Installing My TV Player on Windows 11

There are 2 ways to install the Windows app, and the second is not a fallback for people who cannot use the first. They serve different purposes.

From the Microsoft Store#

The normal route. Search for My TV Player, install, done. Updates arrive the way every other Store app's updates arrive, and you never think about it again.

For most people this is the answer and the rest of this article is background.

From our own domain#

The second channel exists for one reason, stated plainly in our own distribution notes: the Store can delist an app, and that must not stop new installs or updates.

So the same desktop build is also published as an MSIX package, advertised through an App Installer document served from our domain and its mirrors. Windows App Installer polls that document and services the app with no Store involvement at all.

A release publishes 4 artifacts plus a checksum list:

MyTvPlayer.appinstaller                     the feed, stable URL, carries update policy
MyTvPlayer.Desktop.Windows_<ver>_x64.msix   the app, version-stamped
Microsoft.WindowsAppRuntime.1.8_<ver>_x64.msix   framework dependency
SHA256SUMS.txt                              integrity list for the download page

Two things about that list matter.

The app package is .NET self-contained, so there is no step 0 where you install a .NET runtime first. The Windows App SDK stays framework-dependent, because it is a shared serviceable framework, which is why its package sits alongside rather than being folded in. A first install needs no Store round trip to fetch it.

And the version in the file name is design, not tidiness. The URLs are immutable and therefore cacheable, which is what makes a mirror useful. The one file that must never be cached is the feed itself, and its own version attribute has to increase on every publish or the document is treated as unchanged.

What I did not expect to be a hosting problem, until our own notes named it the classic one: serve the feed with the wrong content type and Windows either downloads it as text or rejects it with no useful error. 5 file extensions need explicit types, and the fix belongs at the origin rather than at an edge that rewrites HTML.

What is not in the package#

No credentials. The build refuses to run at all if an untracked local settings override is present, and after packing it verifies that the shipped settings file still has empty key fields.

Metadata service keys are delivered after you authenticate and applied at runtime, so nothing sensitive sits in an artifact anyone can download. The check keeps it that way. It does not exist to catch a known problem.

If you are checking a downloaded package yourself: Windows will not install an unsigned MSIX at all, and the publisher declared in the package has to match the signing certificate's subject exactly. A mismatch produces an opaque signtool error rather than a helpful one, which matters if you ever repackage for an organisation.

The first launch#

Startup got a lot of attention and the numbers moved: warm launch to Home came down from 11.6 seconds to about 4.6, and picking a profile to reaching Home was roughly halved, to about 1.2 seconds.

One thing deliberately did not get faster. The profile picker never skips itself, even in a household with one profile, and even though auto-advancing was on the table as the way to hit an under 3 second target. It was rejected permanently. Choosing a profile is a security boundary, and a boundary you cross automatically has stopped being one. If your household uses parental controls, that picker is the thing enforcing them.

The first launch after adding a large source is a separate matter, and it is slower than every launch after it, because the playlist is parsed and indexed locally rather than on a server. On a console the cold case has been measured at 39.5 seconds and 1.4 GB; a desktop is faster but the shape is the same.

Next#

Import a playlist in the web console, or straight in the Windows app, and the app has something to show. If you have an Xbox as well, pair it now and it inherits everything: installing on Xbox.

Two things worth setting up on day 1 on a desktop specifically: the keyboard shortcuts, which are standard media player keys with one live TV rule that catches people out, and watching on a second monitor if the machine is a work machine.