Settings reference

Settings opens on two tabs, and the split is the whole answer to a question the screen used to leave open: whose setting is this?

• Profile — everything you choose. Theme, playback tuning, subtitles, hidden writing systems, hidden and renamed categories, the merge switches, channel logos, the player's ambient light, and which tabs you see. Switching profile redraws the app immediately.
• App — the device. Sources, the Movie Database key and its catalogue scan, backup and restore, the update check, licences and the version number.

Before 2026-08-24 everything on this page was shared by everybody using the device, while favourites and resume points were not — with nothing on screen saying where the line fell. Who is watching sets out the division in full.

Four tabs can be switched off, per profile: Live TV, Movies, Series and Favourites. An M3U with no films shows a Movies tab that opens on nothing, and a household that never watches series still walks past Series to reach Films every evening.

Three things it deliberately does not do:

• Search, Sources and the television's Home cannot be hidden. Two of them are the only way to reach something that is not on a shelf; hiding the third would leave the app opening on a tab it has been told not to draw.
• The last visible tab will not switch off. The control refuses rather than greying out, because which one is last changes as you switch the others.
• It is not a lock. Hiding a tab is a preference, not parental control — anybody can switch it back on. See No PIN.

Hiding the tab you are currently on moves you to a visible one rather than leaving a screen with no way back to it.

Two switches, and the second only appears once the first is on.

Setting	What it does
Merge duplicate titles	A provider that carries one film in SD, HD, FHD and 4K sends four rows. On, the catalogue, search, the recently-added row and the category counts show it once, and the copies are offered on the film's own screen
One grid instead of shelves	Those same four copies are usually filed under four categories — FILMS HD, FILMS 4K, FILMS AR. On, the shelves go and the whole kind is one grid

Both are off by default, because both hide rows a provider sent, and hiding rows nobody asked to hide is how somebody comes to believe their account is missing something.

The second is hidden rather than greyed out while the first is off. Collapsing the shelves without merging the copies would give you one grid in which every film appears four times in a row — the worst of both settings, and not a state worth offering.

Quiblo is installed from an APK and has no store behind it, so nothing would otherwise tell you that the build on your television is eight months old.

Check on launch, under the App tab, is on by default. Once each time the app opens it asks our own GitHub releases page whether a newer version exists. If there is one, you get Update now or Later; the television downloads it and verifies the published checksum before handing it to the system installer, and the phone opens the releases page in a browser — it holds no install permission and deliberately never will.

Four things about it are decisions rather than details:

• Off means no request. Not a hidden answer — nothing goes out at all.
• Nothing about you is sent. It is a plain request for a public file. No identifier, no device information, no body; your version is compared on the device.
• Silence when there is nothing to say. Up to date, offline and unreachable show nothing at all. Those answers belong to the Check now button further down the same page, where you asked for them.
• Once per launch. Switching profile or backing out to the home screen does not ask again.

There is no "skip this version". Dismissing an update means not now, and a switch recording which release you said no to is a second setting you could never find again to undo.

Setting	Values	What it does
Skip interval	5, 10, 15, 30 seconds	How far the skip controls move, on both apps
Buffering	Low, Balanced, High	How much the player buffers ahead. Low starts faster and is more fragile on a poor connection; High is the reverse
Maximum quality	Unlimited, 8, 4, 2 Mbps	Caps the bitrate the player will select on an adaptive stream. Useful on metered or slow connections
Start the next episode after (television)	Off, 3, 5, 10, 15 seconds	How long the end-of-episode banner counts down before starting the next one. Off still offers it and waits for you to choose

All of them are stored in DataStore and read by the player as a flow, so a change applies without a restart.

The last is on the television only, because only the television player moves between episodes so far. A setting shown on an app it does not affect is the thing the feature audit taught us to remove, so it stays off the phone until the phone can honour it.

Setting	Values
Theme	System, Light, Dark
Dynamic colour	On, Off — Material You, taking the palette from the wallpaper

Neither exists on the television. See above.

Both belong to the profile, so two people on one phone can have different themes.

Providers name their categories however they like, and a large account can have hundreds. Two local edits are offered, per content kind:

• Hide — the category disappears from browsing. Nothing is deleted.
• Rename — a local display name.

Both are local only; nothing is sent anywhere. The provider's original title stays the storage key, so an edit reattaches after every refresh rather than being lost with the row ids. A blank rename removes the override rather than storing one that says nothing.

Hiding means hidden. A hidden category's titles are gone from browsing, from the television's rows and from the recently-added row, not merely from the list of categories. Until 2026-08-24 they were only gone from that list, which made the setting look as though it did nothing.

Except in Favourites. A title you starred stays starred and stays visible even if you later hide the shelf it came from. Hiding a category filters the catalogue; it never removes something you picked by hand.

Search omits hidden categories too, unless Include hidden is switched on in advanced search.

Every edit belongs to the profile that made it, so two people on one television can hide different shelves.

Optional, off unless you supply a key. With a key from The Movie Database, poster tiles gain a score and detail screens gain a plot, genres, a certificate, the director or creator, and a cast list. It can also fill in artwork where your provider gave none.

Your key is yours, and the service rate-limits per key, so the app is careful with it: answers — including "no match" — are cached in the database across launches, requests are made per tile that has actually been on screen rather than per category opened, and they pass a token bucket that holds the sustained rate to eight a second.

A failure is never cached. "Nothing matches this title" is an answer worth remembering; "I could not ask" is not one, and writing it down as though it were is how a catalogue ends up permanently described as empty.

If you would rather not wait for the cache to fill a tile at a time, you can describe the whole catalogue in one go.

Provider artwork always wins. The service only fills a gap, because a panel's own cover is the cover for the thing it is serving, and second-guessing it is how a grid ends up showing the wrong film's poster.

Ordinarily film and series information arrives a tile at a time, for things you have actually looked at. That is the right default — it costs nothing for a library you never open — but it leaves the genre filter knowing only the corners of your catalogue you have already walked past.

Describe catalogue, under film and series information, asks about everything in one go. It appears once a key has been accepted, and it shows what it is doing while it runs: a progress bar, the number described so far out of the total, and how many of them The Movie Database holds nothing for.

What it costs
Requests to your IPTV provider	None. It reads the catalogue already on the device
Requests to The Movie Database	One per title not already cached, paced at eight a second
Titles already cached	Skipped — including the ones cached as "no match"

Three properties make it safe to press:

• It stops itself. If the service asks us to slow down, or rejects the key, the scan stops asking rather than grinding on. It says which of those happened, because waiting fixes one and nothing fixes the other.
• It resumes. Everything fetched before it stopped is cached and counted, so starting again carries on from there rather than from the beginning. The same is true if you cancel.
• Failures are never written down. A title that could not be asked about is left unknown, not recorded as having no match. Caching a rate limit as an answer would poison a catalogue for a fortnight and leave the genre filter confidently empty.

The key is yours, so the pacing matters beyond this app: a throttled key is throttled for everything else you use it for.

Shows the current profile and offers Switch profile, which returns you to the chooser. Adding a profile happens in the chooser itself.

It sits at the top of the Profile tab, because everything under that tab belongs to whoever it names. What is left on the App tab is shared by everyone using the device. Who is watching sets out the whole division, and what guest does differently.

Also optional and also off by default. Fills in artwork for live channels whose playlist supplied none, from a public reference list.

Off by default is not a UI preference here — it is the "never phones home" invariant. A clean install talks to nothing but the hosts you typed until you say otherwise.

It costs one download of a single index file, cached to the database, rather than a request per channel.

The switch belongs to the profile; the downloaded index belongs to the device, because it is one file everybody shares. Switching it off drops that file, which is the point — turning this off is asking the app to stop holding a third party's data, not asking it to stop looking at it for you alone.

Export writes a JSON file wherever you choose through the system document picker — no storage permission is involved. Import reads one back.

Two properties worth knowing:

• Passwords are never written to the file. The screen says so, and you re-enter them after importing. This is the credentials invariant holding across the export path.
• A backup from a newer version is refused by name: "That backup was written by a newer version of Quiblo (format 99, this build reads 1)." Naming both versions is deliberate — a user told only "wrong format" has nothing to act on.

Importing your own export is idempotent: "Nothing to restore — everything in that file is already set up."