PearCinema: Self-Hosted Video

About

PearCinema plays the film and television collection on a machine you own - an Umbrel, a NAS, an old desktop - from anywhere, over a direct encrypted connection between your phone and that machine. No port forwarding, no VPN, no dynamic DNS, no account, and no copy of your library in anyone's cloud. Your files never leave your hardware: they stream through the live connection while they play, and you can skip to any point in a film straight away. PLEASE READ FIRST PearCinema needs that machine running the free PearCinema host, which is the source of the films. It is not a player for files stored on your phone. So that you can look around before you have one, the app comes with four short public-domain films and nothing else. If you do not have a server yet, someone else can let you into theirs. PEARCINEMA PROVIDES NO CONTENT PearCinema is a player for files you already have. It hosts nothing, indexes nothing and has no catalogue of its own. The four public-domain films it ships with are the whole of what comes in the box: there is nothing else in it to search for or browse, and no way to obtain a film through it. READS THE LIBRARY YOU ALREADY HAVE Point the host at a Jellyfin or Emby server you already run and PearCinema uses its library, its artwork, its seasons and its episodes. Point it at a plain folder of files instead and PearCinema reads them itself: it works out films from shows, sorts episodes into seasons, and picks up the descriptions and posters that Kodi or another media manager already left on the disk. So a folder is a real library rather than a list of filenames. IT MAKES YOUR FILES PLAY Files your phone can already handle go straight through untouched. Anything it cannot, the machine holding the films repackages or converts as you watch, using its own graphics chip, so it costs that machine very little and never changes your original file. Subtitles come along, including the picture subtitles from discs. IN THE APP - Browse films and shows with posters, descriptions and episode thumbnails - Search the whole library - Carry on where you stopped, and when an episode ends the next one is offered - Resume points and favourites that follow you between your own devices - Everyone in the house has their own list rather than sharing yours - Send a film to a Roku or a Samsung television and drive it from your lock screen - Pair with more than one machine and they look like one library - Ask the owner for something you cannot find, and see what they did with it THE LIBRARY DOES NOT HAVE TO BE YOURS Someone can let a friend or a family member in, each as their own person with their own devices, their own place in whatever they were watching, and no login to pass around. The owner sees every device and can revoke one, or everything one person holds, within seconds - mid-film, not on next login, and it stops a television that device had started. Nobody who is let in ever receives a copy of a file. PAIRING IS ONE SCAN Scan a QR code and you are in. There is no password, no server address and no account to create. The connection itself proves which device is calling, so there is no token to leak, copy or forget to rotate. WHEN A DIRECT CONNECTION IS NOT POSSIBLE Some mobile networks and locked-down wifi refuse a direct connection between two devices. When that happens PearCinema can fall back to a relay run by PeerLoom, which forwards encrypted data it cannot read and keeps no copy of it. Your phone always tries a direct connection first, and while a film is coming through the relay its quality is held down so that watching away from home does not quietly consume a data plan. OPEN SOURCE PearCinema is MIT licensed and developed in the open. The host you run on your own machine is free, and so is the app.