2026-07-08, 04:53 PM
Astra is live.
Amazon's Vega OS broke Jellyfin access for anyone buying a new Fire TV Stick — no client, no workaround, nothing. So I spent the last two weeks (nights, weekends, and way too much downtime at my day job) building one from scratch.
Quick origin story: I was dating a woman named Kimberly, a huge Star Trek fan. I host basically the entire Star Trek catalog — every series, every film, minus a handful of 70s cartoons — on my own Jellyfin server. She bought a Fire Stick so she could watch from her own place. Turned out it was one of the new Vega OS models, which has no way to sideload or run a Jellyfin client at all. I already had other hardware that could run Jellyfin fine — I went out and bought a Vega device anyway, specifically so I'd have real hardware to debug against instead of guessing in a simulator.
That was the spark, but honestly not the whole reason. Once I saw how big the actual gap was — a whole new generation of Fire TV hardware with zero Jellyfin support — I wanted to fix it regardless. I like having my own media on any device I own, and I like sharing it: my roommates watch off my collection, and I host my mom's entire cowboy movie collection on there too, because she's an older lady who has a hard time reading DVD covers — now she can just scroll and pick something. That's basically the whole design goal in one sentence.
Astra connects to your own Jellyfin server and gives you a real, TV-native way to browse and watch your library on Fire TV/Vega devices. No accounts beyond your own server, no subscriptions, no hosted content — just your stuff, on your TV.
The goal is "someone technical sets it up once, then anyone can use it." Astra can find your server automatically on the local network, or you can just type in an IP address if it's remote — then log in with your Jellyfin username and password, same as any Jellyfin client. Once that's done, day-to-day it's just: open the app, scroll, pick something, watch.
It's free, and it'll stay free. This is v1 — core playback works, but Vega OS is still rough around the edges as a platform (undocumented APIs, missing things the official Jellyfin team is also fighting), so expect some gaps. I'm actively iterating.
On licensing, upfront: source is on GitHub, but under a source-available license right now, not fully open source yet. Put about two weeks and $100 in API costs into cracking Vega's undocumented quirks and wanted some runway before opening it up completely — it converts automatically to Apache 2.0 by July 2028, or sooner if community support gets there first. Full terms in the repo, happy to answer questions on the reasoning.
Amazon's Vega OS broke Jellyfin access for anyone buying a new Fire TV Stick — no client, no workaround, nothing. So I spent the last two weeks (nights, weekends, and way too much downtime at my day job) building one from scratch.
Quick origin story: I was dating a woman named Kimberly, a huge Star Trek fan. I host basically the entire Star Trek catalog — every series, every film, minus a handful of 70s cartoons — on my own Jellyfin server. She bought a Fire Stick so she could watch from her own place. Turned out it was one of the new Vega OS models, which has no way to sideload or run a Jellyfin client at all. I already had other hardware that could run Jellyfin fine — I went out and bought a Vega device anyway, specifically so I'd have real hardware to debug against instead of guessing in a simulator.
That was the spark, but honestly not the whole reason. Once I saw how big the actual gap was — a whole new generation of Fire TV hardware with zero Jellyfin support — I wanted to fix it regardless. I like having my own media on any device I own, and I like sharing it: my roommates watch off my collection, and I host my mom's entire cowboy movie collection on there too, because she's an older lady who has a hard time reading DVD covers — now she can just scroll and pick something. That's basically the whole design goal in one sentence.
Astra connects to your own Jellyfin server and gives you a real, TV-native way to browse and watch your library on Fire TV/Vega devices. No accounts beyond your own server, no subscriptions, no hosted content — just your stuff, on your TV.
The goal is "someone technical sets it up once, then anyone can use it." Astra can find your server automatically on the local network, or you can just type in an IP address if it's remote — then log in with your Jellyfin username and password, same as any Jellyfin client. Once that's done, day-to-day it's just: open the app, scroll, pick something, watch.
It's free, and it'll stay free. This is v1 — core playback works, but Vega OS is still rough around the edges as a platform (undocumented APIs, missing things the official Jellyfin team is also fighting), so expect some gaps. I'm actively iterating.
On licensing, upfront: source is on GitHub, but under a source-available license right now, not fully open source yet. Put about two weeks and $100 in API costs into cracking Vega's undocumented quirks and wanted some runway before opening it up completely — it converts automatically to Apache 2.0 by July 2028, or sooner if community support gets there first. Full terms in the repo, happy to answer questions on the reasoning.
- Source: https://github.com/AmbientFlare/astra-tv
- Amazon Appstore: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0H7QLTPWZ
- Full writeup + screenshots: https://watchastra.com
- Support: https://ko-fi.com/astrafiretv
