Custom player QOL
The Serial custom player now supports captions, true fullscreen, and muting support. Also, some additional non-player quality of life improvements.
January 20, 2026
Features
More controls for the custom player
- The custom player now supports captions - these can be toggled with c and customized with the caption settings dropdown in the player
- The custom player now supports true fullscreen with f
- Note: windowed fullscreen’s shortcut has been moved to Shift + f (and is still accessible at `)
- The custom player now supports muting a video with m
Mark visible as read button
- Mark all the items seen so far in a view as read by hitting the “Mark visible as read” button at the bottom of the screen, or by pressing
e(the existing “mark as read” shortcut)- This should make working with noisy feeds much less of a chore than before, and help users who strive to have “inbox zero” achieve that
Basic admin features
- For self-hosting users, added a few useful user managment features:
- Automatically create an admin user when no users exist, and prevent public sign up by default
- Add the ability to log out, ban, or impersonate a user
- Add some simple instance stats to see how many people are using your Serial instance
Improvements
- Feeds will now pull cover images from the item’s OG image if no other image is available
- Much better database query performance
- Improved import performance, especially with large lists
- Add item skeletons while loading data, customized for each view
Other notes
- Officially removed the video hold feature, as it was too janky to keep around