Hover Preview Tiles

Everything that can fan out now

Containers show their children. A collection shows its movies, a series its seasons, a season its episodes, and a home video folder its contents, which can be a mix of sub-folders and video files.

Single videos show their own chapters. On a movie, an episode or a home video file, the fan is built from Jellyfin's real chapter images. A click on a tile's play button jumps straight into the video at that timestamp. This is a completely different data path, since a video has no children.

Three additions change how it feels:

• centerHoverOnly opens the fan only when the pointer is on the play button in the middle of the card, not anywhere on it.
• subtileFocusPlayButton puts a small play button on the focused tile.
• Single wrapper folders are skipped. If every home video folder holds one fixed subfolder called "videos", the fan jumps past it. With one folder like "videos Instagram" a fuzzy match still skips it, and with two candidates both stay visible.

A wrapper folder is my own habit for home videos: the outer folder can have any name, but one inner folder always has the same name and holds nothing but the video files. Cover art, photos, backups and leftover cuts sit next to it, so scripts always know where the videos are. Skipping works both when the fan opens and when you click into a folder tile.

The fan itself still works the way malte9799 designed it. The tile nearest the pointer rises, turns upright and shows its title with a highlight ring, while its neighbours part around it. A click on a tile opens that item. Everything is client-side, and nothing changes on the server.

Seven card types, one global block

The script has seven config blocks in two families, and one global block on top.

Shared settings

Most fields repeat in the blocks with the same meaning, though not every block uses all of them. The defaults below are the usual ones.

In centre hover mode the fan closes as soon as the pointer leaves the zone, with one exception: moving onto the open tiles keeps it open, otherwise you could never reach them. Chapter blocks have no sorting, because chapters always come in order.

Two details are easy to miss. Seasons and home videos work out their tile shape from the fetched images and snap the average to a clean ratio such as 2/3 or 16/9, so square covers and landscape thumbnails are not forced into poster shape. Scrolling counts as well: the preview waits for a short silence before it may reopen, so moving through a long library does not set off a fan on every card the pointer crosses.

Settings of single card types

• Collections: showYearInTitle shows each tile as name and year.
• Series: skipSingleSeason stops a pointless fan with one tile, and singleSeasonShowEpisodesInstead shows that season's episodes instead, using the season block's settings. Both are on.
• Seasons: showSeasonEpisodeNumberInTitle puts the season and episode number in front of the title.
• Home video sorting: with separateSortForFoldersAndVideos, off by default, folderSortBy, folderSortOrder, videoSortBy and videoSortOrder apply separately, and mixedOrderMode chooses foldersFirst or videosFirst.
• Wrapper folders: skipFolderLayerNamesEnabled is the master switch, skipFolderLayerNames lists the names, here videos, skipFolderLayerExactMatchEnabled and skipFolderLayerFuzzyFallbackEnabled allow the two kinds of match, and maxFolderSkipDepth of 1 is a safety cap against circular structures.

Global settings

If the fan feels too busy, keep centerHoverOnly on, which is how it ships. If you want it faster, lower centerHoverOnlyDelay first, and leave the geometry alone until the timing feels right. It also respects the browser's reduced motion setting.

The workaround behind direct play

Direct play from a tile was the real hurdle. After a lot of experimenting and testing I found no other way than to go to the item's detail page and trigger its Play button by script. A black fade covers the step, so it is barely noticeable, or ideally not noticeable at all. The README says so openly.

A trick like that has consequences, and most of them came out in a later audit by Claude sessions, who also did the port to Jellyfin 12. The black overlay could stay on screen when playback did not start, so a timeout now takes it away. Chapter play ran into saved progress: the Play button on a detail page can mean Resume, so the chapter could lose to an old position. An option that reset the position sometimes marked an episode as fully watched, so that option went away.

Growing beyond collections was the other big step. TV shows and home videos were first only planned in the README. Once they were in, the script had nearly tripled in size. It now has about 2,450 lines, and it still stands on malte9799's idea.

Also part of Essentials

This script now also runs inside my Essentials plugin, with its settings on a normal dashboard page instead of values at the top of the code. On its own, through the JavaScript Injector, it works as before.

Connected

• Essentials