cinema

A self-hosted media torrenting server for movies and TV shows.

Deployment

Cinema needs a Postgres database and a TMDB API key.

docker run -d \
  -e CINEMA_TMDB_API_KEY=your_api_key \
  -e CINEMA_DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@host/cinema \
  -v ./data:/app/data \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -p 6881:6881 \
  ghcr.io/somfic/cinema

Port 3000 serves the UI; 6881 is the torrent listen port (doesn't necessarily have to be exposed). ./data holds cached torrents, transcodes, and trailers.

For a trailer fallback when YouTube blocks the datacenter, run a trailers-api instance separately and point Cinema at it with CINEMA_TRAILERS_API_URL.

Development

With Nix

nix develop

The flake provisions Rust, bun, GStreamer, yt-dlp, and deno.

Without Nix

Install manually:

• Rust (stable)
• bun
• GStreamer 1.24+ with the base, good, bad, ugly and libav plugin sets (e.g. brew install gstreamer, or the gstreamer1.0-* packages plus libgstreamer1.0-dev and libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev)
• yt-dlp, deno (deno is needed by yt-dlp for YouTube's JS challenges)
• A running Postgres instance (or use docker compose)

docker-compose.yaml spins up a local Postgres on port 5434:

docker compose up -d

That gives you postgres://root:password@localhost:5434/cinema_db.

Run

With just

just install                             # cargo fetch + bun install
export CINEMA_DATABASE_URL=postgres://root:password@localhost:5434/cinema_db
export CINEMA_TMDB_API_KEY=your_api_key
just dev                                 # backend (--dev) + vite side by side

just dev proxies the UI through the backend at http://localhost:3000. Migrations under ./migrations run on startup.

Other targets: just build (release binary), just check (fmt + clippy + frontend typecheck), just schema (regenerate the TypeScript schema from Rust types).

Manual run

Allow direnv (and install it if you don't have it): direnv allow . (needed only the first time)

Run cargo run (backend on port 3000) and bun dev (frontend on port 5174) in separate terminals.

Config file

CLI flags and env vars override anything in cinema.toml (path via --config / CINEMA_CONFIG). See cinema.example.toml for a starting point.

Environment variables

Variable	Description	Default
CINEMA_HOST	Bind address	0.0.0.0
CINEMA_PORT	HTTP port	3000
CINEMA_DATA_DIR	Data directory path	./data/
CINEMA_DATABASE_URL	Postgres connection string (required). Also read from DATABASE_URL as a fallback.
CINEMA_CONFIG	Config file path	cinema.toml
CINEMA_TMDB_API_KEY	TMDB API key (required)
CINEMA_TRAILERS_API_URL	Base URL of a self-hosted trailers-api used when YouTube fails. Unset disables the fallback.	unset
CINEMA_YTDLP_POT_BASE_URL	External bgutil PO-token provider URL. Normally unset — the image mints tokens in-process (script mode). Set only to use a separate provider.	unset
CINEMA_YTDLP_COOKIES	Path to a cookies.txt for yt-dlp (overrides the uploaded one)	unset
CINEMA_YTDLP_COOKIES_FROM_BROWSER	Browser to read cookies from when no cookies file is set. Left unset in server/container deployments (no browser present); the in-process PO token covers the anonymous case.	unset
CINEMA_STREAM_SOURCES	Comma-separated stream source URLs	https://torrentio.strem.fun
CINEMA_SUBTITLE_LANGUAGES	Comma-separated subtitle languages	en
CINEMA_MAX_CONCURRENT_DOWNLOADS	Max concurrent background downloads	2
CINEMA_MAX_CONCURRENT_PRETRANSCODINGS	Max concurrent background pretranscodes. A single GPU is the bottleneck for full transcodes. Live streams are never limited: a re-encoding stream pauses background pretranscodes to make room.	1
CINEMA_TORRENT_PORT	Torrent listen port	6881
CINEMA_USE_DHT	Enable DHT for peer discovery	true
CINEMA_TORRENT_VALIDATION_TIMEOUT_MS	Maximum torrent validation timeout. Configure this if Cinema is run on limited hardware.	30 seconds
CINEMA_TRANSCODE_HARDWARE	Video encoder family: auto (first that works: VideoToolbox, NVENC, VA-API, then x264), none (x264 only), nvidia, vaapi or videotoolbox. Decoding always uses the best available decoder.	auto
CINEMA_TRANSCODE_PRESET	x264 speed preset, for software encoding. Faster presets reduce CPU but cost quality (ultrafast disables deblocking, which shows as blocks); on a Pi 5 use ultrafast with CINEMA_TRANSCODE_MAX_HEIGHT=1080.	veryfast
CINEMA_TRANSCODE_CRF	Quality target on the CRF scale (also used for NVENC and VA-API). Lower = better quality, more bits; 18 is visually lossless even on a large 4K screen. Raise it on slow hardware.	18
CINEMA_TRANSCODE_MAX_HEIGHT	Re-encoded video is scaled down to at most this height. 0 keeps the source resolution (scaled down only for clients that can't take it, like a non-4K Chromecast).	0

Most playback needs no encoding at all: Cinema plays a file as is when the client supports it, and otherwise repackages it as HLS, re-encoding only the streams the client can't decode (usually just the audio). Note: the RPi 5 has no hardware H.264 encoder, so re-encoding video remains CPU-bound. If real-time playback isn't met, raise CINEMA_TRANSCODE_CRF (lower quality, faster encode).