Velox

A fast Plex client for Samsung Tizen TVs, including Tizen 6.0.
Smooth scrolling, hardware playback, no framework.

Velox is a from-scratch Plex client for Samsung TVs, built on SamSUCKS by rfaile313. It keeps SamSUCKS's speed (the official Plex app takes about a minute to open on these TVs; this takes about a second) and adds Tizen 6.0 support plus most of what people miss from the official app.

_{Screenshots of the real app with a real Plex library. The 3D Pipes and Bezier screensavers are the app's own code, rendered in headless Chrome.}

What it does

• Home, libraries and search with poster rows and grids, a clock in the top bar, and auto-fitting titles.
• Stays fresh: new media shows up in Home and the library grids without restarting the app (it checks every couple of minutes while you're on them, and when the TV wakes; adjustable in Settings).
• Genres for each library: a tile per genre with artwork, opening the library filtered to it.
• Collections, an unwatched filter and Shuffle in libraries, and a Shuffle button on the home screen that plays unwatched movies back to back (or all movies, or random episodes mixed from shows you tick in Settings).
• Theme music: a show's theme tune plays quietly on its show, season and episode pages (Settings can turn it off).
• Season pages like the official app: poster, Resume / Play season / Shuffle / Watched, and the season's episodes in a grid.
• Play all and Shuffle for a show (on its page) or a season.
• Detail pages with Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb and TMDB ratings, media flags (4K, HDR10 / Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS, 5.1, subtitles), a cast & crew row, a Trailer button and the full synopsis.
• Actor pages with photo, bio, what of theirs is in your library, and their full filmography (from Plex Discover).
• Playback straight through Samsung's hardware decoder whenever the TV can decode the file; otherwise Plex converts only what it must (usually just DTS audio).
  • Skip intro / skip credits, using the server's detected markers. Credits can be skipped automatically, or ignored when the server's detection is unreliable.
  • Chapters: a strip of chapter thumbnails, marks on the seek bar, and CH ▲ / CH ▼ to jump between them.
  • Jump back and forward (10 and 30 seconds by default, set in Settings), a Stop button, and accelerating seek on ◀ ▶.
  • Streaming quality: Original, or a bitrate cap from 20 Mbps down to 1 Mbps, which makes Plex convert bigger files. Auto plays the original on your network and caps it away from home (8 Mbps, or 2 Mbps through Plex's relay). Changeable per video too.
  • Audio and subtitle tracks, external .srt files, and subtitle search and download (OpenSubtitles, through your server).
  • Subtitle size, colour, font, weight, position, style (outline, drop shadow, box, light box or plain) and per-file sync.
  • Anamorphic video shown at its real aspect ratio.
  • Playback info: direct play or converted, codecs, resolution, bitrate, and what the server is doing while it converts (Options → Playback info).
  • Up next: a card with the next episode when the final credits start (if the server detected them) or when the episode ends, with autoplay after 5–30 seconds or off.
  • Still watching?: after hours of autoplay with no remote use (1–3, default 2), it asks before playing the next episode, like Plex's Passout Protection.
  • Resume, and watch progress synced back to Plex.
• Home-bar tiles: Continue Watching and Recently Added appear above the app in the TV's Smart Hub bar; choosing one plays or opens it.
• Screensaver: after a timeout you choose (30 seconds to an hour; Settings has a Preview), the Velox or DVD logo bounces around a black screen changing colour at each wall, your library's artwork plays as a slideshow, or one of the Windows classics: 3D Pipes, Starfield or Bezier curves.
• Settings, grouped into Account, Appearance, Home, Playback and Screensaver: accent colour, rounded or square posters, watched-badge style (Plex's corner box or rounded), home-bar tile style, screensaver, Velox logo on Home, startup animation, theme music, hide watched on Home, streaming quality, clock (24-hour, 12-hour or off), server and account.

Install

You need:

• a Samsung TV from 2020 or newer (tested on a 2021 Frame, Tizen 6.0; the original project was tested on a 2022 Q60B, Tizen 6.5),
• a Mac or Linux computer on the same network, with git, zip and Node.js 18 or newer,
• a Plex Media Server the TV can reach. If the TV and server are on different VLANs, allow the TV to reach the server on TCP 32400.

1. Turn on Developer Mode on the TV

1. Press Home and open Apps.
2. On the Apps screen, type 1 2 3 4 5 on the remote (use the 123 button for the on-screen keypad if your remote has no number keys).
3. Switch Developer mode to On and enter your computer's IP address. Only that computer can install apps, so if its IP changes, enter the new one here.
4. Restart the TV: hold the Power button until it turns off and back on.

2. Get the Apps2Samsung CLI

Apps2Samsung installs apps on Samsung TVs and signs them for you. Download apps2samsung-cli for your computer from its releases page and unpack it. On a Mac, unblock it once with xattr -d com.apple.quarantine apps2samsung-cli.

3. Get the app

Easiest: download velox.wgt from the latest release and skip to step 4. To build it yourself instead:

git clone https://github.com/SuperDOS/velox.git
cd velox
cp .env.example .env    # the build script reads it; nothing in it needs changing for this
./scripts/deploy.sh --bundle --build-only
(cd build/app && rm -f ../velox.wgt && zip -qr -X ../velox.wgt . -x '.*')

This makes build/velox.wgt. --bundle packs the app into one script with esbuild (fetched by npx the first time). Tizen 6.0 needs it, since its browser won't load JavaScript modules from an app's own files, and it works on newer TVs too.

4. Install on the TV

./apps2samsung-cli scan                                         # find the TV's IP
./apps2samsung-cli install velox.wgt --tv <tv-ip> --launch

(Use the paths to wherever apps2samsung-cli and velox.wgt are; a build of your own is at build/velox.wgt.) On Tizen 7 and newer you're asked to sign in with a Samsung account to sign the package.

5. Sign in

The app opens on the TV. Go to plex.tv/link and enter the code it shows, or scan the QR code.

Updating: download the new release (or git pull and build), then step 4 again. Installing over the existing app keeps your sign-in and settings, so don't uninstall first.

Uninstalling: ./apps2samsung-cli uninstall VeloxApp01.velox --tv <tv-ip>

Installing with Samsung's Tizen Studio instead

As in the original project: run ./scripts/setup.sh once. It installs Samsung's command-line tools, finds your TV, creates a signing certificate and writes .env. After that, ./scripts/deploy.sh --bundle builds, signs, installs and launches the app in one go.

Using it

Remote	What it does
Arrows / OK	Move around / select
▲ from the top row of a library	Shuffle, Unwatched, Sort, Collections
Play/Pause	Play whatever is focused, or pause and resume
Hold OK on a tile	Item menu: resume or restart, mark watched or unwatched (also whole seasons and shows), rate, fix match, add to Watchlist, remove from Continue Watching
Back	Go back (while watching, the first press hides the controls)
◀ ▶ while watching	Seek; hold to go faster
▼ while watching	The control row: Stop, jump back, play/pause, jump forward, Chapters, Audio & Subtitles (including search), and Options (quality, subtitle look and sync)
CH ▲ / CH ▼ while watching	Next chapter / start of this chapter (press again for the one before)
OK during an intro	Skip intro
CH ▲ / CH ▼	Jump by letter in a library

For developers

Dev loop: logs, remote control and benchmarks on the real TV

Chrome DevTools can't attach to a retail TV, so dev builds talk to a small server on your computer instead. Put your computer's host:port in .env as DEV_HOST, then:

node tools/devserver.mjs                    # receives logs and perf samples (build/tv.log)
./scripts/deploy.sh --dev --bundle --build-only
(cd build/app && rm -f ../velox.wgt && zip -qr -X ../velox.wgt . -x '.*')
./apps2samsung-cli install build/velox.wgt --tv <tv-ip> --launch

curl 'localhost:8790/send?keys=down,right,right,enter'       # press buttons
tools/tveval.sh 'document.title'                              # run JS on the TV, print the result
tools/tveval.sh '__bench(["right","right","left","left"], 250)'   # frame stats while replaying keys
tools/scan-tracks.sh 30                                       # files with over 30 tracks (the TV lists 32 at most)

Dev builds also report errors that happen before the app's own logger loads (such as a module failing to load), and show a performance overlay (Settings → Performance overlay). Set window.__ss.muteTimeline = true with tveval.sh to test playback without touching watch history.

How the code is laid out

app/            the whole TV app; deploy.sh copies it to build/app and packages it
  js/screens/   home, library, detail, person, player, search, settings, login
  js/ui/        rows, grids, tiles, ratings, theme, image loader, backdrop, perf overlay
  js/plex/      plex.tv sign-in, Plex Media Server API, Plex Discover (people)
  js/platform/  Tizen keys and device info, AVPlay / <video> player, home-bar tiles
  js/util/      preferences, formatting, streaming quality, storage
  service/      background service that hands the home-bar tiles to the TV
scripts/        setup.sh (Tizen Studio, optional) and deploy.sh (build, bundle, install)
tools/          dev server, TV eval, network remote

Plain JavaScript, no framework. Without --bundle, newer TVs (Chromium 85+) run the ES modules directly with <link rel="modulepreload">.

Tizen and Plex notes

• Tizen 6.0 (Chromium 76) blocks <script type="module"> from file://; Tizen 6.5 allows it. Hence --bundle.
• No zoom-to-fill: AVPlay rejects a display rect larger than the screen, and its setVideoRoi crop isn't supported on this TV.
• No playback speed: AVPlay only does whole-number speeds (trick play), and the TV's <video> can't decode the AC3/EAC3 audio Plex sends it (it plays silent).
• AVPlay ignores the pixel aspect ratio of anamorphic files, so the app sizes the video rectangle itself.
• Trailers redirect to Plex's CDN, which AVPlay can't play, so they're streamed through the server.
• Plex Media Server 1.42 returns 400 for start.m3u8 unless /video/:/transcode/universal/decision was called for the same session first.
• X-Plex-Platform=Tizen selects the server's profile for the official app, which rejects these transcode requests, so the app identifies itself as Samsung.
• Smart Hub Preview (the home-bar tiles) works for a sideloaded app. The background service in app/service/ gets webapis as a global on Tizen 6.0; the require('$WEBAPIS/webapis/webapis.js') in Samsung's guide fails there.
• Samsung TVs from 2018 on can't decode DTS. Plex copies the video and converts only the audio, to AC3 5.1.
• The full-screen CSS gradient behind the UI took almost two seconds per repaint on the TV's CPU; it's a 2×2 WebGL texture stretched by the GPU instead. See the SamSUCKS README for that story and the other performance work this app inherits.

Credits

Based on SamSUCKS by rfaile313, itself inspired by plx-native. Headings use Open Sans and body text Inter (SIL Open Font License). QR codes: qrcode-generator by Kazuhiko Arase (MIT). Rating logos belong to Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb and TMDB; the DVD Video logo to DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation; Plex and the Plex logo belong to Plex, Inc.

Velox is an independent project, not affiliated with Plex or Samsung.

License

Copyright © 2026 rfaile313 (SamSUCKS) and Velox contributors. Released under the GNU General Public License v3.0: you can use, study, change and share it, and anything you distribute that's built on it must stay open source under the same license.