Pix: Screensaver for Plex on Android TV, the NVIDIA Shield and Google TV.
Your Plex library as a slow, cinematic screensaver, with a guessing game.

Download · Website · Install · Google TV

Pix takes the backdrops from the films and shows on your own Plex server and gives them a film look: grain, a soft halation round the highlights, a little warmth. Then it pans slowly across them, one film a minute. While each one is on screen it plays a small guessing game: halfway through you get the year, and a line under it shows how long each word of the title is. Then the title appears.

1. The still

2. The clue: the year, a line a word

3. The title

What it does

• Your own library. Films and TV shows from the Plex server you own, the better-rated ones and the ones you've seen coming up more often, since those are the ones you can guess. Pix leaves out any library with "private" in its name.
• A film look, not a slideshow. Each backdrop is developed once on the GPU, with grain fixed to the picture like a print, and then only panned. Stills with black bars are skipped.
• The guessing game. The year comes halfway, then the title. You choose how long each film stays, how long you get to guess and how long the title stays.
• Works offline. Pix keeps the last 40 films it showed, so it still has your films when the server is down.
• Leaves your TV alone. No wake locks, no sound, no video. Your TV's own sleep timer still ends the screensaver and turns the TV off.

In the screensaver, left and right change the film, up and down set the brightness, and OK opens the film in the Plex app. Any other button closes it.

What you need

• An Android TV device on Android 11 or later, such as an NVIDIA Shield.
• A Plex server you own, and the Plex account it's signed in to.

Important

Many Google TV devices don't list Pix for Plex in their settings. Chromecast with Google TV, the Google TV Streamer and many TVs sold since about 2022 show only Google's own screensavers. If yours doesn't list Pix, set it once with adb (see below). The Shield and other Android TV devices list Pix in their settings like any other screensaver.

Install

1. Download pix-<version>.apk from the latest release.
2. Install it on your TV the way you usually sideload apps, or from a computer with your TV's developer options and network debugging turned on:

   adb connect <your-tv's-ip>
   adb install pix-<version>.apk

3. Open Pix from your apps and scan the QR code with your phone. Approve it on Plex's page and you're signed in.
4. Choose Pix as your screensaver. In your TV's Settings, go to Device Preferences → Screen saver → Screen saver and pick Pix for Plex. Set as screensaver in Pix opens Settings for you.

Not signed in yet? The screensaver shows a public-domain still (the moon from Méliès's A Trip to the Moon, 1902) with the QR code in a corner. Scan it from the sofa and your films take over.

Google TV

With developer options and network debugging on (Settings → System → About, then select Android TV OS build seven times):

adb connect <your-tv's-ip>
adb install pix-<version>.apk

# Note what's chosen now, so you can put it back later
adb shell settings get secure screensaver_components

# Choose Pix
adb shell settings put secure screensaver_components io.betta.pix/.PixDream

To go back, put the value you noted back the same way. Google TV's own is com.google.android.apps.tv.dreamx/.service.Backdrop.

Settings

Open Pix to sign in or out, preview the screensaver and change:

Setting	Choices
Each film	30 s, 1 min, 2 min, 5 min
Time to guess	5 s, 10 s, 15 s, 20 s
Title stays	5 s, 8 s, 15 s, until the next film
Brightness	20% to 100%, 70% (up and down in the screensaver change it too)

Privacy

• Pix talks only to plex.tv (to sign in and find your server) and to your own Plex server. It has no analytics, no ads and no tracking.
• Your Plex sign-in stays on the TV, in the app's private storage, and is left out of Android's backups. It's never logged or shown.
• Pix only reads your library. It never changes anything in Plex.

Pix is not affiliated with or endorsed by Plex, Inc.

Building it yourself

You need JDK 17 and the Android SDK (Android Studio has both).

./gradlew testDebugUnitTest lintDebug   # the checks CI runs
./gradlew installDebug                   # build and install on a connected TV

Credits

• The screenshots show films from a Plex library; their stills belong to the films' owners.
• The moon: a frame from the hand-coloured print of Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Instrument Sans, under the SIL Open Font License.
• ZXing for the QR code, under the Apache License 2.0.

Licence

MIT.

This repository is published automatically from the code Pix is built from. Issues and pull requests are welcome; an accepted change is made at the source and arrives here with the next release.