Cinema is a video player for Haiku and RenkuOS. It finds and plays YouTube videos (with yt-dlp), the public domain films and cartoons of the Internet Archive, the free video sites of PeerTube, live TV channels, torrents and the videos in your own folders, all in a player of its own. It runs on x86_64, on 32-bit x86, and on 32-bit ARM with RenkuOS, where it was tuned on a Toshiba AC100.
Cinema opens on a home screen of shelves: what you were watching, what you downloaded, and a row for each tab at the top. A tab is either a search kept for later, or a channel whose latest videos it shows. The channel's name is under each of its videos, with how many views it has and how long ago it came out: a click on the name shows its latest videos, under its picture, name, followers and what it says of itself, with a star to keep it among the favorites. To follow a channel, press Follow there or next to its name on the page of one of its videos, the + button next to its tab, or right click the name: it becomes a tab, and its latest videos a shelf of the home. A right click on a tab removes it, and so does Following. Each video has a page of its own, with its details and views and the buttons to play or download it.
The menu next to the search field chooses where to search, YouTube, the
Internet Archive or PeerTube, and @peertube words in the field does it for a
single search. The tabs are kept in ~/config/settings/Cinema/categories, one
per line, as Name = what to search on YouTube or Name = channel:<id>.
@source in front takes another source, as in
Classic films = @archive channel:feature_films (a collection of the Internet
Archive), Blender = @peertube channel:blender_open_movies@video.blender.org
or Home videos = @local channel:/boot/home/Videos.
Videos play in Cinema, from where they were left; a check marks what was
watched and a red bar what was started. Space pauses, the left and right arrows
go back and on by 10 seconds, up and down (or the mouse wheel) change the
volume, shown upright at the right, F goes to full screen, Esc closes
the video (while it is still getting ready, it sends it behind instead: you can
browse meanwhile, and a notification says when it is ready, a click on it
showing it) and M plays it in MediaPlayer instead. Subtitles come from
YouTube, from a subtitle file next to the video, or from the text tracks inside
it: the CC button chooses one and V turns them on and off. The star
next to it, or S, keeps the video among the favorites. Cinema shows
videos through the video overlay of the graphics card where it works, which
spares the processor. As some drivers accept an overlay and show only its
green background, on a graphics card it does not know Cinema asks once, over
the first video, whether you can see it, and keeps the answer. O switches
the overlay while a video plays, and the settings can keep it always on or
off. I shows, small at the top, what the player is doing: the size and
codecs of the video, frames per second, how much it decodes and drops, the
processor, and the sound ready ahead. + and - ask for a video of
YouTube a size larger or smaller, from 360p to 1080p: it plays on until the
new one is found, then goes on from the same point. The video
quality is in the settings: Automatic means 360p on 32-bit ARM and 720p
elsewhere, and you can ask for anything from 360p to 1080p. Above 360p YouTube
sends the picture and the sound apart, and ffmpeg puts them back together for
the player, so those videos take longer to start (about a minute and a half on
the AC100).
The first time, Cinema offers a TV tab with the free channels of your
country, from the public lists of iptv-org.
The settings add the channels of other countries or any M3U list, and an .m3u
file dropped on the window works too. Channels for adults are left out. Live TV
plays with FFmpeg, which decodes less on slow machines to keep up, and uses the
hardware video overlay where there is one.
Drop a folder on the window and its videos become a tab, newest first, with
their length and a picture when ffprobe and ffmpeg are installed; drop a
single video to play it. The films and series in those folders also fill the
Movies and TV series tabs. Cinema reads their names from the files
(Title (1968), Title.1968.720p, Show.S01E03, Show - 1x03, or a
Season 1 folder). With a free TMDB key in the
settings (an API key or a read access token) it adds posters, plots, casts and
the names of the episodes, and keeps them for a month so the library opens
without the network. A series opens on the next episode to watch, and an
episode watched to the end goes on to the next one.
Any video can be downloaded to watch offline with D or a right click. The
files go to ~/Cinema, with their title, channel and length in attributes, and
show in the Downloaded tab, which works without the network; a downloaded
video plays from its file wherever it appears. Click a magnet link in the
browser, open a .torrent file from Tracker (Cinema takes both, unless
another program already does), paste the link in the search field or drop the
link or the file on the window, and the biggest video it
shares is downloaded with aria2c into the same tab, where you can follow and
stop it. It plays while it downloads: its pieces come in order, and Cinema
starts it as soon as the first ones are there (a link with xs=, the address
of its .torrent, starts in a few seconds); over a video already playing it
asks first, and the bar of the player shows, lighter, what of it is already
downloaded. A stopped or interrupted download picks up where it was. Without
aria2c, Cinema offers to install it on x86. Use it for
what you may share, such as the films of the Blender Foundation or the torrents
of the Internet Archive. S or a right click gives a video or a channel a
star, and the stars have a Favorites tab of their own.
The settings, in the ≡ menu or with Alt+,, hold the TMDB key, the folders of the library, the TV lists, the video quality, whether videos play in Cinema or in MediaPlayer and from where they were left, and where a search goes first. Even volume, on unless you turn it off, brings films and TV, which are mastered well below music to leave room for their peaks, up to the level of music, and keeps an explosion from drowning the dialogue after it; it costs about half a percent of one core of the AC100.
Everything works from the keyboard: the arrows choose, Enter or Space plays, D downloads, S gives a star, F toggles full screen and Esc goes back. Tab or F6 moves to the tabs at the top, where the arrows choose one and Enter opens it. A gamepad works too: the D-pad or the left stick chooses, A plays, B goes back, X downloads, Y toggles full screen, and L1, Select or Start goes to the tabs.
Cinema speaks English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
Ukrainian, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese; the last three need a CJK
font such as noto_sans_cjk_jp.
The releases have packages for
x86_64, for 32-bit x86 (x86_gcc2, built for the gcc 13 side of the hybrid)
and for 32-bit ARM (ARMv7 with VFPv3-D16, such as the AC100):
pkgman install cinema-1.5.0-1-x86_64.hpkgOn x86_64 and 32-bit x86, pkgman brings Python, the yt-dlp module and FFmpeg
6 from HaikuPorts too. HaikuPorts has no yt-dlp for ARM, so there you put the
single-file release of yt-dlp in the PATH:
mkdir -p ~/config/non-packaged/bin
curl -L -o ~/config/non-packaged/bin/yt-dlp \
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp
chmod +x ~/config/non-packaged/bin/yt-dlpCinema keeps an unpacked, compiled copy of that file in its cache, so that
yt-dlp loads in about three seconds instead of nine on the AC100. YouTube changes
often, and when videos stop being found a newer yt-dlp usually helps:
pkgman update, or the same curl again.
Cinema needs python3 and yt-dlp, either the Python module
(yt_dlp_python3.14, matching your Python) or the single-file yt-dlp in the
PATH, and curl for the pictures. yt-dlp is loaded once, by
cinema-helper.py, a small helper that Cinema starts and talks to. If they
are missing or broken, Cinema says so once and, on x86, offers to install
them: only if you choose Install, and pkgman asks again in a Terminal before
it changes anything.
Live TV links the FFmpeg libraries: ffmpeg6 on x86_64, ffmpeg on ARM. The
ffmpeg and ffprobe commands are used for YouTube above 360p and for the
length and the picture of your own videos, and aria2c for torrents.
makeIt links the FFmpeg libraries, so on x86_64 install ffmpeg6_devel first.
packaging/build-hpkg.sh, run on Haiku or RenkuOS, builds the package for the
machine's architecture. Without a package, put objects/Cinema and
helper/cinema-helper.py together in a folder such as
~/config/non-packaged/apps/Cinema/, and the catalogs from
objects/catalogs/ in
~/config/non-packaged/data/locale/catalogs/x-vnd.atomozero-Cinema/.
If Cinema ever stops answering, ~/config/cache/Cinema/freeze-reports.txt
says what each of its threads was doing then: worth attaching to a report.
To translate, make catkeys writes locales/en.catkeys, and
tools/update-catkeys.py <language> brings a translation up to date with it.
This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Live TV is played after the FFmpeg player of R Television, by Lee JunHaeng (MIT license), and its channels come from the lists of iptv-org.
MIT, see LICENSE.