TLDR: I ended up installing Chora, pictured in the thumbnail, which is open-source and works pretty well on TV (and on mobile). Navigation works with remote, and I was able to connect to my music collection quickly. I moved the music collection to Navidrome, and I have noticed that it generally loads and searches my library faster than Jellyfin. It does not have a continuous play/instant playlist (like for example, Tempus on mobile), but otherwise checks most of the boxes.
Original Post:
I have a great music library on my homelab, but I hardly ever listen to it because I mostly listen to music on my TV.
I occasionally use the Jellyfin app, which is the best player I've found for TV, but it is not really built for audio and is cumbersome for searching, on-the-fly playlist, and continuous play.
Other apps I've tried are either worse in terms of features, or an absolute labyrinth to navigate with a remote. Most apps are designed for mobile and are somewhat to completely broken on TV, if they run at all.
I don't mind if the app is not free as long as it works well enough for my family to use it, and it connects to the server. I don't mind migrating my library to another service to get it working well on the TV.
Has anyone found an actually good Android TV app for hosted music?
@gedaliyah support.symfonium.app/t/symfon…
This is what I use on my phone, and it's a great app. Even supports reading rating tags, though it can't write to them due to Android limitations. It was a one-time payment of under $10 when I got it, and that blog post says they at least have an experimental build for Android TVs. Mostly why I picked it was:
It also has WebDAV support, but I just sync the music to my phone.
Symfonium is really great, but the TV version doesn't quite work —or didn't as of my testing probably a year ago.
I have also stopped using GMS, which makes using paid apps more difficult.
One thing that I really enjoyed was the Android Auto mode, which was flawless.