Casts to any Chromecast, AirPlay or DLNA device from every platform. Keeps SyncPlay in step over the internet. Works from a TV remote.
An opinionated fork of Fladder, the cross-platform Jellyfin client built with Flutter.
Windows · macOS · Linux · Android · Android TV · iOS · Web
chudder_showcase_720p.mp4
What Chudder adds • Design choices • Screenshots • Download • Contributing • Credits • License
Fladder is a genuinely good Jellyfin client, and this fork exists because of that rather than in spite of it. I use it every day, on a desktop and a phone and a TV, and every day I noticed small things I wanted to work differently. Not bugs — taste. The kind of thing that is nobody's job to fix because it is only wrong for me.
So Chudder is my perfect version of it: an app I change whenever I want it to feel different, without asking anyone whether my preference is the right one. Some of those changes are opinionated to the point of being unmergeable upstream. Some are features I wanted badly enough to build. Most are the hundred small adjustments that add up to an app feeling like it was made for you, because it was.
If your taste happens to line up with mine, you are very welcome here.
The two big ones first, neither of which exists upstream:
Chudder casts on every platform it runs on, through whichever protocol the device on your shelf actually speaks:
- Chromecast — native Google Cast on Android and iOS, a pure-Dart CASTV2 sender on Windows, macOS and Linux, and the Cast Web Sender on Chromium browsers. Plays through the Jellyfin receiver where it can and a default-receiver path where it can't.
- AirPlay — the real system picker on iOS and macOS, with subtitle and audio track switching rather than a video stream you cannot change.
- DLNA / UPnP — direct play with on-demand transcode when the renderer can't handle the subtitles, audio track or bitrate you asked for.
It starts from what you were already watching — current track, current quality, current position — and drops the player into a remote control once connected. It will also adopt a stream already running on a receiver instead of restarting it, and it hides audio-only renderers when you are casting video. There is a "why can't I find my device?" panel in the picker, because discovery is the part that always goes wrong.
Watching the same thing at the same time as someone who is not in the room:
- Latency-adaptive drift correction with ping reporting and a warm-up period, tuned for people watching over the internet rather than across a living room.
- A persisted per-user playback offset, so if your stream is reliably a second and a half behind someone else's, you set it once.
- Optimistic local loading on next/previous episode, so changing episode in a group does not stall everyone on a spinner.
- A group indicator and controls that are reachable from inside the player and from every screen, not just the one that thought to offer them.
- Sessions that survive a wobble. A phone that loses its connection for a moment — a pocket, a lift, an aggressive battery saver — rejoins the group by itself and carries on where the group is now.
The whole app works from a remote, player included. Point the d-pad at something and it responds.
- The player answers the pad. The selection starts on play/pause. Left and right scrub, up and down do volume, so the two things you reach for most are the two things the pad does first.
- Scrubbing that knows what it is in. Hold a direction and it picks up speed in proportion to the runtime, so crossing a two-hour film and nudging along a twenty-minute episode each take about as long as you would expect. The time counts along with you.
- You can always get out. Every dialog and sheet has a close button on it, because a remote has no Escape key and nowhere to click.
- Nothing is out of reach. The next-episode card, the queue, subtitles and audio, SyncPlay and Cast — all a few presses away.
Downloads came with Fladder. What Chudder puts in is the time it took to make them dependable in the case they exist for — a train, a plane, a hotel with bad wifi.
- Your files stay findable. You choose a folder, the download goes there, and the app still knows where it is next time you open it.
- No server, no problem. A downloaded episode plays with nothing to connect to. Everything the player needs comes off the device.
- The app shows what you have. Offline, the dashboard, favourites and the library fill up from your downloads instead of going blank — continue watching, next up, favourites, and Shows, Movies, Music and Books built from what is on disk. When the server comes back they fill in the rest on their own.
- The numbers are your numbers. Sizes and counts describe your copy: the files on the device, plus whatever is still coming down.
- Asked once, if you like. The quality prompt can remember your answer and stop asking; a toggle in Settings › Downloads brings the question back.
Posters are drawn whole rather than cropped to fit their card, artwork stays cached instead of being fetched over and over, and a picture flies from the poster you tapped into the page it opens. The metadata editor now covers a show, its seasons and its episodes from one place — poster, logo and backdrop for each — and a backdrop you would rather not look at can be dropped from the rotation on this device without deleting it from the server.
Part of a great client for me is getting to where you want to go as quickly as possible. That means fewer clicks and shorter waits. The changes that make the app feel faster:
- It starts faster. The launch work runs together rather than in a queue, and the first seconds go to the dashboard instead of to everything else.
- Scrolling keeps up. Pictures load ahead of you and appear when they arrive, so a quick flick through a library no longer leaves a trail of empty posters behind it.
- Play starts sooner. Everything the player needs travels alongside the video rather than after it, and pressing play no longer waits on the last thing you watched.
- Pages arrive at once. A film, show or library page asks for its parts together and draws what is above the fold first, instead of filling in a strip at a time.
- Big libraries stay smooth. Browsing and selecting across thousands of items does not get heavier the further in you go.
- SyncPlay and Cast are ready to go. The group and device pickers are always up to date with what is on the network, so you can join a session or connect to a device without waiting for discovery to finish.
Your headphones can run the show. Press play on a headset, or the play key on a keyboard, while the next-up card is on screen and the next episode starts. Press it while a Skip Intro or Skip Credits button is showing and it skips. With neither prompt up it plays and pauses like it always did. So you can get through the whole gap between episodes — credits, intro, next one rolling — without reaching for the device or even looking at it. This is the feature I miss most when I use anything else.
Playback follows you around. Shrink the player into a small window you can drag, resize and pinch, and carry on browsing underneath it. On Windows the transport buttons turn up in the taskbar preview; on Android it takes audio focus properly instead of talking over whatever else is playing.
Studios are actual pages. Click a studio and you get a grid of what they made and what you haven't seen yet, rather than "not implemented yet".
Search that forgives you. Type a name and you get the person with four films in your library before the one with a single credit. Misspell a title and it still finds it. Come up empty and it suggests something to try instead.
Offline means your server is unreachable. Not "something on the network gave us an odd answer". A proxy's error page or a hotel captive portal will not persuade the app that everything is fine, and a single bad response will not persuade it that everything is broken. When the server comes back the app notices on its own and carries on — no restart, no pull-to-refresh, no waiting to find out by tapping something.
Ready for Jellyfin 12. Jellyfin 12 changes how a URL carries its credentials, which catches out a client that only knows the old way — the shared WebSocket, and so SyncPlay with it. Chudder sends both, so one build works against a 10.x server and a 12 one, and metadata saves work on 12 as well. It is the server I run every day, so it is the one everything here is tested against.
Settings search. Across every settings page at once, because I could never remember which page a thing lived on.
The parts where Chudder deliberately disagrees with upstream:
Chrome that stays put. SyncPlay and Cast start sessions that outlive whatever screen you are on — you can join a group or connect to a device before you have chosen anything to play. So they live in the app's chrome, in the same corner on every overview screen, rather than on the one screen that happened to offer them.
Controls that shed rather than overflow. The player's bottom bar works to a budget. Play/pause is the only button it will not part with; everything else bids for the remaining width in order of importance, and a narrow window drops the least useful buttons instead of running off its own edge. Anything it drops is still one tap away in the options sheet.
One shape per row. Posters are one shape, scroll arrows sit at the ends of the row and on the artwork rather than floating beside it, and banners are not cropped to fit a grid they were never meant for.
Show pages you don't get lost in. This one came straight out of frustration. I kept opening a series, going into a season, into an episode, and then having no idea how to get back to the season I actually wanted — or how to tell where I was. So moving between seasons and episodes is direct now, the header takes up far less room, a phone opens the page at the title instead of somewhere below the fold, and the things you can actually watch come first.
Playback always has a face. Anything making sound has a player attached to it — full screen if that is where you were, and the small one you can browse underneath otherwise. Pausing whatever is playing is never more than a tap away.
SyncPlay wraps around your evening, not the other way round. You join and leave groups around whatever you are watching. Ending a session drops the syncing and leaves the film running.
Notices in one place. Messages arrive top centre on every device, in the same surfaces as the rest of the app, so you know where to look.
Icons that read as what they do. A handful of the originals never quite landed for me — I would look at one and have to think about what it meant, which is one thought too many. Those got changed. Entirely a matter of taste, and exactly the sort of change that is easier to make in your own fork than to argue for in someone else's.
Its own look. A blue accent, art-derived backgrounds, and a drawn cheese wedge for an icon. Chudder is a distinct app and should not be mistaken for Fladder at a glance — that matters both for you and out of respect for the original.
Taken against a Jellyfin demo server stocked with the Blender Studio open movies (CC BY) and public-domain classics, so everything on screen is free to show.
Desktop
Tablet
Phone
Television
Driven from a remote, so the focus ring shows where the d-pad is.
Everything comes from this repository's releases page. Platform notes live in INSTALL.md.
| Platform | Get it |
|---|---|
| Windows | Chudder-Windows-*-Setup.exe (per-user installer) or the .zip for a portable copy |
| macOS | Chudder-macOS-*.dmg |
| Linux | .AppImage, .flatpak bundle, or the .zip |
| Android and Android TV | Chudder-Android-*-arm64-v8a.apk fits nearly every device, or add the repository to Obtainium for updates |
| iOS | Chudder-iOS-*.ipa, sideloaded with AltStore or Sideloadly |
| Web | Try it in the browser at jentejan.github.io/Chudder against the public Jellyfin demo server (user demo, no password), or self-host the Chudder-Web-*.zip or the ghcr.io/jentejan/chudder image. Server on your own network? See the note in INSTALL.md |
Warning Chudder is a personal fork. It tracks upstream Fladder but is not tested anywhere near as broadly, and it is primarily exercised on Windows and Android. If you want the stable, widely-tested option, use Fladder — it is excellent and you will be in good hands.
Warning (Windows) The installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will say "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Click More info → Run anyway. It installs per user, into
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Chudder, and needs no administrator rights. Some Flutter applications are also flagged as false positives by Windows Defender — see this upstream issue for background.
Contributions are genuinely welcome. This is an opinionated fork, but opinionated does not mean closed.
Open an issue and I will do my best to fix it. Please check it has not already been reported, and include the steps to reproduce it — that is the part that decides whether a bug gets fixed this week or this month.
If the bug also exists in upstream Fladder, it is worth reporting it there too; fixes that belong upstream I will try to send upstream.
Pull requests are welcome. For anything large, open an issue first so we can agree on the shape of it before you spend an evening on it — this fork has strong opinions about how things should feel, and it would be a shame to find that out at review time.
Keep pull requests focused on one thing. It makes review faster and kinder.
- Fixing what gets raised. Issues opened here get my honest best effort.
- Staying in line with the official repo. I track upstream Fladder and merge its changes in rather than drifting away from it. Bug fixes I make that are not taste-specific I will offer back upstream.
- Fixing what I run into. Most of what is in here started as something that annoyed me during ordinary use. That will continue.
Chudder is a fork of Fladder by DonutWare / PartyDonut.
Essentially all of the hard work is theirs. Fladder is a polished, thoughtfully built Jellyfin client, and everything here rests on years of it. This fork exists because the foundation was good enough to be worth having opinions about. Thank you — sincerely.
If you want to support the work this is built on, the sponsor links on this repository go to the Fladder authors, not to me. That is deliberate.
This software also uses:
The showcase video in assets/marketing uses "Werq"
by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0,
and footage of Caminandes: Llamigos by the Blender Foundation (CC BY),
as served by the public Jellyfin demo server.
Chudder is a modified version of Fladder and is licensed, as Fladder is, under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for the full text.
The files in this repository have been modified from the Fladder originals; the commit history records what changed and when.