Trickplayer

Watch your own media on Even Realities G2 glasses — as a still frame every few seconds, with the subtitles in sync.

Trickplayer takes the preview thumbnails and subtitle track your Plex or Jellyfin server already generates and streams them to your glasses. You get the picture of what's happening and the dialogue as it's spoken, on a display you can see through, from a server you own.

Screenshots

Video (simulator)

Screenshots and clip show Tears of Steel — (CC) Blender Foundation, mango.blender.org, used under CC BY 3.0.

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What it actually is

It is not video. The G2 display is 576×288 and monochrome green, and the Bluetooth link to it carries a few kilobytes a second — nowhere near enough for moving pictures.

What it is: your media server already builds a trick-play index for every item — the strip of thumbnails you scrub through in the web player. Trickplayer fetches those thumbnails and the subtitle track, then shows you one frame at a time alongside the lines spoken during it.

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How it works

A scene is one frame plus every subtitle cue that starts during it. Scenes tile the episode end to end, so a line straddling a boundary is shown once, in the scene it begins in — never twice.

Three things make it watchable given how slow the link is:

• The next frame is fetched while you're still reading the current one. By the time a scene ends, its replacement is usually already on the glasses.
• Quality adapts to the link. If sends start failing or dragging, the picture drops to a cheaper form automatically, then climbs back when the link recovers. You get a coarser image rather than a stalled one.

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Features

Your own server, and nothing else

Connects to Plex or Jellyfin running on hardware you control. Sign in once on the phone and it remembers.

Subtitles, however your server has them

Separate subtitle files play straight away. A text track inside the video file can be extracted through your server the first time you play the item — on Plex, where the server won't hand it over directly — with a progress bar, an estimate of the time left, and a Cancel button. After that it loads instantly. And an item with no subtitles at all can get some: Find subtitles searches through your media server, lists what it finds by release name, and your server downloads the one you pick.

Every episode, and what it needs

Each item in a list carries badges showing whether its subtitles are ready, need extracting, or are missing, and whether it has preview thumbnails — nothing is silently left out. Every item opens on its own page with its picture, season and episode, and description; one that can't play yet says why, and offers what will fix it.

Browse from the glasses or the phone

Your phone handles sign-in and full library browsing. The glasses carry the shortcuts — Recently played, Continue watching, and Playlists — so once something is set up you never have to take the phone out.

Picks up where you left off

Reads the resume position from your media server, and can optionally report back as you watch so your other clients stay in step. Reporting is off until you turn it on — it writes to your server.

Adaptive picture quality

Bluetooth to glasses is unreliable by nature. Rather than stalling, the picture steps down through progressively cheaper forms and climbs back when the link improves. You can also pin it by hand if you'd rather have consistency than adaptation.

Tuned for a see-through display

Contrast, brightness and gamma, plus a Glare control that gives up the brightest levels.

Private by construction

Trickplayer talks to your media server and to nothing else. No account to create, no telemetry, no analytics, no third party. When you search for subtitles, it's your server that asks OpenSubtitles, not the app. Diagnostic logging is off until you switch it on, stays on your phone, and only ever leaves if you copy it and send it yourself.

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What you need

• A pair of Even Realities G2 glasses and the Even Hub app.
• A Plex or Jellyfin server you can reach. Jellyfin support is experimental.
• Items with a trick-play index. Subtitles can be separate files, text tracks inside the video, or downloaded from the app. Trickplayer checks each item and shows you which will play, so you don't have to guess.

Server setup

	What to enable	Subtitles
Plex	Generate video preview thumbnails — Settings → Scheduled Tasks	External .srt files play at once. A text track inside the file can be extracted on first play (see below). Find subtitles uses Plex's own subtitle search.
Jellyfin	Enable trickplay image extraction — per library settings	Embedded text tracks and sidecars both work. Find subtitles needs a subtitle plugin, such as OpenSubtitles, set up on the server.

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Controls

On the glasses

Gesture	What it does
Swipe up / down	Move through a list
Tap	Choose the highlighted row
Tap, then long press	Open the contextual menu
Double tap	Exit the app

The contextual menu holds Play / Pause, Play from start, and Return to list.

On the phone

Sign in, browse your full library, play, pause, seek, extract or download subtitles, and everything under Settings. Back ends playback and returns to the list where you left it.

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Settings

Setting	What it changes
Framerate	How often a new image is sent. Fewer images means longer gaps between images but may be more reliable.
Picture quality	Auto steps between High, Standard and Low as the connection allows. Choosing High, Standard or Low holds it there.
Glare	How much of the top of the brightness range to give up. (depending on content the brightest level blows out the image)
Contrast / Brightness / Gamma	Standard tone controls, with a live preview.
Skip silent scenes	Drop stretches with no dialogue, so the episode moves faster.
Report progress	Write your position back to the media server. Off by default.
Debugging tools	Message logging and link capture, both off by default, plus two checks: whether the glasses accept pictures, and how fast this phone prepares them.

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FAQ

No — and it can't be. The link carries a few kilobytes a second, and the display is monochrome green. Trickplayer sends one still every few seconds, using the preview thumbnails your server already generated. Think motion comic, not film.

It is missing one of the two halves. Trickplayer needs preview thumbnails (a trick-play index) and text subtitles for the same item. Every episode is listed, and the badges say which half each one has:

Badge	Meaning
SUBS in green	Subtitles ready. Plays straight away.
SUBS in amber	Subtitles are inside the video file. Its page offers Extract (read them out through your server, once) or Download (search for a subtitle file). After either, it's green.
SUBS in red	Plex lists a subtitle file that isn't on the server any more. Use Find subtitles, or refresh the item's metadata in Plex.
SUBS in grey	No text subtitles. Image-based ones (PGS, VobSub), styled ASS tracks and forced-only tracks don't count. Use Find subtitles to get some.
IMG in grey	No preview thumbnails yet. That one has to be fixed on the server — see server setup.

Plex won't hand over a subtitle track embedded inside a video file directly, only sidecar files sitting next to it. Extract asks your server's transcoder to read the track out, which means the server runs through the whole file once: a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the video and the server's hardware. The progress bar shows an estimate of the time left once it knows the pace, and Cancel stops the work on the server. Your phone downloads only the subtitles themselves (tens of kilobytes), and the result is kept, so playing the item again is instant. The subtitles are the file's own, so they're in sync with it.

Download searches for a subtitle file instead, through your media server, and is quicker for a long video or a slow server. The file comes from a third party, so its timing may differ from your copy — see below.

Extraction reads the track that is selected for the item in Plex; to change the language, pick the subtitle track in a Plex app first. Jellyfin serves embedded tracks on its own, so items there never need extracting.

From your media server's own subtitle search — on Plex, the OpenSubtitles agent built into the server; on Jellyfin, a subtitle plugin. Trickplayer only asks the server to search and to download the one you pick: the server contacts OpenSubtitles, fetches the file and attaches it to the item, so it's then there for every app that plays from your server. The file never passes through your phone.

Results list the release each file was made for, and are ordered best first: files the search matched to your exact video, then plain subtitles before ones that describe sounds (SDH), then the most downloaded. A file whose name is for a different episode is marked and moved to the bottom, even when the search calls it a match — that happens. Pick the one whose release looks like your copy; if its timing is off, search again and pick another.

Remote access. Glasses apps declare in advance which domains they may reach, and Plex has a first-party one (plex.direct) that covers every user's server. Jellyfin has no equivalent, so there is no single domain to declare.

Local connections work. For remote access, Trickplayer also permits *.ts.net, so a Tailscale network will reach your server from anywhere. Anything else is currently out of reach.

No — that's the quality ladder doing its job. When sends slow down or fail, the picture steps down to something cheaper so frames keep arriving rather than stopping, then climbs back on its own once the link recovers. Locking your phone is the most common cause: it slows Bluetooth enough to push full-size frames past the host's deadline.

No. It talks to your media server and nothing else. There is no account, no telemetry and no analytics. If you turn on Report progress, positions are written to your server — the same thing any other client does — and nowhere else.

The display's top level reads much brighter than its position in the range suggests, which on a see-through display can cause eye strain. The Glare setting gives up the brightest levels to soften it. It is off by default; the first two steps cost roughly half a percent of the picture.

Anything with thumbnails and subtitles — films, episodes, whatever is in a playlist. Subtitle-led material fares best, since the dialogue drives the pacing.

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For developers

Run it

npm install
npm run dev          # vite, bound to the LAN so a phone can load it
npm run simulate     # desktop glasses simulator

To load a dev build on real glasses, point the Even Hub app at http://<your-ip>:5173. To package a release:

npx evenhub pack app.json dist -o trickplayer-X.Y.Z.ehpk

The SDK is pinned to 0.0.14. Later versions changed bridge behaviour that the foreground/background handling depends on.

Tests

Everything runs headless, without glasses:

npm run conformance      # the shared findings ledger, asserted against this code
npm run quality-check    # the picture ladder
npm run telemetry-check  # report generation and redaction
npm run ble-sim          # the send queue under a lossy link
npm run png-check        # the PNG encoder
npm run route-check      # server discovery and route racing
npm run store-check      # every persisted key is actually hydrated
npm run redaction-check  # nothing identifying reaches a report
npm run pixel-bench      # the pixel pipeline, timed and pinned byte-for-byte

Layout

index.html          webview host, zoom-locked viewport
src/main.ts         the engine: BLE queue, scene pipeline, image path, glasses UI
src/ui.ts           the phone panels, and the engine's UI hooks
src/quality.ts      the picture ladder
src/pixels.ts       greyscale, tone, dither, block expansion
src/png.ts          4-bit greyscale PNG encoder
src/timeline.ts     trick-play index parsing
src/subtitles.ts    SRT and ASS parsing, and cleaning
src/cuelayout.ts    wrapping and paging cues onto the glasses (F-002)
src/plex*.ts        Plex sign-in, server discovery, library, embedded-subtitle
                    extraction, subtitle search
src/jellyfin*.ts    Jellyfin equivalents
src/logging.ts      the debugging tools panel
app.json            manifest and network permissions
tools/              the test suites above

Display facts worth knowing

• 576×288, 4-bit greyscale — 16 shades of green.
• Images are sent at 256×144, letterboxed, the container's maximum height.
• Text lines are 27 px; the 432×132 subtitle area holds four. Lines are measured with the firmware's own font metrics (@evenrealities/pretext) and broken by the app.
• Image containers cannot capture events; a full-screen text container is used as the event layer.
• A list holds exactly 20 rows, and a menu 10 items with 32-byte labels.

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Credits

Tears of Steel — (CC) Blender Foundation, mango.blender.org. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Every screenshot and the demo clip in this README show that film; see store_assets/README.md for why it is the one film these repositories carry images of.

Trickplayer is not affiliated with Plex, Jellyfin, or Even Realities.