pre-existing stale subtitle cache entries can purge old entries via Settings → Maintenance → Purge Cache.
• Search Results Horizontal Margin Alignment:
  • Aligned search results grid horizontally with search_bar_area (x: chunks[2].x + 2, width: chunks[2].width - 4), eliminating the awkward 2-character left overhang where result cards previously started flush against the terminal’s 0-column border while the search input prompt was indented.
  • Synchronized mouse hitboxes and column detection in handle_home_mouse to match the padded results bounds and ignore out-of-bounds clicks in the margin.
• Subtitle Selection Picker Padding and Geometry Optimization:
  • Added symmetric 1-character horizontal padding (Span::raw(" ")) around raw picker list item spans in crate::tui::overlay::picker, ensuring text and active selection pills no longer hug the outer modal borders.
  • Reduced subtitle picker minimum_width from 26 to 20 and unified modal titles to Subtitles, eliminating the excessive 10-column dead space gap on the right-hand side while cleanly fitting the "Subtitles · 1/12" title without truncation.
  • Synchronized minimum_width constraints across rendering and mouse hitboxes in mouse.rs for player (10), theme (16), and subtitle (20) pickers.
• Provider Selection Popup UX and Layout Unification:
  • Replaced manual paragraph iteration in render_provider_popup with ratatui::widgets::List and canonical selection_style, eliminating competing dual-indicator visuals (left bar and background highlight) into a single cohesive selection cue.
  • Added persistent ✓ active provider prefix glyph in theme.success, ensuring the currently active source remains visually distinguishable while navigating through options.
  • Added compact key hints footer ([↑↓] [↵] [Esc]) anchored to the bottom of the popup with automatic geometry expansion in provider_popup_bounds.
  • Styled popup block title with theme.title matching modal frame standards and restored unselected item labels to theme.text.
• TUI Declutter and OS/Terminal Native-Feel Adaptation:
  • Standardized key_hint with split styling ([/] in theme.overlay0, key in theme.shortcut, label in theme.subtext1), improving shortcut readability across all modals and popups.
  • Stripped instructional “Press X” prose from stream failure messages, details error cards, and the update modal.
  • Streamlined home screen bottom bar on compact terminals by dropping redundant mode word labels and keeping clean shortcut glyphs.
  • Trimmed dynamic rotating search placeholder hints to three focused prompts per mode.
  • Added Truecolor detection support for Konsole and xfce4-terminal via TERM_PROGRAM.
  • Added BACKGROUND environment variable fallback for light/dark terminal detection.
  • Updated Help modal title from “Help · Streaming Mode” to clean “Help · Streaming”.
• Universal Solid Highlight Bar Selection Overhaul:
  • Replaced floating cursor and indicator glyphs (▌, >, ▸) across all application screens with full-width solid inverted highlight bars (Modifier::REVERSED with theme.highlight and dark bold text), unifying selection styling across the entire TUI to match the provider selection standard.
  • Upgraded search results cards by eliminating the floating vertical ▌ indicator paragraph and styling the selected card’s title with a tight inverted highlight pill (" " + title + " " in Modifier::REVERSED), stopping exactly where the title text ends rather than stretching across empty card space, preserving rich metadata badge colors on transparent background underneath, and recovering 2 horizontal columns in item_slot_rects.
  • Refactored Continue Watching and Favorites landing deck lists to use empty highlight symbols ("") with clean 2-space padding, ensuring the active row renders as an uninterrupted solid highlight bar.
  • Converted search autocomplete suggestions to use empty highlight symbols ("") with 1-space leading padding, rendering active suggestions as solid highlight bars.
  • Updated all four Media Details panes (Audio, Seasons, Episodes, Streams) to use canonical overlay::selection_style with Modifier::REVERSED and empty highlight symbols (""), eliminating the ▌ glyph and horizontal layout shifts when alternating focus between panes.
  • Unified Provider popup, TV playlist manager, Addons manager, and overlay modal pickers (themes, players, subtitles, browse presets) by removing leading ▌ symbols and rendering clean solid highlight bars.
• Terminal Color Support and Capability Detection Precision:
  • Fixed a critical precedence bug in classify_terminal where term == "xterm" degraded truecolor-capable terminals to 16-color Basic even when COLORTERM=truecolor was set.
  • Made term_program matching case-insensitive across all checks (iterm.app, hyper, tabby, wezterm, warpterminal, warp, vscode, ghostty, konsole, xfce4-terminal, apple_terminal).
  • Added truecolor recognition for VTE-based terminals via VTE_VERSION (GNOME Terminal, Tilix), Warp via warp / WARP_IS_LOCAL_SHELL_SESSION, and Alacritty / WezTerm socket and executable environment variables.
  • Corrected Windows fallback in classify_terminal to ColorSupport::Color256 instead of Truecolor, preventing legacy Windows ConHost sessions from receiving garbled truecolor escapes while preserving automatic Truecolor for Windows Terminal via WT_SESSION.
  • Connected uses_basic_ui directly to ColorSupport::Basic, ensuring all basic and 16-color terminals automatically receive plain borders and simplified ASCII controls.

Removed

• Legacy Addon Mode Routing and Keybindings:
  • Removed Ctrl+A shortcut and the bottom bar Addon Mode button.
  • Removed obsolete Action::ToggleAddonMode.

Fixed

• Notification Toast Title Text Coloring:
  • Styled notification toast title spans with badge_style rather than the default foreground text style, ensuring that Error (red), Warning (yellow), Success (green), and Info (blue) toasts render consistent title colors matching their borders and badges.

[0.1.18] - 2026-09-06

Added

• Minimal Update Available Modal & Indented Release Notes:
  • Formatted release notes into a clean, scannable indented hierarchy under Release Notes: with category badges ([Added], [Fixed]) and bullet points, displaying concise feature titles without decorative tree glyphs, block prefixes (▌), or multi-line duplicate text walls.
  • Stripped decorative star icons and redundant prompt sentences, keeping the header focused on a clean, high-contrast version diff (Installed: vX.Y.Z → Latest: vX.Y.Z).
  • Separated dialog sections with subtle horizontal card divider lines (─) and dedicated action button pills ([u] Update Now, [o] Open Release Page, [Esc] Dismiss).
• Calm, Minimal Self-Updating Progress Dialog:
  • Redesigned draw_updating_modal into a calm, focused card with top and bottom border clearances, eliminating visual crowding against the title and frame.
  • Streamlined the in-flight display into a unified active status line with spinner (⠋ Downloading MovieBox-Tui v... / ⠋ Installing MovieBox-Tui v...) and a cross-platform safety warning (⚠ Please wait • do not close terminal / [!] Please wait - do not close terminal).

Fixed

• Landing Screen ASCII Banner Bleed-Through:
• Modal Frame Corner Backdrops & Transparent Halos:
  • Removed block-level background color overrides from ModalFrame, eliminating dark rectangular halos and square pixel spillage around rounded corner glyphs (╭, ╮, ╰, ╯) across transparent and custom terminal themes.
• Update Modal Geometry & Border Clearances:
  • Widened the modal from 72 to 76 columns to align with standard dialog geometry and provide a generous 3-column safety margin, preventing text lines and bullet points from crowding the outer borders.
• Search Bar Synthetic Cursor Artifacts:
  • Removed artificial block glyphs (▎ / █) drawn directly into search input paragraphs, relying on native terminal cursor positioning without visual cursor duplication or blinking redraw churn.
• README Walkthrough Media Attachment:
  • Formatted the WebM walkthrough attachment link in README.md and docs/README.md for native inline playback.
• CI Performance Benchmark Runner Tolerance:
  • Bound wall-clock timing assertion tolerances during unoptimized debug test execution in tests/performance_audit.rs, eliminating flaky runner noise failures across virtualized CI runners while maintaining release regression bounds.

Performance

• Zero-Allocation Text Truncation Pipeline (src/tui/text.rs):
  • Implemented SIMD is_ascii() fast path in width and migrated truncate_width to Cow<'a, str>, eliminating 100% of heap allocations on fitting titles and text spans.
  • Reduced 10,000-operation truncation latency from 5,243.5µs to 246.2µs (21.3x faster, 524.3ns -> 24.6ns/op) under release compiler profile on Apple Silicon.
  • Streamlined truncate_middle_width to construct output into a single preallocated buffer, eliminating intermediate Vec<&str>, reversal, and concatenation allocations.
• Table-Lookup Hex Encoding (src/cache.rs):
  • Replaced 16 dynamic core::fmt::write dispatches per MD5 digest with direct 16-byte static lookup table indexing in md5_hex.
  • Reduced 10,000-digest hashing latency from 4,597.9µs to 1,829.8µs (2.51x faster, 459.8ns -> 183.0ns/op).
• Preallocated IPTV M3U Playlist Parser (src/providers/tv/parser.rs):
  • Added newline-count capacity preallocation to M3UParser::parse_m3u, eliminating repeated dynamic vector reallocations during large playlist loads and achieving 352.0µs parse duration for 500-channel playlists.
• Buffered Downloader Chunk Write Aggregation (src/download.rs):
  • Wrapped segment file descriptors in tokio::io::BufWriter::with_capacity(256 * 1024), aggregating incoming 8KB–16KB HTTP response chunks into sequential 256KB disk blocks and eliminating up to 96.8% of unbuffered filesystem write syscalls.
• TUI Draw Loop Allocation Pruning (src/tui/screens/home.rs, src/tui/screens/details.rs):
  • Eliminated redundant display_title.clone() and duplicate Unicode width calculations in search result and landing deck render loops, delivering headless draw latencies of 32.3µs/frame (80×24), 43.4µs/frame (120×30), and 67.3µs/frame (160×40).

[0.1.17] - 2026-09-06

Added

• Anchored Provider Selection Menu:
  • Replaced immediate mouse cycling on the landing search bar provider badge ([MovieBox · ^P]) with a styled popup menu anchored directly beneath the provider badge.
  • Added dedicated keyboard navigation (↑/↓/k/j, Home/End, Enter/Space, Esc) for the provider menu while preserving direct Ctrl+P sequential provider cycling across all screens.
  • Implemented shared geometry (search_bar_provider_pill_rect and provider_popup_bounds) between renderers and mouse hitboxes, ensuring exact alignment and zero geometry divergence.
• Redesigned High-Contrast Download Bar & Responsive Layout:
  • Replaced the solid rectangular download gauge with a sleek proportional track ([━━━━━────] on modern terminals and [=====>----] on basic terminals) with filled accent contrast and dimmed surface rail.
  • Added prominent media title indicators on the top border (⬇ Downloading: <Title> or ⬇ S<N>E<N> (<current>/<total>): <Title>) with bold styling and automatic terminal width truncation.
  • Replaced ambiguous whole-area click cancellation with an isolated [x] Cancel button hitbox on the top-right border, preventing accidental download interruptions while keeping the bar mouse-safe.
  • Formatted transfer statistics into clean badges (<Size> | <Speed> | ETA <Time>) with zero unclosed parenthesis artifacts and zero floating dots.
• Details Screen UX & UI Deduplication:
  • Replaced repetitive audio language strings in the metadata header with a concise summary badge (N Audio Tracks), reserving line space for genre tags and IMDb ratings.
  • Eliminated the redundant workflow breadcrumb bar on wide/desktop layouts where selector columns are already visible side-by-side, reclaiming a vertical display row to show more episodes without scrolling.
  • Standardized selector list typography and cursor alignment, eliminating irregular bullet padding and double-space indentation across Audio, Season, and Episode items.
  • Deduplicated stream table columns by showing clean CDN/provider origins under SOURCE and stripping redundant resolution/codec suffixes from the RELEASE column.
  • Added count context to pane titles (Audio (N), Seasons (N), Episodes (N)), providing immediate visibility into available content quantities.
• Native Android ARM64 Release Target & Pipeline:
  • Added native aarch64-linux-android build target to the release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) using Android NDK r26d and Clang (API 24+).
  • Configured automated packaging of MovieBox_Android_arm64.tar.gz with native Bionic dynamic linking (libc.so), valid ELF PT_PHDR program header table, and /system/bin/linker64 dynamic loader.
  • Added Android ELF header validation in CI to verify PT_PHDR and /system/bin/linker64 presence, preventing Could not find a PHDR: broken executable? aborts on Android devices.
  • Updated universal installer script (install.sh) to detect Android Termux on 64-bit ARM and automatically fetch MovieBox_Android_arm64.tar.gz with verified SHA256 checksums, enabling 1-second native installation without on-device compilation.
• Native mdBook & GitHub Pages Documentation Architecture:
  • Integrated mdBook documentation engine reading directly from canonical docs/*.md guides with zero duplicated markdown files and zero third-party web frameworks.
  • Added docs/SUMMARY.md defining table-of-contents chapter navigation across all guides, architecture diagrams, and operational workflows.
  • Added docs/installation.md detailing complete installation instructions for macOS (curl script and Homebrew tap), Linux, Windows (PowerShell), Android (Termux), Cargo, and source builds.
  • Formatted docs/README.md as the book’s introductory landing page featuring core capabilities, prerequisites player matrix, and the live terminal demonstration video streamed from the GitHub CDN.
  • Added minimal root book.toml with navy dark theme, collapsible sidebar navigation, and client-side full-text search.
  • Added automated GitHub Actions deployment workflow (.github/workflows/pages.yml) publishing the documentation site to GitHub Pages on every push to main.
  • Added documentation build integrity validation step in CI hygiene pipeline (.github/workflows/ci.yml).

Changed

• Codebase Cleanups, Dead Code Removal & Shared Logic Centralization:
  • Removed obsolete compatibility forwarders and dead code (render_favorites_landing, remove_last_grapheme, pad_to_width, ctrl_key, and unused shortcut constants).
  • Centralized theme_color in src/tui/theme.rs, eliminating duplicate definitions across widgets and screens.
  • Centralized favorite status lookups for active details into AppState::is_selected_details_favorited, unifying 30-line duplicate calculations in details screen rendering and mouse hitbox detection.
  • Unified subtitle picker label formatting ("None" -> "No subtitles", language sanitization) into format_subtitle_label.
  • Consolidated details pane border, title, and selection styling through pane_styles, eliminating over 50 lines of duplicate style branching.
  • Streamlined details footer action definitions into declarative primary/secondary group builders, cutting redundant code blocks while preserving exact keybindings and layout.
  • Hardened cross-platform process spawning by unifying the Windows CREATE_NO_WINDOW (0x08000000) flag into a canonical constant in player.rs.
  • Decoupled network URL validation by moving is_http_url to crate::net, eliminating backend network provider dependencies on the TUI text formatting module.

Fixed

• Global Modal Background Unfocus & Dimming:
  • Automatically unfocused and dimmed all background components across Details, Home, and Runner views whenever any modal or popup dialog is active, replacing bright active borders, focus bullets, and selection highlight rectangles with dimmed styling (theme.muted).
  • Dimmed background resolution badges (Multi, 4K, 1080p, etc.) and provider origin tags to muted styling (theme.muted on surface backgrounds) during active modal popups, preventing neon badge colors from competing with foreground dialogs.
  • Dimmed unselected list items across Audio dubs, Seasons, Episodes, and Search Results to theme.muted, eliminating bright white text bleeds in the background.
  • Dimmed background footer shortcuts and download bar elements during open dialogs, ensuring visual focus remains strictly on the active foreground popup.
  • Suppressed terminal graphics protocol rendering for background posters when a modal dialog is open, preventing image pixels from bleeding over foreground confirmation dialogs.
• Stream Table Source Column Resolution:
  • Prioritized specific mirror and uploader labels (file.source_label()) in the stream table SOURCE column before falling back to generic provider names, displaying actual source tags (Pahe.in, PSA, NF, GalaxyRG, etc.) when present while retaining provider fallbacks for direct CDN streams.
• MovieBox DASH Progress Normalization, Throttling & Background Continuity:
  • Normalized multi-stream MPEG-DASH download percentages across video (0–90%), audio (90–98%), and merger (99–100%) stages, eliminating progress resets back to 0% when the video stream finishes and the audio stream begins.
  • Enforced monotonic progress tracking and throttled progress event emissions to 250ms intervals, eliminating terminal text jitter and channel saturation.
  • Preserved active downloads and queue processing across content provider switching (Ctrl+P) and mode toggling (Ctrl+T, Ctrl+A), eliminating premature download pauses and false cancellation warnings when navigating the TUI.
  • Added explicit cancellation feedback notifications when dismissing the subtitle selection popup via Esc or outside mouse click, preventing silent stream launch cancellations.
• Empty Search Clear Guarding on Landing Screen:
  • Guarded search-cleared status notifications in Action::GoBack, c/C, and Ctrl+U to only fire when an active search query or loaded results actually existed, eliminating spurious “Search cleared.” status messages when navigating on an already-empty landing page.
  • Allowed pressing Enter on an empty search input in editing mode to cleanly switch back to normal mode without triggering unneeded state resets.
• MovieBox DASH Stream Download Engine & Header Authentication:
  • Forwarded mirror authentication headers (Cookie containing CloudFront signed policy and Referer) through Action::StartDownload and start_resilient_download, eliminating HTTP 403 Forbidden errors on MovieBox CDN downloads.
  • Added dedicated MPEG-DASH stream engine utilizing yt-dlp to assemble multi-track audio/video manifests (index.mpd) into .mp4, maintaining full feature parity with progressive single-file downloads.
  • Integrated real-time child process progress parsing (parse_ytdlp_progress), reporting live percentage, speed, and ETA metrics to the TUI status bar.
  • Implemented dynamic, OS-tailored installation guidance for yt-dlp and ffmpeg when missing from the host system (Homebrew on macOS, package managers on Linux, WinGet on Windows, and Termux pkg install yt-dlp ffmpeg on Android).
  • Hardened Windows background process spawning with CREATE_NO_WINDOW and added cross-platform path resolution fallbacks for macOS Homebrew, Nix, and Termux environments.
  • Preserved external subtitle sidecar retrieval alongside DASH video downloads, maintaining clean <base_dir>/Movies/<Title>/ and <base_dir>/Series/<Title>/Season <N>/ directory hierarchy.
• Series Season Default & Episode List Rendering Normalization:
  • Initialized unselected series search results with season: 0, preventing catalog season counts from masquerading as watch history progress and erroneously defaulting multi-season shows (e.g. Breaking Bad) to their final season on initial selection.
  • Guarded history pre-seeding in search submission strictly to /history queries and active continue-watching items, ensuring search results always open at Season 1 Episode 1 for new series while resuming at the user’s progress for previously watched shows.
  • Authoritatively resolved target season and episode in DetailsSuccess, preserving in-view season and episode positions across audio dub switches while defaulting fresh series navigation to Season 1 Episode 1.
  • Replaced "· " unwatched episode status prefix with clean whitespace padding, eliminating double middots (· · EP 01) and stray dots before unselected episodes in the details pane.
  • Guarded duration formatting against empty strings in MediaDetails, eliminating duplicate bullet dividers (· ·) in the metadata header for series without runtime durations.
• Accurate Playback & Download Preparation Notifications:
  • Replaced misleading “Fetching subtitles” toast notifications during stream and episode download preparation with accurate stream preparation notices (Preparing <filename>... and Resolving episode stream...), eliminating false subtitle retrieval messages when streams rely on embedded subtitles or contain no external captions.
  • Clarified external subtitle download failure status to External subtitle unavailable; playing stream directly. to prevent ambiguity when video containers carry built-in subtitles.
  • Standardized download mirror error notice to No downloadable mirrors were found for this release. and normalized notification title casing.
• MovieBox Subtitle Resolution & High-Speed Multi-Tier Aggregation:
  • Implemented multi-tier subtitle resolution in MovieBoxService::get_ext_captions with immediate early-exit (< 250ms) when the active stream provides rich subtitles (≥ 5 tracks), eliminating 15–20 superfluous sibling network round-trips that previously triggered 15-second playback resolution timeouts.
  • Replaced sequential nested loops for sibling dub crawls with concurrent parallel dispatch via futures::future::join_all, bounding multi-dub subtitle aggregation (e.g. Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat) to < 1.2s.
  • Added asynchronous background subtitle cache pre-warming in Action::EpisodeStreamsReady, fetching and caching subtitle options as soon as streams are received so that pressing Enter on a stream yields an instant < 1ms cache hit.
  • Resolved full multi-language subtitle availability (English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Urdu) on MovieBox by linking genuine upload resourceId identifiers to releases instead of internal CDN transcoding stream IDs.
  • Filtered out 34-byte dummy placeholder caption files returned by transcoding endpoints and deduplicated subtitle tracks by language and download URL.
  • Added automatic fallback to subject resources in MovieBoxService::get_ext_captions when a stream ID does not directly attach captions.
  • Added in_id language code mapping to sanitize_language_label for localized Indonesian subtitle display.
  • Registered draw_subtitle_picker in App::draw, restoring the visual “Subtitles” modal picker overlay during stream playback and download preparation when external captions exist.
  • Tightened modal picker vertical height calculation in picker_layout, eliminating blank gap lines between the last list item and the bottom divider for short lists.
  • Hardened Action::PlayStream error handling with structured diagnostic warnings on subtitle timeout or resolution failure before dispatching direct playback.
• Termux Android Player Exit Code 126 & Intent Bridge Resolution:
  • Eliminated Player Error: Crash code: 126 (/system/bin/am[11]: /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/cmd: Permission denied) crash in Termux on Android 10+ by prioritizing native Termux openers (termux-open, termux-open-url, termux-am) and strictly avoiding unprivileged /system/bin/am shell script calls.
  • Preserved LD_PRELOAD for Termux applet compatibility while prepending system paths (/system/bin:/system/xbin) for system command invocations.
  • Added actionable diagnostic notifications when player execution fails or when no player is detected in Termux, directing users to install termux-tools termux-am and verify an external Android player (VLC, Just Player, MX Player).
  • Updated universal installer (install.sh), README, and documentation guides with termux-am prerequisites and architecture details explaining external Android video player integration versus headless CLI mpv.
• Android Intent Player Stream Compatibility:
  • Eliminated blanket player incompatibility errors on Android: unauthenticated streams (CircleFTP, DhakaFlix, IPTV, direct streams) and streams carrying standard Referer/User-Agent headers (4KHDHub) now dispatch directly to Android video players via termux-open or am start.
  • Added empty-header guard to supports_headers, ensuring streams without authentication requirements are never falsely rejected as incompatible.
  • Forwarded User-Agent, Referer, and subtitles (subtitles_location and subs) as intent extras when dispatching playback via am or termux-am.
  • Prevented circular provider switch prompts when playing 4KHDHub streams by tailoring notification hints based on the active provider.
• Documentation Mobile Layout & Typesetting Normalization:
  • Replaced unparsed LaTeX syntax ($\to$, $\ge$, $\mu\text{s}$, $N\times$) across all documentation guides with standard Unicode characters (→, ≥, µs, N×), eliminating raw unrendered markup in mdBook output.
  • Added responsive documentation stylesheet (docs/custom.css) integrated via book.toml, enabling smooth touch horizontal scrolling, compact cell padding, visible scrollbars, and dynamic code text wrapping across mobile and small screen viewports.
  • Formatted provider matrix table in docs/providers.md with explicit column alignments and bold provider labels to optimize scannability on narrow screens.

Changed

• Documentation Readability & Typography Polish:
  • Expanded reading container width (--content-max-width: 860px) and relaxed line-height (1.62em) with vertical list spacing (0.45em) in docs/custom.css.
  • Added theme-adaptive inline code badge containers (:not(pre) > code) with bordered backgrounds, and framed <pre> code blocks with rounded corners and drop shadows.
  • Added table row hover transitions and container borders across configuration, platform, and player documentation tables.
  • Implemented responsive mobile header title scaling (.menu-title) and smooth anchor navigation scrolling (scroll-behavior: smooth).

[0.1.16] - 2026-09-05

Added

• Home Landing Deck Continue Watching & Multi-Tab Navigation:
  • Implemented interactive multi-tab landing deck on the Home screen supporting both Continue Watching and Favorites.
  • Added seamless Tab and Shift+Tab keyboard cycling between Continue Watching and Favorites tabs with instant row focus retention.
  • Added one-click/key direct resume (Enter, Space, or P) on Continue Watching items, automatically configuring episode advancement, season positioning, and auto-play in Details view.
  • Formatted Continue Watching rows with title truncation, series episode badge (S01E03), progress percentage, and remaining duration (45% · 24m left).
  • Added mouse support for clicking the landing deck header bar to switch tabs, and double-clicking items to play/open.
• Windows TrueColor & High-Contrast Terminal Theming:
  • Enabled 24-bit TrueColor auto-detection by default on Windows 10/11 (conhost.exe, Windows Terminal, PowerShell, CMD), ensuring Windows users receive rich Catppuccin themes out of the box.
  • Overhauled 16-color ANSI dark fallback palette (Theme::fallback), replacing low-contrast dark blue and magenta with high-contrast cyan accents for borders, titles, headers, and highlights.
  • Added background row selection suppression in Settings Hub when modal popups (media player picker, theme picker, download directory input) are active, directing 100% of user focus to floating dialogs.
  • Clamped popup picker minimum height to 7 rows, eliminating visual crowding on single-item selections.
  • Elevated active selection surface styling to theme.surface1 with accent-highlighted cursor indicators (▌ / ▸ ) across lists and settings rows.
• In-App Self-Update Engine Hardening:
  • Added deterministic fallback download URL generation for GitHub release assets and SHA256SUMS when unauthenticated API requests encounter HTTP 403 rate limits.
  • Added active in-flight self-update progress modal (draw_updating_modal) featuring animated Braille spinners, version upgrade indicators (v{old} → v{new}), and real-time status steps.
  • Added environment-aware update modal actions: displays Homebrew upgrade instructions (brew upgrade moviebox-tui) with [b] shortcut on Homebrew installations, Termux installer guidance on Android, and package manager notifications on read-only installations.
  • Added 5-iteration retry loop with bounded 1-second backoff in the Windows update helper script (moviebox_update_helper.bat) to tolerate transient file locks from antivirus or Windows search indexers during binary replacement.
  • Cached full Release metadata in AppState and action pipeline, eliminating duplicate network queries between release checking and self-update invocation.
• Empirical Performance Standards & Benchmark Testing Guidelines:
  • Added strict performance verification standards requiring empirical before-and-after measurements (runtime latency, allocations, frame render latency, I/O syscalls, binary footprint) across hot paths.
  • Documented standardized performance benchmark reporting format in docs/testing.md for reproducible optimization audits.
• Centralized Poster Placeholder & UI Animation Widgets:
  • Extracted reusable render_poster_placeholder widget to src/tui/widgets/poster.rs, standardizing placeholder containers, loading dots, and geometry clamping across Home and Details screens.
  • Centralized loading_spinner in src/tui/widgets, providing uniform ASCII fallback (.., ...) on basic terminals and animated Braille frames on modern terminals.
  • Added zero-allocation cursor helpers (cursor_prefix_str, cursor_column_offset, cursor_split_parts) to TextInputBuffer, replacing dynamic vector and string allocations with zero-copy slices during typing and cursor blinking.
  • Added step_list_selection to src/tui/state.rs, centralizing bounds-safe list stepping for PageUp and PageDown navigation across browse, theme, and favorites lists.
  • Added clear_poster_cache and clear_poster_protocols to AppState, guaranteeing consistent flushing of in-flight requests, LRU image handles, and terminal protocols across provider switches and search resets.

Removed

• Poster Graphics Configuration & Halfblocks Engine:
  • Removed Unicode Halfblocks poster engine (▀/▄), eliminating low-resolution cell distortion, font scanlines, and terminal redraw lag during list scrolling.
  • Removed redundant Poster Graphics toggle from Settings Hub (/settings → Appearance) and config.json, delegating terminal graphics strictly to automatic native GPU protocol detection (Kitty, Sixel, iTerm2).

Fixed

• Cross-Platform Handle Safety & Silent Failure Elimination:
  • Fixed Windows file sharing violation (ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION) in multi-segment download assembly by explicitly flushing, syncing, and dropping the file write handle before executing destination renames.
  • Added overwrite handling on destination collisions during download finalization on Windows, preventing failed renames on re-downloaded media.
  • Guarded FavoritesManager::load_from_path against premature corrupt file rotation on transient read errors, matching history and configuration persistence invariants.
  • Hardened Lua tracker script and state file directory initialization to return None on directory creation or write failures rather than passing non-existent paths to media players.
  • Handled web browser launch failures in Settings Hub (open::that), logging warnings and displaying the repository URL on headless or restricted environments.
  • Added CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag (0x08000000) to the Windows update helper process spawn to eliminate console window flashes during in-app updates.
• Resilient Cross-Platform Cache Clearing & In-Flight Task Isolation:
  • Hardened clear_all_cache with recursive directory contents deletion, leaving the root directory node intact to prevent ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED and ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION failures when Windows processes or shells hold folder handles.
  • Added Windows read-only attribute clearing before unlinking locked files.
  • Included external Android subtitle cache directory (~/storage/downloads/moviebox_subs) and temporary system subtitle caches in the cache purge sequence.
  • Connected Action::ClearCache directly to self.request_tasks.cancel_all() and added cancellation guards in spawn_search_posters, preventing in-flight background requests from writing stale responses or posters immediately after cache clearance.
  • Propagated concrete filesystem Result<(), String> to Action::CacheCleared, replacing hardcoded success notifications with real error reporting.
• Unified Search Result Selection Background:
  • Unified search result card selection highlight across the entire item slot (item_area), eliminating fragmented background rendering between cursor indicators, posters, and text columns.
  • Removed redundant poster sub-area buffer clearing before image rendering, preventing selection background clipping and black gutter artifacts on the right edge of posters.
• High-Precision Playback Tracking & Race Elimination:
  • Eliminated wall-clock race condition where process elapsed time overwrote exact seek/pause positions from mpv and iina-cli Lua trackers.
  • Hardened moviebox_tracker.lua with latched completion: reaching $\ge 90%$ playback or EOF permanently latches completion, preventing shutdown events from reverting completed status.
  • Implemented atomic state file persistence in Lua using temporary files (.tmp) and clean destination replacement for Windows and Unix platforms.
  • Handled unknown stream durations by writing JSON null, preventing zero-duration calculations.
  • Pre-registered media playback on launch (record_start), ensuring immediate watch history persistence for Android intent dispatchers (termux-open, am start) and app fallbacks.
  • Added self-healing recovery in reconcile_from_dir: pre-seeded pending state files carry metadata (title, cover_url, stype, release_year), restoring new items into watch history even after sudden terminal exits or reboots.
  • Implemented smart series episode advancement: completing an episode automatically cues the next episode (episode + 1 or next season) on resume (Space/P) and in the Details view.
• Details View Empty Stream Source Label Geometry:
  • Replaced verbose empty stream message with a compact string (No stream sources found on {provider} (Ctrl+P to switch provider, r to retry)), preventing awkward multi-line text wrapping on standard 80-column terminals.
• Standardized ‘No Art’ Poster Containers Across Terminals:
  • Replaced robot eyes and broken infinite loading spinners with clean, static, centered No Art bordered blocks across search results and details screens on terminals without graphics support.
  • Preserved full-fidelity native GPU graphics rendering on supported terminals while standardizing card geometry and poster container boundaries across all platforms.
  • Gated background poster network requests and CPU image decoding strictly behind image_supported, eliminating redundant network bandwidth and CPU cycles on standard terminals.

Changed

• Provider Switching Shortcut:

  • Scoped Ctrl+P strictly to Streaming Mode for provider cycling, eliminating redundant Ctrl+P handling in TV and Addon modes.
  • Streamlined /config as a direct alias for /settings.

• Pruned Redundant Theme Slash Command:

  • Removed standalone /theme slash command, parser routing, and auto-suggestions; theme selection and visual palette swatches are managed directly within the interactive Settings Hub (/settings → Appearance → Theme).

• Discover Categories Landing Card UX:

• Clean Segmented Landing Deck Header Styling:

  • Replaced crowded decorative star (★) and bracket ([ ]) glyphs with a clean, segmented tab bar header (Continue Watching │ Favorites (Tab)).
  • Streamlined overflow row formatting to centered minimalist pill indicators (+N more · /history and +N more · /favorites).
  • Streamlined Discover & Quick Categories card: elevated /browse command to a right-aligned header badge ([ /browse ]), eliminated redundant /browse · row prefixes, and adapted category rows dynamically between Streaming and Addon modes.
  • Added direct mouse click navigation to discover categories, routing clicks to preset browse queries or the addon catalog menu.

• Command Dispatch & Cache Lookup Optimization:

  • Unified ParsedCommand and SlashCommand into a single canonical enum, eliminating duplicate type definitions across command dispatch and testing.
  • Streamlined image disk cache lookups (get_namespaced_image_cache), eliminating 6-iteration fallback namespace scans across unrelated provider directories on cache misses.
  • Replaced duplicate is_termux_env in player module with crate::updater::artifact::is_termux_environment.

• Automation Workflows & Installer Hardening:

  • Added bounded execution timeouts (timeout-minutes) across all CI and release pipeline jobs to prevent runner hangs.
  • Accelerated release preflight by eliminating redundant cross-compilation target toolchain downloads during source packaging.
  • Streamlined Homebrew formula updater (homebrew.yml) by parsing the release’s attested SHA256SUMS manifest directly with strict 64-char hex validation, eliminating redundant ~50MB archive downloads.
  • Added on-device binary execution smoke tests to install.ps1 and enhanced install.sh error diagnostics with API version resolution fallbacks.

• Documentation & User Guide Streamlining:

  • Overhauled root README.md into a developer-focused technical guide, pruning marketing copy, redundant comparison tables, and promotional buzzwords.
  • Added structured media player setup guide with package manager commands (brew, apt, winget).
  • Updated macOS Homebrew installation with explicit brew trust step required by Homebrew 6.0+ for third-party taps.
  • Streamlined quickstart section to reference in-app interactive help (?) and docs/controls.md, preventing documentation drift.

• Streamlined Test Architecture & High-Signal Test Suite:

  • Consolidated unit assertions for file stem sanitization, MD5 hashing, atomic writing, and badge rendering directly into their respective modules (src/download.rs, src/cache.rs, src/tui/widgets/badge.rs).
  • Pruned 10 redundant, weightless, and duplicate test suites (player_integration.rs, url_security.rs, download_integration.rs, m3u_integration.rs, cache_lifecycle.rs, real_acceptance.rs, grand_user_journey.rs, history_reconciliation.rs, version_upgrade_e2e.rs), reducing integration test files from 20 to 9 focused suites while preserving complete regression coverage.
  • Hardened .omp/AGENTS.md and docs/testing.md with strict engineering rules rejecting weightless tests, duplicate test layers, and monolithic multi-phase journey tests.
  • Aligned update modal keyboard tests with modal input isolation, verifying keystrokes do not fall through to background search results while the dialog is active.

Fixed

• Responsive Text Sizing & Layout Truncation:

  • Raised Details footer split threshold (DETAILS_FOOTER_SPLIT_THRESHOLD) to 106 columns, ensuring shortcuts use a clean 2-row layout on terminals between 80 and 105 columns without clipping.
  • Omitted [Ctrl+P] Provider hint from the Details footer when in Addon mode or viewing addon streams, recovering 18 columns of footer space.
  • Added line-width budgeting to Details metadata: audios and extra metadata (Genre, Director, Cast) now dynamically truncate to available row width without wrapping beyond their allocated lines.
  • Synchronized Settings tab hit-testing (category_tab_rects) with compact rendering (popup_area.width < 58), resolving mouse click target divergence on compact terminals.
  • Added dynamic subtext and label truncation in Settings rows, preventing 2-row Paragraph wrapping and off-screen line displacement.
  • Replaced hardcoded path truncation in Settings download directory with dynamic middle truncation (truncate_middle_width), maximizing displayed path length while fitting compact rows.
  • Added dynamic description truncation to Home discover categories card, preventing overflow on narrow (50–54 col) screens.
  • Added responsive compact labels ([Try Provider (P)] and [Clear (c)]) and narrowed separation to No-Results buttons when terminal width is under 56 columns.
  • Removed obsolete Ctrl+P hint from search bar mode pill in Addon mode, replacing it with [Addon Mode].
  • Added available width clamping to non-landing search bar placeholders and status messages to prevent 1-row Paragraph wrapping.
  • Omitted redundant media type separator in search results metadata when terminal width is under 36 columns and release year is present, keeping provider badges intact.
  • Budgeted list entry lengths in TV Playlists and Addon Manager popups to fit within inner popup bounds regardless of installed badge counts.
  • Raised Help menu two-column threshold to 102 columns to prevent keybinding description truncation.
  • Added compact title formatting to download gauge when width is under 60 columns.
  • Added compact button formatting ([u] Update [o] Web [Esc] Back) to Update Modal on terminals under 60 columns.
  • Added compact header formatting to Updating progress modal when inner width is under 42 columns.
  • Added title boundary protection to ModalFrame, truncating overly long titles to preserve border integrity.
  • Eliminated dark rectangular halo artifact around modal popups by removing block-level background color overrides from ModalFrame, allowing rounded borders to cleanly render against transparent and custom terminal backgrounds without pixel spillage.

• Resilient Configuration & Accurate Metadata:

  • Safeguarded user TV playlists (tv_config.json) and HTTP addons (addons_config.json): replaced destructive error-swallowing deletion with timestamped .corrupt.{timestamp} file rotation and sanitized logging on JSON parse failures.
  • Eliminated fabricated S01E01 fallback in addon metadata adapter, accurately reporting empty series episodes when an upstream catalog entry lacks episode records instead of injecting unplayable dummy data.

• Discover Card Layout & Truncation:

  • Fixed horizontal text clipping on discover card category descriptions by adjusting margins_len to account for visual pointer and margin cell budgets.
  • Suppressed discover card rendering while search suggestions dropdown is open, preventing visual overlap.

• Update Modal Input Isolation & Event Guards:

  • Prevented keystroke hijacking: deferred blocking update modal presentation while the user is actively typing in the search bar (InputMode::Editing), ensuring keys (u, o, Esc) never trigger unintended update actions.
  • Added input lock during in-flight updates (is_updating), consuming all keyboard and mouse events to prevent mid-upgrade process termination or disk corruption.

• Comprehensive Multi-Platform Player Detection & Dynamic Settings Refresh:

  • Expanded Windows MPV and VLC candidate discovery across executable-adjacent directories (.\mpv.exe, .\vlc.exe), WinGet Packages (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WinGet\Packages), user Downloads and Desktop extractions, mpv.net (mpvnet.exe, mpv.net), mpv.com, Scoop apps and shims, Chocolatey, portable drive roots (C:\mpv, C:\vlc, C:\tools), and Windows Registry App Paths and Environment\Path.
  • Expanded macOS and Linux discovery across Nix profiles (~/.nix-profile/bin, /run/current-system/sw/bin), Homebrew, MacPorts, user .local/bin, and user/system Flatpak exports.
  • Replaced permanent negative caching (OnceLock<Option<String>>) with non-negative path caching across MPV, VLC, IINA, and Android Intent openers, ensuring players installed after cold start are discovered immediately.
  • Added non-destructive dynamic player detection merging to Settings Hub (ToggleSettingsPopup, ShowSettingsPopup), player selection activation, and value cycling, refreshing available_players in real time without requiring an app restart.

• Direct Playback & Header Compatibility:

  • Eliminated vestigial in-stream “Open with” popup that blocked playback when only VLC was installed, routing playback directly to the preferred compatible player.
  • Prevented silent player overrides: when a user explicitly selects a default player (e.g. VLC) that cannot satisfy stream authentication headers (e.g. MovieBox signed DASH manifests), the app now halts playback and warns the user with actionable detected alternatives instead of silently launching an unselected player.
  • Added structured PlaybackResolution engine with dynamic context-aware notifications across playback resolution and download operations.

• Terminal Graphics Probe Leak:

  • Prevented raw Kitty APC escape sequence leak (Gi=31...) on macOS Terminal.app and legacy non-graphics consoles by skipping graphics stdio probes.
  • Removed unsafe mid-session stdio graphics re-probing on FocusChange events.

• High-Performance Player Detection Engine (src/player.rs):

  • Centralized OS executable probing (mpv, vlc, IINA) into a single probe_player_executable engine, stripping ~150 lines of duplicate path traversal.
  • Added static caching (OnceLock) to IINA resolution and Android Termux Intent detection, eliminating repeated expensive filesystem IO and PATH lookups during playback launches.
  • Expanded candidate resolution: added macOS MacPorts (/opt/local/bin/*) and standard /bin/* locations.
  • Aligned installer (install.sh, install.ps1) player detection with the app engine, explicitly probing standard /Applications/*.app and C:\Program Files deployments so GUI installations are correctly discovered immediately post-install.

• Responsive Mobile Installer Headers (install.sh & install.ps1):

  • Implemented dynamic terminal column detection (tput cols, stty size, and $COLUMNS in install.sh; $Host.UI.RawUI.WindowSize.Width in install.ps1) with automatic multi-tier banner sizing.
  • Eliminated ASCII art banner wrapping and visual corruption on narrow mobile viewports (e.g. Android Termux portrait mode at 40–55 columns) by rendering an adaptive 31-column compact half-block banner (█▀▄▀█...) and dynamic horizontal centering.

• Android Termux Static-PIE & TLS Alignment:

  • Linked aarch64-unknown-linux-musl target as static-PIE (-C relocation-model=pic -C link-arg=-pie) to produce ET_DYN (ELF e_type: 0x0003) binaries accepted by Android Bionic’s /system/bin/linker64, resolving runtime failure (unexpected e_type: 2).
  • Added 64-byte PT_TLS alignment anchor in src/main.rs and post-build ELF program header alignment in .github/workflows/release.yml to satisfy Android Bionic’s ARM64 TLS segment minimum alignment validation.
  • Added automated ELF e_type and PT_TLS validation checks to .github/workflows/release.yml and a post-installation execution smoke test to install.sh.

Removed

• Pruned unused legacy type aliases (SeasonInfo, EpisodeInfo, StreamResource, StreamMirror) in src/models.rs.
• Removed dead util_row struct field from LandingRows in src/tui/screens/home.rs.
• Removed vestigial ShowPlaybackPicker and ShowPlayerPicker action variants and playback picker state fields in favor of direct compatible player dispatch.
• Removed unreferenced static screenshot assets (assets/), reducing repository clone size by ~1.3MB.
• Redundant Slash Commands:
  • Pruned 10+ legacy slash commands (/download-dir, /clear-cache, /update, /github, /probe, /toggle-update, /toggle-bdix, /toggle-streaming, /toggle-tv, /toggle-addons, /enable-*, /disable-*) superseded by the interactive Settings Hub.
  • Removed 300+ lines of redundant command execution and file write probing in src/tui/app/search.rs.
  • Removed duplicate unreachable Ctrl+U key handling in src/tui/app/keyboard.rs.

[0.1.15] - 2026-09-03

Added

• MovieBox MPEG-DASH Stream Playback:
  • Implemented visitor login authentication with JWT session tracking and atomic disk persistence (~/.cache/moviebox-tui/moviebox_session.bin).
  • Added CloudFront DASH manifest resolution (index.mpd) labeled with [Multi] badge in stream listings for multi-resolution playback (1080p, 720p, 480p).
  • Forwarded authentication headers and mobile User-Agent to mpv, IINA, and VLC for authenticated CloudFront DASH demuxing.
• Seekable 4KHDHub Stream Resolution:
  • Prioritized seekable Cloudflare R2, S3, and FSL stream mirrors (HTTP 206 Partial Content) over attachment downloads.
  • Added automatic unwrapping of base64 watch-online redirect URLs and expanded HubCloud button selectors.
  • Concurrently probe resolver mirror candidates in chunks of 3 with a 4-second timeout, filtering expired or broken links.
• Interactive Settings Hub (/settings):
  • Added a unified 4-tab modal (General, Content Modes, Appearance, Maintenance) for media player selection, download directory configuration, live theme palette preview, and provider toggles.
• TUI Layout & Ergonomics:
  • Added /exit slash command (with /quit and /q aliases) to exit and restore the terminal directly from the search prompt.
  • Added direct watch history resume on Space / P for the recorded season and episode.
  • In-place provider switching (Ctrl+P) on the Details screen to re-query titles without returning to the landing screen.
  • Multi-Esc navigation: first Esc returns focus to the search bar; second Esc clears the query and returns to the home landing.
  • Added fluid 10-frame Unicode Braille loading spinners (⠋⠙⠹...) with ASCII fallbacks.
  • Grapheme-cluster-safe text input (TextInputBuffer) across search, TV playlist, and addon inputs with Ctrl+W, Ctrl+U, Delete, and Home/End support.
  • Added 4-tier responsive stream table layout and dynamic single-column fallback for narrow terminals (<85 cols).
  • Added Kitty keyboard protocol support (DISAMBIGUATE_ESCAPE_CODES, REPORT_EVENT_TYPES) for lower latency input on supported terminals.
  • Added terminal theme autodetection using OSC 11 background luminance queries, with NO_COLOR override support.

Changed

• Unified Favorite Keybinding: Standardized favorite toggling across all screens exclusively on f / F.
• Search & Landing UX:
  • Anchored search bar at row 0 across empty, loading, and zero-results states to eliminate layout shifting.
  • Structured zero-results and query error screens with actionable guidance shortcuts ([Ctrl+P] Switch Provider, [r] Retry, [Esc] Back).
  • Enclosed landing favorites list in an aligned bordered card.
• Streams Table Display:
  • Replaced non-existent stream duration column with source and uploader columns, expanding room for codec and media tags.
  • Grouped secondary stream audio/video codec tags (DV, ATMOS, HEVC) with subtle separator points.
  • Isolated stream row selection highlight so background styling applies exclusively to the active stream row rather than table headers.
• MovieBox Client Spoofing: Updated client identity headers to APK v4.0.01 to ensure backend compatibility and avoid upgrade notice videos.
• Search Prefetching: Bounded initial search prefetching to visible viewport bounds to reduce initial network requests.

Fixed

• Stream Playback & Resolver State:
  • Fixed an issue where timed-out or failed stream resolutions left the playback state locked, preventing subsequent playback attempts.
  • Fixed empty stream panel click focusing the pane without inadvertently triggering playback of index 0.
  • Prevented transient “No stream sources found” flash while metadata or streams are loading.
• Metadata & UI Isolation:
  • Guarded search preview metadata and details merging with strict provider and item ID checks, preventing stale metadata leakage when navigating quickly.
  • Suppressed Sixel, Kitty, and iTerm2 poster graphics while modal dialogs or search dropdowns are open to prevent graphic bleed-through.
  • Fixed poster placeholder widget incorrectly drawing over loaded images on the results screen.
  • Fixed text wrapping panic on multibyte / CJK characters during title year extraction.
• Cross-Platform & Installation:
  • Windows: Fixed self-update batch script losing staged binary on process exit, preserved leading backslashes on UNC paths, and sanitized NTFS forbidden characters in tracker state filenames.
  • Android (Termux): Added fallback directory resolution for config, cache, and data paths, and added architecture guard preventing incompatible glibc Linux ARM64 binaries from overwriting Termux installations.
  • DNS: Replaced hardcoded /etc/resolv.conf requirement with custom resolver querying OS DNS first and falling back to public DNS (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9) on zero-config platforms.
  • Installers: Hardened path quoting, signal handling, and TLS 1.2 negotiation in install.sh and install.ps1.

Performance

• MessagePack Binary Disk Cache (src/cache.rs): Replaced raw JSON disk caching with binary MessagePack serialization (rmp-serde) with magic signature MBC1, versioned envelopes, and automatic migration from legacy JSON caches.
• Zero-Copy IPTV M3U Parser (src/providers/tv/parser.rs): Converted playlist attribute parsing to single-pass slice scanning, eliminating bulk heap allocations on large playlists.
• Scraper Efficiency (src/providers/fourkhdhub/): Precompiled static CSS selectors using LazyLock<Selector> across scraping paths.
• Connection Pooling & DNS (src/net.rs): Shared static DNS resolver cache and tuned HTTP connection pool settings (tcp_nodelay, keepalive, idle timeouts).

Removed

• Removed deprecated JSON conversion adapters and untyped serde_json::Value service endpoints in favor of strongly typed domain structs.
• Removed redundant [o] Open With and [s] Subtitles Details shortcuts in favor of /settings media player selection and automatic subtitle loading.
• Removed obsolete * favorite shortcut in favor of f / F.

[0.1.14] - 2026-08-26

Added

• Favorites:
  • Added a Favorites feature for starring whole movies and series (src/favorites.rs, favorites.json), independent of watch history and unaffected by /clear-cache.
  • Added * on the Home screen and f / F on the Details screen to toggle a title’s favorite status, with a ★ indicator on favorited rows and a [f] Favorite / [f] Unfavorite hint on the Details screen.
  • Added an arrow-navigable Favorites row on the landing screen (Streaming and Addon modes) showing up to 5 recently-starred titles, with a +N more • /favorites overflow link; Down from the search bar focuses the row, Enter opens the selected title, Esc releases focus.
  • Added the /favorites slash command, mirroring /history, to load the full starred list into the results view; * unstars the selected row there.
  • Added mouse support for the landing Favorites row (select/open rows, open the full list via the overflow line).
  • Extracted cross-provider title-identity matching into SubjectIdentity (src/models.rs), now shared by watch history and Favorites so remakes, cross-provider duplicates, and movie/series title collisions are deduplicated identically.

Fixed

• External player failure reporting: Treat every non-zero player exit, including exits after several seconds or without stderr output, as a playback error instead of reconciling false watch progress.
• Search focus: Restore Backspace on the Home screen as a reliable way to focus the search input from results or Favorites.
• Season subtitles: Remember an explicit subtitle or no-subtitle choice for every episode in a season download.
• Playback state safety: Sanitize provider and subject identifiers before using them in tracker state filenames.
• Cross-platform release validation: Run all-feature locked builds/tests, binary startup smoke tests, Unix and Windows installer syntax checks, and release-target builds in CI.
• Release artifact smoke tests: Execute each native release target’s produced binary on its CI runner before archiving.
• Documentation accuracy: Document Android intent limitations, the actual Termux binary model, macOS-only IINA support, native runtime verification requirements, and the current automated test count.
• Windows VLC & player spawn fix: Removed erroneous CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag that suppressed GUI window creation and caused VLC to crash on Windows; normalized Windows backslash subtitle paths in --sub-file and gracefully handle subtitle download failures without breaking stream playback.
• Termux player opener resolution: Resolve termux-open, termux-open-url, and termux-am directly in $PREFIX/bin and static Termux paths; remove broken /system/bin/am fallback in unrooted Termux that crashed with Permission Denied (exit code 126).
• Termux dependency path: Remove the Android platform-verifier dependency path that caused the v0.1.12 startup panic; real-device confirmation remains required.

[0.1.13] - 2026-08-21

Added

• Production-Grade In-App Self-Update Engine:
  • Implemented modular self-update architecture (src/updater/ with check.rs, artifact.rs, download.rs, verify.rs, extract.rs, and apply.rs).
  • Added streaming SHA-256 integrity verification validating exact hash matching against release SHA256SUMS.
  • Added hardened archive extraction for .tar.gz and .zip with strict path traversal protection against .. components and absolute root paths.
  • Added multi-platform installation strategies: atomic binary replacement with .old backup and automatic rollback on Unix/Linux/macOS/Termux, detached helper process on Windows, and Homebrew prefix detection guiding users to brew upgrade moviebox-tui.
  • Added active work protection deferring self-update when active video playback or background downloads are running.
  • Connected [u] shortcut and [u] Update Now button in the existing Update Available modal, preserving visual styling, animations, and dismissal model.
  • Added safe terminal state restoration (disable_raw_mode, LeaveAlternateScreen, DisableMouseCapture, ShowCursor) before process exec/restart.
• Update System Concurrency & Platform Compatibility Architecture:
  • Added single-flight guard (is_checking_updates) ensuring manual (/update) and automatic startup checks never spawn duplicate concurrent network requests.
  • Added shared geometry calculation (UpdateModalLayout, update_modal_layout) guaranteeing 1:1 synchronization between popup rendering and mouse hit testing.
  • Added release asset data modeling (Release, ReleaseAsset, TargetPlatform) with deterministic platform compatibility detection across macOS Universal, Linux x64/arm64, Windows x64/arm64, and Android Termux ARM64.
  • Added dedicated integration test suite tests/update_lifecycle.rs testing update single-flighting, error recovery, mouse hit testing, and asset filtering.
• Comprehensive QA & Regression Test Architecture:
  • Introduced the initial 132-test automated suite covering critical algorithmic boundaries, end-to-end user journeys, watch history reconciliation & precision progress tracking, cross-mode history audit, in-app self-update lifecycle, real-world release artifact downloads, live SHA-256 verification, genuine version upgrade execution, content & metadata loading pipelines, stale request isolation, active player session lifecycle & duplicate launch protection, dynamic slash command autocomplete (/download-dir reset), search/command draft cancellation via Esc, error handling, addon manifest validation, mouse interactions, modal dismissals, TUI rendering across terminal size matrices, state reconciliation, crypto HMAC signing, download chunk arithmetic, and URL/stem security.
  • Added structured integration tests in tests/ (including content, error, TUI, history, Favorites, update, release, cache, player, TV playlist, addon, download, and URL-security suites) and test fixtures (tests/fixtures/).
  • Added docs/testing.md detailing test architecture, command references, and manual QA procedures.
• Playback Tracking & Watch History Progress:
  • Added real-time playback position tracking for mpv with injected tracker script (moviebox_tracker.lua) and 5-second periodic state auto-save to disk.
  • Added automatic startup state reconciliation (reconcile_pending_playback_states) ensuring watched progress is preserved even when closing the terminal or killing tmux mid-playback.
  • Added two-tone smooth scrub line progress bars (━─────── 1% (2h 18m left) • Watched 11h ago) and completion status badges ([✓ Completed], [✓ Watched]) in /history and Details screens.
  • Added cross-provider title-based history deduplication and auto-resume from the last watched position.
• Addon Mode Watch History Parity:
  • Added full watch history support (/history) in Addon Mode matching Streaming Mode, enabling seamless watch progress tracking, scrub bars, and completion badges for community HTTP addon content.
• Pluggable Provider Trait & Capability Architecture:
  • Formalized the public Provider and ReleaseProvider traits across all built-in scrapers (MovieBox, 4KHDHub, CircleFTP, DhakaFlix, and Addons).
  • Added ProviderCapabilities (supports_search, supports_pagination, supports_series, supports_subtitles, supports_homepage) and MovieBoxService::capabilities() for dynamic capability reporting.
  • Added structured ProviderError boundaries (Network, RateLimited, NotFound, Parsing, Unavailable) with .user_message() for consistent error notifications.
• Theme System Expansion & Official Color Calibration:
  • Added official Dracula, Gruvbox, and Rosé Pine themes to the /theme picker alongside Catppuccin and Nord.
  • Added alias parsing support for "dracula", "gruvbox", "rose-pine", and "catppuccin".
  • Guaranteed 100% transparent terminal compatibility across all themes with zero background opacity overrides.
  • Fixed modal backdrop rendering by removing fullscreen screen clearing when opening /theme.
  • Optimized live preview navigation to eliminate unnecessary disk I/O on arrow key navigation.
• Universal Multi-OS Player Detection & Flathub/Snap Compatibility:
  • Added sub-millisecond, filesystem-backed player probing across Linux (Flathub, Flatpak exports, Snap, and Native), macOS (Homebrew, MacPorts, App Bundles), Windows (Program Files, WinApps, Scoop, Chocolatey, WinGet), and Android (Termux).
  • Fixed Flathub/Flatpak VLC detection failure by adding direct probes for ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/org.videolan.VLC and /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.videolan.VLC.
  • Added full Flathub/Flatpak and Snap compatibility for MPV (io.mpv.Mpv, /snap/bin/mpv).
  • Centralized player process construction (build_player_process_command) and standardized subtitle flag arguments (--sub-file=<path>) across all platforms.
• Codebase Optimization & Comprehensive Caching Architecture:
  • Centralized application paths (config_dir, data_dir, cache_dir, logs_dir, scripts_dir, playback_state_dir) in src/config.rs.
  • Added dedicated disk caching for Addon Mode stream aggregation (2h TTL), catalog /browse presets (1h TTL), and verified manifests (24h TTL).
  • Added search pagination caching (search_{hash}_{page}.json) preventing redundant API calls when navigating multi-page search results.
  • Eliminated redundant reqwest::Client allocations in background poster pipelines in favor of the shared service.http_client().
  • Streamlined MovieBoxService usage across background tasks and removed redundant addon_client field from AppState.
  • Centralized formatting utilities (format_file_size, format_duration) in src/tui/text.rs.
  • Modernized Config loading and persistence with safe, standard Serde derives.
• Addon Mode (Community HTTP Addons):
  • Added full support for community HTTP addon manifests (/manifest.json, /catalog, /meta, /stream) with dedicated Ctrl+A mode switching.
  • Pre-installed and locked Cinemeta out-of-the-box as the default core metadata provider with zero API keys required.
  • Added interactive Addon Manager dialog (/addons, Ctrl+P in Addon Mode) with one-click enabling, removal, and manifest URL adding.
  • Added concurrent multi-addon stream resolution aggregating playable releases from all enabled stream addons.
  • Added a smart runtime torrent detector that automatically detects if an addon’s streams are 100% blocked raw torrents (e.g., Torrentio without Debrid) and flashes a UI warning toast that only HTTP streams are supported.
• Addon Mode /browse & Curated Catalog Exploration:
  • Added /browse support in Addon Mode with a minimal, organized 4-preset catalog picker (Top Movies, Top Series, Top Rated Movies, Top Rated Series).
  • Added direct catalog fetching (/catalog/{type}/{id}.json) with poster hydration, details navigation, stream resolution, and /reload support.
• Strict Slash Command Guarding & Guidance:
  • Intercepted all / slash commands to guarantee zero remote catalog network requests.
  • Added warning toast notifications for unrecognized slash commands ("Command '/xyz' is not recognized. Type '/' to view available commands.").
  • Added platform-aware mode-guidance toasts (^T / ^S / ^A on macOS, Ctrl+T / Ctrl+S / Ctrl+A on Linux/Windows) for mode-restricted commands.
• Active Mode & Provider State Persistence:
  • Added active_mode configuration field in config.json automatically persisting and restoring the last active mode (streaming, tv, addon) and active provider across app restarts.
• Configurable Mode Navigation:
  • Added /enable-streaming, /disable-streaming, /enable-tv, and /disable-tv slash commands alongside /enable-addons and /disable-addons.
  • Enforced safety validation ensuring at least one mode remains active and gracefully migrating focus when disabling the current mode.
• Dynamic Multi-Source Host & Resolver Resolution:
  • Added 100% dynamic domain-based host extractor (extract_domain_label) and stream tag parser (detect_stream_host) identifying and formatting direct hosts (Pixeldrain, Hubcloud, Fast Download, Google Drive, Mega, etc.) and debrid resolvers without hardcoded tables.
• Full Emoji & Symbol Sanitization:
  • Added strip_emojis and clean_stream_text sanitizing all raw stream titles, release names, source labels, and languages from community addons for clean terminal alignment without broken characters.
  • Standardized checkbox representations to clean ASCII [x] / [ ].
• Complete Mouse Navigation:
  • Added dynamic footer hitboxes for [Ctrl+S] Streaming, [Ctrl+T] TV, [Ctrl+A] Addons, [Ctrl+P] {Provider}, [?] Help, [q] Quit.
  • Added complete mouse click support for Addon Manager modal and browse popups.

Fixed

• Windows MSVC Static CRT Linking (+crt-static):
  • Configured target-feature=+crt-static in .cargo/config.toml for x86_64-pc-windows-msvc and aarch64-pc-windows-msvc, statically embedding the C runtime to eliminate external VCRUNTIME140.dll dependency and resolve 0xC0000135 (STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND) on clean Windows installations.
• Cross-Platform Installer Polish & Windows In-Memory Execution:
  • Replaced file-based execution commands in Windows documentation with the in-memory stream pipeline (irm ... | iex) to eliminate PSSecurityException execution policy blocks.
  • Added immediate active process $env:PATH update in install.ps1 so the command is recognized in the current shell session without terminal restart.
  • Replaced rigid fixed-width boxed summary tables with responsive, borderless hero layouts across both install.ps1 and install.sh, preventing broken box-drawing characters and layout overflow on narrow screens.
• Pending History Reconciliation Order:
  • Sorted pending Lua tracker state files chronologically during startup reconciliation to guarantee correct playback state replay order.
• MovieBox Title Sanitization (DEF-02):
  • Fixed destructive title truncation where leading bracket tags ([Dub], [1080p], [RAW]) and titles starting with parentheses (e.g. (500) Days of Summer) were stripped down to empty strings.
  • Preserved release years in parentheses (Inception (2010)) and added a fallback safeguard returning the trimmed original title if sanitization ever results in an empty string.
• Watch History Identity & Deduplication Collisions (DEF-03):
  • Enforced stype separation in HistoryManager::is_same_show so Movies and TV Series sharing identical titles (e.g. Home) never overwrite one another.
  • Enforced strict canonical identity (provider + subject_id), preventing cross-provider conflicts and ensuring remakes with differing release years remain distinct entries.
• Background Episode Playback State Reconciliation (MISS-01):
  • Fixed a state loss bug in reconcile_pending_playback_states where a completed episode’s watched status was discarded if the user had already advanced to a subsequent episode before the state file was processed.
• Windows MPV Script Options Path Escaping (DEF-04):
  • Fixed path corruption in MPV’s --script-opts on Windows by normalizing backslashes (\) to forward slashes (/), preventing MPV escape sequence parsing from corrupting state_file paths in moviebox_tracker.lua.
• M3U Single-Quoted Attribute Support (DEF-07):
  • Extended M3UParser attribute extraction to support both single-quoted (tvg-id='...') and double-quoted attributes, preserving channel IDs, logos, and groups across varied IPTV playlists.
• Continuous OS-Level SIGINT Handling (DEF-05):
  • Wrapped tokio::signal::ctrl_c() in a continuous background loop to ensure repeated non-interactive OS signals are reliably handled.
• Subtitle Prefetch Fallback (DEF-08):
  • Reduced subtitle download timeout from 30s to 8s to prevent unnecessary startup delays when launching external players if a subtitle mirror hangs.
• Addon Stream Sorting & Rendering:
  • Fixed addon streams randomly scrambling on UI hover when sizes are tied by adding a secondary stable sort based on the mirror label.
  • Fixed misleading 0MB stream sizes for community addons that omit video sizes by cleanly rendering -- instead.
• Terminal Race Condition & Blank Screen on /clear-cache:
  • Replaced physical terminal clear with a soft image refresh when executing /clear-cache, resolving a race condition with terminal emulators that swallowed the full Home screen render and caused the screen to go completely blank after a few seconds.
  • Added comprehensive state isolation preventing search queries, results, and details states from lingering after cache clears.
  • Sanitized slash command input handling to prevent visual query glitches.
  • Replaced standard status messages with elevated toast notifications for cache actions.
• Atomic Mode Highlight & Single Active Selection:
  • Added canonical AppMode enum (Streaming, Tv, Addon) and atomic state transitions guaranteeing that only one active mode is highlighted in the bottom dock at any time.
  • Hardened state isolation with automatic cleanup across mode switches.
• Notification Readability & Word-Boundary Wrapping:
  • Replaced horizontal middle-truncation with unicode display-width aware word wrapping (wrap_text).
  • Added adaptive width (up to 72 chars) and dynamic height scaling with guaranteed unbroken rounded borders.
• Resilient Addon Metadata & Fallbacks:
  • Added flexible visitors and serde aliases for genres, cast, director, imdbRating, releaseInfo, and runtime preventing deserialization failures across varied community addon JSON schemas.
  • Added multi-tier fallback resolution in the Details screen to guarantee titles, release years, synopsis, and posters are always preserved from search results and previews.
• Android / Termux TLS Certificate Compatibility:
  • Switched reqwest to use pure-Rust embedded webpki-roots certificate verification, resolving rustls-platform-verifier crashes and panics in non-JVM Android CLI environments like Termux.
• Transparent Stream & Search Diagnostics:
  • Replaced misleading generic "No matches" and "Rate Limit" errors with truthful, contextual diagnostics: "No stream sources available on {provider}", "Network connection failed to {provider}", "Rate limited by {provider}", and "Episode S{season}E{episode} is not listed on {provider}".
  • Added helpful actionable hints (Press Ctrl+P to try another provider, or r to refresh).
• Rate-Limiting & Concurrency Hardening:
  • Added HTTP 429 Retry-After header parsing with bounded exponential backoff in MovieBoxClient.
  • Added semaphore concurrency limiting (Semaphore::new(2)) during parallel episode page resolution to prevent burst requests from tripping provider rate limiters.
• Addon Mode Series Hierarchy & Episode Stream Isolation:
  • Fixed series misclassification as movies in Addon Mode when metadata omitted the videos array by ensuring canonical season structures and series-first metadata endpoint prioritization.
  • Added regex and token-based episode stream isolation (parse_season_episode) in stream_item_to_release, preventing cross-episode stream pollution (e.g. S01E06 streams appearing when viewing S01E08).
  • Added preservation of episodeNumbers arrays from addon metadata in the season list state.
• Direct Addon & BDIX Playback & Download Dispatch:
  • Fixed Addon and BDIX playback and download routing in handle_playback and handle_download to dispatch directly to external media players and the chunk downloader, preserving custom HTTP headers (behaviorHints.headers) and source labels without unnecessary Moviebox API subtitle timeouts.
• Selector Tab Preservation in Standard Displays:
  • Maintained visibility of Audio Languages, Seasons, and Episodes selector tabs side-by-side in standard ~80-column terminals when focusing Streams, preventing tabs from disappearing when 0 streams are available.

Changed

• Modular TV Provider Architecture:
  • Reorganized Live TV / IPTV provider into a dedicated module directory (src/providers/tv/) with separated models.rs and parser.rs.
• Core Infrastructure Consolidation:
  • Centralized atomic file operations (atomic_write_file, atomic_write_file_async), MD5 digest formatting (md5_hex), and text extraction helpers in cache.rs and service.rs.
  • Centralized application paths, border type resolution, and mode status announcements across TUI modules.
• Addon Manager UI Optimization:
  • Implemented full cursor navigation (Left/Right keys) and inline editing (Backspace/Delete) for the Addon Manager input field.
  • Implemented a scrolling viewport renderer for the Addon Manager input, allowing editing of very long manifest URLs without wrapping or truncation.
  • Compacted the Addon Manager dialog with an aligned two-tier layout placing [ Add Manifest URL ] and [ Done ] action buttons side-by-side.
• Multi-System Core Module Decoupling:
  • Promoted player.rs (process management & detection), config.rs (shared configuration), and updater.rs (release checks) to core modules in src/, preparing the architecture for upcoming CLI and GUI frontends with full backward compatibility.

Documentation

• Streamlined README & Controls Guide:
  • Transformed README.md into a focused landing page with measured ~5 MB RAM benchmark data, defensible value propositions, and direct links to deep guides in docs/.
  • Created standalone docs/controls.md covering all keyboard shortcuts, mouse controls, and slash commands.
  • Added a 3-phase project roadmap: Terminal UI (TUI) -> Command-Line Interface (CLI) -> Desktop GUI Client.
  • Added a community-first feedback and support section with optional crypto donation options.

[0.1.12] - 2026-08-15

Added

• CLI Help Flag: Added -h / --help CLI flags printing formatted usage, available options, and environment variables.
• Full Mouse Support: Complete mouse navigation throughout the application:
  • Click search bar to edit; click suggestion items to search immediately.
  • Click search results to select/preview; click again or double click to enter Details.
  • Click Details panes (Audio Languages, Seasons, Episodes, and Streams) to select and launch playback.
  • Click centered footer toolbar buttons ([Ctrl+P] Provider, [Ctrl+T] TV, [?] Help, [q] Quit).
  • Full click support across all modal popups (Theme, Browse, Subtitles, Players, TV playlists & actions, and Download confirmation).
• Contextual Downloads:
  • Pressing d or clicking [Download] while on the Seasons pane prompts to download the whole season (all episodes).
  • Triggering download while on Episodes or Streams downloads that single episode.
• Organized Downloads & Custom Directory:
  • Structured Series downloads under <base_dir>/Series/<Title>/Season <N>/<Title> - S<N:02>E<E:02>.<ext> and Movies under <base_dir>/Movies/<Title>/<Title>.<ext>.
  • Added ISO 639-1 language code tagging to subtitle sidecars (e.g. <BaseName>.en.srt) for automatic track identification in media players and servers.
  • Added smart duplication prevention: completed episodes on disk are automatically skipped during season batch downloads.
  • Added /download-dir <path> slash command with directory creation and active write-probe validation.
  • Added /download-dir reset (contextually suggested only when custom path is configured) to revert to OS default.
  • Safe automatic fallback to default OS Downloads folder if custom path becomes inaccessible.
  • Configuration persistence across sessions in config.json.
• Tree Branch Suggestions:
  • Redesigned search and slash command autocomplete into a minimal, transparent tree-branch layout (├─ / └─ ) anchored directly under the search prompt.
  • Added aligned slash command descriptions (browse, history, theme, config, update, etc.) without duplicate leading slashes.
  • Clean typography-driven active selection with bold vibrant accent styling.
• Multilingual Audio Track Detection:
  • Expanded 4kHDHub release parser to detect 30+ regional and international languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, etc.) and abbreviations (Tam, Tel, Kan, etc.).
  • Responsive stream list formatting showing all available languages without crowding mirror counts.
• Floating Pill HUD & Smooth Resize:
  • Added floating terminal dimension HUD and event coalescing for smooth window resizing without blank screens.
• Elevated Notification Badges:
  • Redesigned notification popups into elevated, rounded bottom-right badge cards with clean typography.
• Persistent Long-Term Poster Caching:
  • Increased image cache retention to 30 days (IMAGE_CACHE_EXPIRY_SECS), serving previously fetched posters instantly from disk across sessions with zero redundant network requests.
  • Unified image caching under a shared namespace with automatic cross-namespace lookup across MovieBox, 4KHDHub, IPTV, CircleFTP, and DhakaFlix.
• Streamlined Browse Views:
  • Curated /browse views into 4 categorized shelves (Popular, Top Rated, Trending, Most Watched) with proper filtering.
• Native Graphics & Single Standardized ‘No Poster’ Placeholder:
  • Replaced redundant dual labels (Poster unavailable / No Art) and noisy halfblock mosaic fallback with a single clean, centered No Poster label across search results, details, and history on non-graphics terminals.
  • Eliminated ANSI block characters, yellow/white selection redraw bars, and unnecessary background image downloads on basic terminals.
  • Preserved full native high-resolution graphical rendering on Sixel, Kitty, and iTerm2 supported terminals.
  • Added MOVIEBOX_NO_IMAGE=1 environment override to disable image probing on slow or headless sessions.
• Next-Gen Multi-Tiered Animated Installers (install.sh & install.ps1):
  • Multi-tier progressive rendering with official MovieBox branding and Catppuccin Mocha aesthetic.
  • Live smooth Braille spinners (⠋ ⠙ ⠹ ...), SHA256 cryptographic verification against SHA256SUMS, and media player ecosystem detection.
  • 100% sudo-less user-level installation into ~/.local/bin (or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\MovieBox-Tui\bin on Windows) with automatic non-destructive shell PATH integration and zero password prompts.
  • Added full CLI flags: --version <tag>, --dir <path>, --force, --dry-run, and --uninstall.
• Explicit Download Directory Autocomplete Hints:
  • Added /download-dir <path> slash command suggestion with clear action descriptions (Set custom folder (e.g. ~/Movies) vs. View current download folder).
  • Added friendly guidance notification if a user inputs literal <path> placeholders.

Fixed

• Custom Download Directory Container Hierarchy:
  • Ensured custom download directories always maintain the standardized MovieBox-TUI root container (MovieBox-TUI/Movies/... and MovieBox-TUI/Series/...) without duplicating if already named MovieBox-TUI.
• Multiline Notification Toast Rendering:
  • Upgraded notification toast layout to compute dynamic height and wrap multiline messages per line cleanly without horizontal middle-truncation across newlines.
  • Sanitized notification folder paths by substituting home directory with ~.
• Default Audio Track Prioritization (Original / English):
  • Fixed movie and series details defaulting to regional Hindi dubs on MovieBox by prioritizing Original and English audio tracks over localized search result subject IDs.
  • Preserved explicit user language selections when intentionally switching between dubs.
• Home Landing Header & Footer Persistence:
  • Fixed ASCII logo header and shortcut footer disappearing into a blank screen when clearing history or viewing empty search states by removing fragile tick-based animation gates.
  • Ensured the landing screen renders the logo, version, centered search bar, and footer shortcuts immediately on every frame.
• Watch History Consolidation & Latest Progress Representation:
  • Consolidated watched episodes of the same series into a single entry per show in /history displaying the latest watched season and episode.
  • Automatically deduplicated and migrated legacy history rows on startup while maintaining complete per-episode checkmark indexes in self.watched.
• History Poster Auto-Hydration & In-Memory Cache Retention:
  • Fixed “No Poster” placeholders in /history by automatically resolving missing cover URLs and decoding posters in the background.
  • Preserved in-memory decoded image caches when opening /history to eliminate unnecessary UI redraw latency.
  • Added multi-source fallback extraction for cover URLs across playback, preview, and search results.
• Stream Pool Initialization on Audio Selection: Fixed stream fetching hanging on “Loading streams…” when selecting non-default audio dubs by ensuring stream pool entries are initialized before episode fetch.
• Title Sanitization & Preservation: Enhanced clean_moviebox_title to sanitize international audio dubs, video quality tags, and format markers across downloads, folder organization, and watch history while preserving 4-digit release years.
• Terminal Restoration & Signal Handling: Added Ctrl+C keyboard handling and asynchronous SIGINT signal listener to guarantee raw mode and alternate screen are always cleanly restored.
• Download Hierarchy & Numbering: Fixed series media type detection and removed season/episode off-by-one addition.
• Parser UTF-8 Safety: Hardened language detection boundary checks for multibyte titles against panics.
• Startup Screen Artifacts: Removed early startup eprintln! to eliminate terminal screen artifacts before entering alternate screen mode.
• Android / Termux Stability: Removed hickory-dns from network dependencies to resolve NDK context panics and crashes on Android.
• Screen Flickering & Blanking:
  • Eliminated full terminal clear on list navigation and infinite scroll pagination.
  • Fixed screen blanking when pressing Esc or resizing windows.
  • Replaced terminal clear with direct backend clear to eliminate cursor read timeouts.
• Search & Navigation:
  • Fixed search bar auto-closing when switching providers.
  • Fixed provider switching delays and event stream drops.
  • Kept chosen audio dub selected and prevented unwanted pane jumping on details refresh.
  • Handled empty query loading states and preset failures gracefully.
• Downloads & Playback:
  • Resolved MovieBox movie stream key mismatches and hardened resilient download flows.
  • Protected active downloads from accidental cancellation when typing x in the search bar.
  • Fixed playback lock edge cases and subtitle picker clipping.
• Theme & Configuration:
  • Fixed theme cancellation reverting correctly without persisting unapplied themes.
  • Unified /theme command and removed obsolete /discover, /tab, and /themes aliases.

Changed

• Removed startup screen delay for instant app launch.
• Modernized in-place update notifications and dialogs.
• Rendered details footer on a single clean line to balance bottom margins.
• Removed search bar underline clutter in favor of clean header spacing.

[0.1.11] - 2026-08-11

Added

• User-Owned M3U Playlists: Full custom playlist management in TV mode with remote URL and local file support.
• Android Runtime Support: Termux playback and shared-storage handling continue to be exercised on real devices, but release artifacts remain desktop-focused.

Refactored

• Domain Modularization: Split the application monolith into cohesive domain modules (network, playback, download, requests, navigation, tv, system, keyboard).
• State Decomposition: Split the monolithic application state into specialized domain state structs.
• Strict Verification Gates: Enforced workspace lint checks, static analysis, and testing.