FMHYPlay, a free Android TV app, lifts the video out of a website and plays it in a remote-friendly player
It ships no list of streams, and its README says it hosts nothing and has no tie to FMHY. Ten releases landed between November 7 and 9, one of them to fix a loading screen that closed right after OK was pressed on a TV remote.
A website built for a mouse is an awkward fit for a remote with four arrows and an OK button, and anyone who has tried to click a tiny play icon with a TV remote knows the feeling (it’s soup with a fork). FMHYPlay’s tagline names the fix: “Any streaming site, a real player.”
The mechanism, per the README, goes in three steps. The page loads in a WebView. The WebView’s requests “are watched for HLS and DASH playlists,” and the app steps in when a page starts an HLS, DASH or live FLV stream. At that point “the page is paused and the stream goes to ExoPlayer with the same headers and cookies the page used.” The README calls the player FMHYPlayer, “ExoPlayer with the hardware decoder,” so the video plays in a native player instead of inside the page.
The website still does the finding. The app just stops it from doing the playing. For the remote, the README lists a cursor (“with funny and useful looks”), for the times a site wants a pointer and you’ve only got arrows. It also works with touch.
Then come the site shortcuts. The app opens exact episodes “directly on 34 TV sites and 22 anime sites,” opens a title’s own page on about 70 sites, and searches the rest. A directory of sites tracks the lists on FMHY, a site that calls itself “The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!” and states “This site does not host any files.” The name FMHYPlay is a nod, and the README is firm that it’s only a nod: it is “not affiliated with or endorsed by FMHY, Cloudflare, Stremio, OpenSubtitles, iptv-org or any streaming site.”
The rest of the feature list is long. Cast to Chromecast and DLNA targets, IPTV with more than 11,000 channels from iptv-org plus custom playlists, domain-based ad, tracker and pop-up blocking, in-app Cloudflare WARP, subtitles from OpenSubtitles, and an optional debug overlay. There are separate APKs for TV and phones, both on the releases page, for arm64 or 32-bit ARM. On Fire TV, the README gives a Downloader code, 9828006. Releases are signed with the same key, so updates install over the old version.
The releases page moves fast. It lists ten releases between November 7 and 9, from 2.16.1 through 2.18.6. Version 2.18.6 fixes a loading screen that closed right after pressing OK on Next episode with a TV remote, and a Next episode that could stay on the old episode for some resumed anime. Version 2.18.5 added a one-step Home button and a loading screen for site actions. Version 2.18.0 added series and anime in the player, skip intro, a Sub/Dub button and picture-in-picture. Everything here comes from the project’s README and release notes.
The README says the app is “free and made in spare time,” and it doesn’t name a maintainer.
Apps that read a page, take the stream and hand it to a native player will probably keep spreading wherever a remote is the only input: smart TVs, streaming sticks, projectors. The weak point on those devices is the browser. Which streaming sites keep their streams in HLS or DASH is a different question, and the README gives no answer for the sites it doesn’t name.
Remote sold separately.