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User Guide
How to use Moonfin on the TV day to day: the remote inside the player, typing, finding things, and making the app look the way you want. For the first-time setup see Getting Started.
Every setting mentioned here can also be found by typing its name into the search box at the top of Settings.
| Button | What happens |
|---|---|
| Left / Right | Seek back or forward by the Seek Step (10 seconds by default) and show the controls. Keep pressing to jump further before it applies |
| Up / Down | Show the controls and move between the rows of buttons. During Live TV, Up opens the channel changer |
| OK | Play or pause when the controls are hidden, and on the progress bar too. When a Skip Intro, Skip Credits or Next Episode prompt is on screen, OK takes it |
| Play / Pause | Play or pause |
| Rewind / Fast forward | Jump back by Skip Back Length (10 seconds) or forward by Skip Forward Length (30 seconds) |
| Stop | Leave the player |
| Back | Close whatever is open first (a menu, the controls), then leave the player |
| Red | Opens a developer console overlay on the right of the screen. Press Red again to close it. Green clears it. It's harmless, it's just there for debugging |
All three lengths are under Settings > Playback & SyncPlay > Video Playback Preferences. During Live TV, Left and Right only show the controls.
While you scrub with Left and Right, playback pauses so you can look through the preview thumbnails, and Play or OK carries on from the new spot. That's Pause While Scrubbing, on by default in the same screen. It needs Trick Play on and a video with preview thumbnails, and it stays out of the way during SyncPlay. Turn it off to keep playing and jump as soon as you stop pressing. Chapter Marks, also there and off by default, marks where each chapter starts on the progress bar.
There is deliberately no playback speed control. These TVs hand the playback rate to a native pipeline that can't stretch audio and drops it instead, so every speed other than 1x played silent.
- On a movie or episode page, pick the audio and subtitle track before pressing Play. Moonfin remembers the choice for the rest of a series, and matches it by what the track is rather than its position, so it survives a reorder.
- Inside the player, the controls have Audio and Subtitles buttons for switching mid-film.
- Subtitles out of step with the speech? The Subtitles button has Offset, which moves them earlier or later a tenth of a second at a time. For plain text subtitles it also shows the lines around the current moment on a 10 second ruler, so you can watch them slide into place as you adjust.
- Defaults live under Playback & SyncPlay > Audio Preferences (default and fallback audio language, prefer audio description) and Subtitle Preferences (when subtitles load automatically, default and fallback language, prefer SDH).
- Size, position, colors and background are under Subtitle Preferences > Subtitle Customization. HDR Subtitles holds a separate style for HDR films, because white text reads far brighter in HDR.
Under Playback & SyncPlay > Automation & Queue:
- Intro Action and Outro Action: ask, skip on their own, or do nothing. Auto Hide Skip Button takes the button off the screen after a while.
- Autoplay Next Episode, the Next Up Countdown style and timeout, and the Still Watching Prompt.
- Cinema Mode plays trailers or pre-rolls before a film, and optionally before episodes.
The player's own controls include a Sleep timer. Under Video Playback Preferences, Show Description on Pause dims the video and shows the overview while paused, Trick Play shows preview thumbnails while seeking, and Player Zoom Mode crops or fits the picture.
Playback & SyncPlay > Video Playback Preferences > Player Buttons picks which buttons the player shows. Progress Bar Time sets what the six slots around the progress bar display: elapsed, remaining, total, the clock time the film ends at, the current time, or nothing. Personalization > Details Screen > Action Buttons does the same for the details page, and Action Buttons on Screen sets how many stay in the row before the rest move under More Actions. With the Moonbase plugin these layouts follow you to other devices.
The keyboard that opens for text fields has more than the letter grid:
- Layouts follow the app language: QWERTY, AZERTY for French, QWERTZ for German and several Central European languages.
- Symbol and number pages, and a phone-style pad for PINs and ports.
- Hold OK on a letter for accented versions.
- A movable cursor to fix a typo in the middle of a word, and a paste key for addresses and passwords copied on your phone.
- Suggestions above the keys offer recent servers, usernames and searches. Passwords never show suggestions.
- Prefer the TV's own keyboard, for voice input for example? Personalization > General Style > Keyboard > Prefer system keyboard.
Hold OK on a movie, show, season, episode, song, album or collection card for a menu of things you can do without opening it:
- Play or Resume, and Mark as Watched or Mark as Unwatched.
- Hide from Continue Watching on something you've started, and Hide from Next Up on an episode.
- Add to Favorites or Remove from Favorites, Add to Collection (when your account can manage collections) and Add to Playlist. On a collection's own page, its cards also offer Remove from Collection.
- Go to Series on an episode.
- Admins on a Jellyfin server also get Refresh Metadata, Identify and Change Artwork.
- Search groups results into tabs by type, offers your last ten searches as chips, and includes Seerr results and games when those are set up.
- Genres browses everything by genre in one place. Shuffle opens something random, filtered to movies, shows or both. Both buttons can be shown or hidden under Personalization > Navigation.
- Inside a library, the filter and sort controls only list what that library actually holds. Group a library into rows by genre, rating, decade or studio from the same place.
- Folder view with breadcrumbs is available per library under Personalization > Navigation > Enable Folder View.
- Live TV has a program guide with a filter rail (movies, sports, kids and so on), a date picker, and recording straight from the guide. Recordings have their own view. More on it under Live TV below.
When your server has Live TV, a Live TV button sits in the navigation bar, and Live TV leaves the Libraries list while the button is there. Personalization > Navigation > Show Live TV Button turns it off.
- The guide opens on the channel you watched last. A band at the top shows the focused program with its artwork, cells are tinted by genre, programs that already ended are faded, and episodes show their title and number.
- The bar above the grid has Earlier, Now and Later to move through the day, Sort By (Channel Number, Name or Favorites First, remembered and synced through Moonbase), Select date, and Recordings. The filter rail narrows the guide to movies, series, sports, news, kids, premieres or favorite channels.
- Fast forward and Rewind page through the channel rows. If you've wandered off, Back first takes you back to your last channel at the current time, and a second Back leaves the guide.
- Select a program to watch it, record it or the whole series, or favorite its channel.
- Skip TV Guide under Playback & SyncPlay > Advanced Options opens the first channel straight away instead of the guide.
Press Up during live playback, or the Channels button in the player, to open the channel changer. It's a strip of channels in guide order that wraps around at the ends. Left and Right move along it (hold to keep going), OK tunes, and Down or Back closes it. If a channel doesn't start, the one you were watching plays again. The strip closes by itself after two minutes without a press.
When your server has Seerr connected through the Moonbase plugin and you've signed in under Integrations > Seerr, titles you don't own open the same details page with a Request button (and 4K when offered), a status badge, and live download progress. The request dialog shows how many requests you have left. The Requests view shows your requests as a poster grid you can filter by status, with the type, who asked and when, and a download bar while a title is on its way. Setup steps are on Seerr Setup.
With the Moonbase plugin and a game library on the server, a Games entry appears with box art, and games play right on the TV with save states synced through the server. It needs webOS 5 or Tizen 5 and newer. Setup and supported systems are on the plugin's Retro Games page.
Moonfin provides no games or BIOS files. They come from a library you assemble on your own server, and you are responsible for holding the rights to anything you put there.
Everything below is under Settings > Personalization.
| You want to change | Go to |
|---|---|
| Colors and overall look | General Style > App Theme, the Theme Store for community themes, Custom themes, Focus Border Color, and OLED Mode for true blacks |
| How big everything is | General Style > UI Scaling |
| Blur, backdrops and the focus animation (also the knobs that make older TVs faster) | General Style > Browsing Background Blur, Background Backdrops, Focus Expansion Animation, and Performance Mode |
| Where the navigation bar sits and what's on it | Navigation: Top Bar or Left Sidebar, color and opacity, and which buttons show |
| The big banner at the top of Home | Media Bar: six styles or off, which libraries and collections feed it, auto advance, trailer previews |
| Which rows are on Home and in what order | Home Screen > Home Sections, plus Home Row Toggles and the image type per row |
| How a movie or show page is laid out | Details Screen: Details Screen Style picks Modern (the default), Spotlight, Nouveau, Minimalist or Classic. Also background blur and opacity, Metadata Row for which details show and in what order, and the spoiler toggles that hide descriptions and use series artwork instead of episode stills |
| Which libraries show up at all | Libraries > Library Visibility |
| A screensaver for burn-in, with your own artwork | Screensaver: timeout, dimming, what it shows and which libraries it draws from |
| Theme music on detail pages, seasonal decorations | Theme Music and Seasonal Effects |
With the Moonbase plugin these choices sync between your devices.
Under Settings > Account & Security:
- PIN Code Protection asks for a four-digit PIN before your account opens. Set your own under PIN Code. Until you do, the default is 0000. The PIN you set is stored as a hash, not as the digits themselves. After five wrong tries, each further guess makes you wait, starting at 30 seconds and growing to as much as 15 minutes.
- Blocked Ratings lists the age ratings found on your server, mildest first. Blocking one also blocks everything stronger than it, so blocking PG-13 blocks R and NC-17 too. Ratings Moonfin can't rank sit under Only blocks itself. See below for where it applies.
- Kids Mode strips the app back for a child and locks the way out with a PIN. See below.
- Always Authenticate forces the password every time instead of the stored sign-in.
Combined with a separate server user for each child, this keeps grown-up libraries out of reach on a shared TV.
A blocked rating works everywhere: home rows, search, suggestions, favorites, libraries, genres and people pages, and playback, including SyncPlay and the next episode. A blocked title that's opened some other way shows a padlock and "This isn't available", and it won't play. An episode without its own rating goes by its series' rating, and anything with no rating at all is never blocked.
The list is kept on the TV for each server and user, and it doesn't sync to your other devices, so locking down the kids' TV doesn't lock down your phone.
Open Account & Security > Kids Mode and choose a four-digit PIN. You pick a new PIN every time you turn it on, and it's cleared when you turn Kids Mode off. While it's on:
- Settings shrinks to Exit Kids Mode, where the PIN brings the full app back. Settings search is hidden too.
- Libraries, Live TV, Seerr and SyncPlay leave the navigation bar, and the Live TV, Recordings and Seerr screens send you back Home.
- Home keeps only My Media, Recently Added and one combined Continue Watching and Next Up row.
- Search leaves out Seerr results.
- Movie and show pages use the Minimalist style with just the play buttons, Shuffle and Favorite, and no description or technical details.
- A wrong PIN gets the same growing wait as PIN Code Protection.
Kids Mode is off by default and stays on the TV you turned it on for rather than syncing. Your own layout comes back untouched when you exit. Continue Watching and Next Up still come from the account's own history, so anything a grown-up started on that account shows up there. Blocked Ratings is what keeps that out.
Add servers from the server screen and turn on Personalization > Libraries > Multi-Server Libraries to browse them as one. Content carries a badge for the server it came from, and watch progress is tracked on the right server. Account & Security > Sort Servers By orders the list.
SyncPlay keeps a group in step across devices on the same server. It's on by default under Playback & SyncPlay > SyncPlay, where SyncPlay Button puts a SyncPlay button in the navigation bar. That button opens the SyncPlay dialog, where you create or join a group.
- While you're in a group, details pages get a Watch with group button that starts the title for everyone in the group.
- When the group is already watching something you aren't, the SyncPlay dialog shows what's playing with a Watch now button that takes you straight into it.
- A TV that drifts out of step catches up by jumping to the group's position. It never changes speed to close the gap. SyncPlay Extra Offset in the same screen adds a fixed offset for a TV whose picture lags behind the others.
While Moonfin is open, another Jellyfin app, like the Jellyfin web app or a phone app, can control it through the server. Pick the TV from that app's list of devices, then:
- Play, pause, stop, seek, and skip to the next or previous item.
- Change the TV's volume or mute it, and switch audio and subtitle tracks, repeat and shuffle.
- Send a message to the screen, or use the arrows and OK as a remote.
- Send something to play now, play next, or add to the end of the queue.
A phone remote can also open Search on the TV and type into it, with the results updating as you type.
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