• jellyfin client ·
• apple tv ·
• iphone ·
• ipad ·
• on-device decoding ·
• direct play ·
• dolby vision ·
• offline downloads ·

Tomo TV, a Jellyfin Client

Your whole Jellyfin library on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad. Nearly every codec there is, decoded on the device, in the one player the system already ships.

By Keiver Hernandez · Published November 22, 2025 · Updated September 9, 2026

Connect a Jellyfin server and your films, shows, music and photos are there, ready to play. Underneath is a playback engine built for the job: MKVs, Atmos bitstreamed untouched, TrueHD and DTS-HD carried across without loss, picture subtitles, HDR10 and Dolby Vision. What Apple's player cannot read is converted on the device rather than by your server, so most of the time your server does nothing but send the file.

Free, nothing to buy inside it, and no analytics of any kind. The only account involved is the one on your own server.

It plays what is already on a Jellyfin server you run. The app hosts no media, ships with none, and has no catalogue of its own. What you keep on that server and play through the app is yours to answer for, not ours. The terms of use at the foot of the page say the rest.

01 / Library

Everything you have, in one place

Films, full show seasons, music, home videos and photos, each library with its own artwork and a count. Continue puts everything you are part-way through on the first screen, progress riding the artwork rather than hidden in a menu, and Favorites and New follow underneath. Music is laid out by cover art, so the app that runs your movie nights doubles as your record shelf. Photo libraries open in a full-screen viewer with a slideshow; on iPhone and iPad a photo pinches to zoom, a drag changes it or closes the viewer, and its info panel shares the original file.

Those same recent items fill the Top Shelf, the row across the top of the tvOS home screen, so a half-finished film is one click from the system home without opening the app at all. tvOS

02 / Play

Apple's own player, for everything

Every format on this page, a disc rip and a camcorder tape and a 4K HDR remux alike, arrives in the player the system already ships: the transport you know, AirPlay, Picture in Picture, and the subtitle and audio controls sitting in the system's own chrome. There is no second player to learn.

Switching the audio track mid-film is instant on anything the device plays itself: every track is its own rendition in the playlist the engine serves, so nothing restarts. Whichever subtitle track you picked follows you into the next episode instead of resetting when the file changes. Swipe down on the remote and tvOS opens its info panel over the video, with an Up Next tab added to it. A file with chapter markers lists them there, and picking one jumps straight to it. Where your server publishes segment markers, Skip Intro and Skip Credits appear as timed pills over the video. tvOS

Watch together through Jellyfin's own SyncPlay. Settings, SyncPlay makes a group and fills the screen with its join code; a phone or iPad signed into the same server scans it and is in, nothing typed and no credentials in the code. The server drives every member's player, play, pause, seek and stop, and nobody starts until everyone is ready: a scrub on one device reaches the others, and a device that stalls holds the group until it catches up. Video only.

Press Play and one of three things happens. The app says which before you press anything, in these words.

Only the third asks anything of your server, and it still plays at full resolution: on Auto the quality follows your measured link, with the original as the ceiling.

None of that is a claim you have to take on faith. Open anything and the panel carries the verdict at the top and the file underneath it: the video stream with its codec, profile, dimensions, frame rate, bit depth and bitrate, then every audio track with its language and channel layout, then where the file sits on your server. It answers “why did this one play like that?” two seconds from any card.

And afterwards it shows its work. Diagnostics, under About Tomo TV in Settings, keeps the last playback: the lane it chose and its reason when it declined a file, the streams your server described, every error, the build, and the device with what it decodes in hardware. Only the last session is kept. iPhone and iPad can copy or share it; Apple TV has no clipboard, so it sends the log to your own Jellyfin server, into your account's settings slot, and your phone offers it when it arrives. That slot is the only place it ever goes.

03 / Your server

What your server is actually asked to do

Most of the time, nothing but send bytes. The setting below only comes into it when your server is the one re-encoding, and then it is a hard ceiling: metered data, a shared uplink. Anything the device handles itself ignores the preset entirely, because the file the engine reads is the original either way.

The useful part is the arithmetic it puts on screen. The measured link sits at the head of the section, Auto says in words what that link is good for right now, and every preset states the bitrate it asks of your connection. A 4K ceiling wanting 29 Mbps of a line measuring a fraction of that is a fact you can read rather than something you discover in the middle of a film.

A measured-slow link also changes how a session opens: rather than buffering toward full quality it starts on a smaller server feed and climbs natively as the link allows.

04 / Offline

Take it with you

Download a film, an episode, a whole folder or an album, and it plays from the device with no server and no network at all. Downloads in flight show a percentage and pause on a tap, finished items sit under the folder they came from, and the gauge at the foot of the card says what you have used and what is left on the device. Music and audiobooks download the same way.

Music and audiobooks are not routed through the video player either. They play in a dedicated native queue player: gapless transitions, previous and next on the Apple TV remote, and on iPhone a queue that keeps going in the background with Now Playing and Lock Screen controls. Apple Lossless passes through untouched and FLAC is re-encoded as FLAC, so a lossless library stays lossless all the way to the receiver either way. While a queue plays, a small player rides above whatever you are browsing and tucks itself against the nearest edge when you leave it alone. iPhone and iPad

05 / Find

Find it, then narrow it

Type a title, genre, artist or year and results surface as you go, films and episodes together rather than in separate lists. On Apple TV the letters sit in one row across the screen, so a title is a few clicks rather than a walk around a grid keyboard.

Any library narrows the same way: by watched status, by genre, by year, with a shuffle sort and a Clear All when you have gone too far. What you picked stays picked while you browse.

Start in minutes

Pick Scan Network and Tomo TV sweeps your local subnet for Jellyfin servers, honoring the network's real netmask, and lists every one it finds. Pick yours out of the list with nothing to type, or enter the address including the port, http://192.168.1.100:8096. Reverse-proxy subpaths like 10.0.0.5/jellyfin work too. The connect screen shows your device's own IP, warns when a private address is not on this subnet, and if a connection fails it lists every address it tried and how each one failed instead of one generic error.

Sign in with your Jellyfin username and password, or use Quick Connect: the app puts a code on screen, you type it into any Jellyfin device you are already signed in on, and it authorizes itself. Keep as many servers as you like, each with its own sign-in, and switch between them from Settings. Nothing of your own to point at yet? Jellyfin's public demo server is in the list.