Features
Live TV, timeshift, recording and VOD — coordinated across every BingeBop device in your home.
95 features across 18 categories.
What makes BingeBop different
Your TVs work together
Paired devices know what the others are watching, recording and using. They coordinate provider connections and tuners instead of behaving like unrelated installations.
- TVs watching the same channel can share one upstream connection
- Provider and tuner limits are tracked across the household
- Active recordings are protected from another viewer consuming their connection
- Recordings are available throughout the cluster
- Connection conflict guard — names which peer is using a provider slot
Recordings belong to the household
Recordings aren't tied to one TV. A scheduled recording can run on whichever paired device is available. If that device disappears during recording, another can take over. Every TV sees the resulting household recordings transparently.
- Record now, scheduled, or recurring — with pre/post padding
- Record from catch-up: keep a past programme from your provider
- Storage on another device, USB, SMB/NFS, SFTP or WebDAV
- Capacity checks before committing a recording
Timeshift that remembers
Change channel, browse around, come back — your old timeshift buffer is still there, with a gap marking the time you were away. Decide to record after something already happened and still keep the material that's already in the buffer.
- Each channel's buffer can remain when you leave it
- The time you weren't tuned creates a gap, not a destroyed buffer
- Turn the existing buffer into a recording, including material from before you pressed Record
- As you seek, the selected preview starts playing in place — not just a static frame
- The same live thumbnail seek works in VOD and recordings
- Configurable skip steps, USB and network storage for the buffer
One channel, many sources
BingeBop identifies duplicate channels within a playlist or across multiple providers and combines them into one logical channel — while keeping each original stream available as a selectable alternate source. If one source stalls, it fails over to the next.
- Each original stream remains selectable as an alternate
- Automatic failover when a source drops
- Works for VOD too — the same film from multiple providers appears once
Set up the household once
Household settings provide the baseline for every user. Channel names, groups and common settings are defined once. Each user inherits that baseline and can override what they need individually — their own favourites, appearance and profile-specific restrictions.
- Household-wide channel names, groups, EPG bindings
- Per-user favourites, watch history and theme
- Per-user parental controls and screen-time limits
- PIN-gated household settings mode
Take the programme with you
Scan the QR code on the TV and continue watching the same channel on your phone's browser. No BingeBop phone app required. Walk to the kitchen without missing a scene.
- Works in any phone browser — nothing to install
- No extra tuner or provider connection needed
Bring the sources you already have
BingeBop's FFmpeg playback engine handles broadcast formats and codecs that aren't necessarily supported by the standard Android media path — …which lets BingeBop handle HDHomeRun broadcast formats and recover from many malformed or unusual streams that the standard Android media path struggles with.
With an HDHomeRun source, live TV, timeshift, recording and household coordination can run entirely on your home network. Internet access is only needed for external services such as EPG data.
Everything you'd expect from a serious DVR and TV player
Playback
- ~0.8s channel switching — in-house FFmpeg engine, not a wrapper around ExoPlayer
- Per-device codec profiles — from a Fire TV Stick to an NVIDIA Shield
- Auto frame-rate matching (24/25/30/50/60 Hz)
- Audio track selection with preferred-language auto-pick
- Playback speed control (0.5× to 2×)
- A/V sync offset slider, per-channel or device-wide
- Automatic error recovery and reconnection on stream drops
Guide & live TV
- Fuzzy-matched EPG — works even when your provider's channel IDs are wrong
- Genre-coloured programme cells (sports, news, movies, etc.)
- Per-channel manual EPG binding with searchable picker
- Per-source and per-group time offsets for misaligned guides
- Programme reminders — auto-tune when a show starts
- Picture-in-picture — watch one channel while browsing others
- Catch-up playback for past programmes on supported channels
Recording & storage
- Now, scheduled, recurring — with pre/post padding and capacity check
- Distributed recording across paired devices
- Storage on another device, USB, SMB/NFS, SFTP or WebDAV
- Per-role storage assignments — DVR, timeshift and VOD cache can each target different destinations
- USB auto-defaults — plug in a drive and live-pause follows it
Movies & series
- VOD deduplication — same title from multiple providers appears once
- Per-user resume position and watch history
- Autoplay next episode with configurable countdown
- Watchlist / My List with auto-remove when watched
- Unified Home dashboard — recent channels, continue watching, recently added
Subtitles
- Teletext, DVB, CC 608/708, and OTT text tracks
- Bitmap-to-text OCR for DVB and PGS subs via Tesseract
- Preferred-language auto-select
- Font size, colour, background, outline, position — all configurable
People & controls
- Profile selection — per-user settings, favourites, watch history
- Age-based content gating with DOB-relative strictness
- Screen-time limits — daily caps, weekday/weekend, time-of-day windows
- PIN lock — per-profile, admin gate for household settings
- Channel management — favourites, hiding, custom groups, renaming
- Stable cluster-global channel numbering with digit-keypad input
- Sleep timer — preset durations or "end of programme/episode"
For power users
- HTTP API on port 18080 — 113 endpoints for automation and integration
- Encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT) to bypass ISP blocks
- Connection troubleshooter — 5-hop visual path with DNS-block detection
- Backup & restore — encrypted ZIP export to local or network storage
- Self-update — stable and beta channels, signature-pinned APK
- Remote button mapping — customise short/long press per context
- Theme presets, accent colour picker, font & layout density choices
- Multi-script on-screen keyboard — Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic
- Global search across channels, groups, movies, series, recordings, and EPG
- Web remote from any phone or browser on your network