Wholphin developer's guide

See also the Contributing guide for general information on contributing to the project.

Overview

This project is an Android TV client for Jellyfin. It is written in Kotlin and uses the official Jellyfin Kotlin SDK to interact with the server.

The app is a single Activity (MainActivity) with MVVM architecture.

The app uses:

Compose for the UI
Navigation 3 for navigating app screen
Room & DataStore for local data storage
Hilt for dependency injection
Media3/ExoPlayer for media playback
Coil for image loading
OkHttp for HTTP requests

Getting started

We follow GitHub's fork & pull request model for contributions.

After forking and cloning your fork, you can import the project into Android Studio.

You need a compatible Android Studio version for the configured AGP. This is generally Narwhal 3 Feature Drop | 2025.1.3 or newer. See https://developer.android.com/build/releases/gradle-plugin and `libs.versions.toml.

Native components

Wholphin includes some optional native components that are compiled outside of the normal Android gradle build process.

These components are not generally required to build or test the app during development.

If you want to build any of them locally, you must have the Android NDK installed.

FFmpeg decoder module

Wholphin ships with media3 ffmpeg decoder module.

It is not required to build the extension in order to build the app locally.

You can build the module on MacOS or Linux with the build_ffmpeg_decoder.sh script.

MPV player backend

Wholphin has a playback engine that uses libmpv. The app uses JNI code from mpv-android and has an implementation of androidx.media3.common.Player to swap out for ExoPlayer.

See the build scripts for details on building this component.

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