Launch: Teleplayer
After reading about the in-house analog cable channel project, I thought I’d do something similar for the next Chinese New Year when my relatives come over. Since I don’t have the engineering skills to follow the cable channel project, I figured I’d just AirPlay a bunch of videos to the TV.
For some reason, QuickTime Player can’t play multiple videos as a playlist, and VLC and IINA don’t support AirPlay. So I thought, how hard can it be to make my own video player? Turns out, it’s pretty hard. But I’m stupid and decided to go ahead with the project anyway, and that’s how I ended up creating Teleplayer.
It’s Big Buck Bunny. It’s always Big Buck Bunny.
Teleplayer is a video player with one main purpose: to AirPlay a list of videos to an Apple TV.
If you have a collection of TV shows, you can create your own personalized TV channel. If you have music videos, you can recreate the old MTV channel. Or you can turn your homemade videos into a screensaver to play when you aren’t watching anything.
To keep things simple, I use the default system video player and stick to video formats that are supported natively on the Apple TV. Teleplayer doesn’t use mpv for playback or ffmpeg to transcode videos on the fly. This means it can’t play mkv or avi videos, but I can use Subler to convert mkv to mp4 and Handbrake for other formats. So no big deal.
During AirPlay, if your Mac goes to sleep, the playback stops. To work around this, you can use something like Staring to keep your Mac awake. Teleplayer now keeps your Mac awake while the app is running.
Usually, apps like this come with a companion remote app for iOS. But I wanted to avoid that and just use the Apple TV remote. With Teleplayer, you can scrub to the end of a video to skip to the next one and rewind twice at the beginning of a video to go back to the previous one. Here’s how it works:
Other than that, the app has no features. It doesn’t even have a settings screen. Don’t expect it to have feature parity with other video players. It works pretty well for what I need, though. Give it a try. I hope you find it useful.
Teleplayer Pricing
Teleplayer is available for a limited time at $4.99 on the App Store. After January 2025, the price will increase to $9.99. There are no subscriptions, in-app purchases, ads, or tracking.
Teleplayer Privacy Policy
Teleplayer doesn’t collect, store, or transmit any personal information.
Teleplayer Support
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via email or Mastodon. I read all my emails and Mastodon mentions, but sometimes I’m too socially awkward to reply. Sorry about that in advance.