Kinora

A desktop library for movies and TV shows kept in folders on a disk or a NAS. Covers, metadata, light and dark theme; Play opens the video in Kinora's own player (VLC's engine), or, if you prefer, in the player the OS associates with it. Windows, Linux and macOS (Avalonia 12, .NET 10).

Download the latest release

A movie page: Play, watched, subtitles, the folder, Move to	A show: seasons, episodes, the next one to play
Click a name in the cast: biography and their titles in the library	Light theme

_{Posters, pictures and texts in the screenshots come from TMDB and belong to their owners.}

What it does now

• Library folders: as many as you like. Each movie in its own folder, collection folders (Alien Collection/Alien (1979)/…), or loose files in the root.
• Local metadata first: Kodi / Emby / Jellyfin .nfo files (movie.nfo and <video>.nfo: the newer wins, the older fills the gaps), posters, fanart and clear logos with the usual names, subtitles next to the video. Without an nfo, title and year come from the folder or file name; [imdbid-tt…] and {tmdb-…} in names are read too.
• Fast on a NAS: the library opens from a local SQLite database and a local cache of resized posters, never touching the share. A scan enters only the folders whose time changed; a full scan reads them all. 472 movies on a NAS: first scan 8.5 s (posters included), the next 0.1 s.
• Offline-safe: a root that doesn't answer (NAS asleep or off) deletes nothing; its movies are marked offline.
• Watched flags survive rescans, and a movie moved outside Kinora keeps it (by IMDb/TMDB id).
• Search across title, original title, year, director, collection and cast; accents and punctuation don't matter. Sort by title (articles ignored), year, date added, rating.
• Folders that are mounted somewhere else later (another drive letter, another OS): change the root's path in Settings, nothing is scanned again. Paths are stored relative to the root.
• Names that Windows normally tidies up, ending with a dot or a space (S.W.A.T.), are read, moved and deleted as they are: a show S.W.A.T. next to a S.W.A.T keeps its own episodes.

TV shows

• One folder per show, with tvshow.nfo and pictures (poster, fanart, clearlogo, seasonNN-poster.jpg); episodes in season folders (Season 01, S2, Specials…) or loose in the show folder.
• Episode numbers from the episode nfo or the name: S01E02, S04E10-E11 (two in one file), 1x02, 05 - Title or Episode 5 inside a season folder.
• A show is read again only when its folder or a season folder changed. 159 shows and 7,274 episodes on a NAS: first scan about 20 s, the next 0.3 s.
• The show page lists seasons and episodes with their pictures (made on demand), marks episodes watched one by one or a season at a time, and plays the next one not seen. With TMDB, episodes missing from the folder are listed greyed out.
• Watched episodes are remembered by the show's ids and the episode number, so a better copy of an episode keeps the flag.

Online metadata (TMDB)

With a TMDB API key (Settings), what the folders don't say comes from The Movie Database:

• movies without ids are searched by title and year, and taken only when the match is sure (same title, year within one); the rest wait in Not identified, where Identify… lets you choose;
• movies with gaps (no plot, genres, cast, poster or fanart) get them filled; what the folder says always wins, and a rescan keeps what came from TMDB (it is kept apart, in its own table, and merged again whenever a movie is rebuilt from its folder);
• missing posters are downloaded into Kinora's cache; backdrops and logos when a movie page opens;
• the actors on a movie or show page get their photos: the one the nfo names when it can be reached (a web address, a file in the folder, Kodi's .actors; Jellyfin's paths on its own server can't), otherwise TMDB's, from the title's credits (asked once per title, matched by TMDB id or by name). Without a photo, the initials;
• with Save downloaded metadata and pictures in the movie folders on (off by default) a movie.nfo and the missing pictures are written next to the movie; existing files are never replaced.

The key is stored encrypted for the Windows user (DPAPI); on Linux and macOS in a settings file only the user can read.

Playing

Play opens the video in Kinora's player, over the whole window: VLC's engine draws it (hardware decoding, 4K and HDR included: a 4K HDR10 HEVC movie from the NAS takes 7% of one core), Kinora's controls sit over it and go away after three seconds without moving the mouse.

• Play/pause, back 10 s, forward 30 s, the seek bar, volume and mute, full screen; the audio track and the subtitles (the ones in the file and the .srt files next to it) from two menus.
• Keys: Space or K play/pause, ← → back 10 s / forward 30 s (Ctrl+→ a minute), ↑ ↓ volume, M mute, F or a double click full screen, A and S the next audio track or subtitle, Esc leaves full screen, then the player.
• Media keys (Windows): play/pause, stop, and the forward and rewind buttons of remotes work even when Kinora is minimized or another window is in front, and so do the buttons of Bluetooth headphones. Windows' media panel shows the title and the poster. Windows sends the keys to the app that played last: while a video plays that is Kinora, not the music paused for it.
• It starts again where you stopped (past the first minute; "Start over" goes back to the beginning), and marks the movie or episode watched once 90% is behind or it reaches the end. Until then a started movie has a ring on its poster instead of the check, as full as what was seen; a started episode has a bar under its picture.
• VLC's engine starts in the background a couple of seconds after Kinora opens, so the first Play doesn't wait for it. The Windows packages carry VLC's module cache (plugins.dat, written by build.ps1): without it VLC loads all of its ~280 modules at every start (from a slow disk 37 s instead of 0.85 s).
• Settings → Playback: Kinora's player, or the app the system opens videos with.

On Windows VLC's engine comes with Kinora (64-bit libvlc 3.0; the setup is about 58 MB). On macOS and Linux Kinora uses the VLC installed on the computer (/Applications/VLC.app, or the vlc package); without it, Play opens the system's player and says why.

Subtitles (OpenSubtitles)

With an OpenSubtitles API key and account (Settings), Subtitles… on a movie page, or CC on an episode, searches by the file's OpenSubtitles hash (two 64 KB reads, even on the NAS) together with the IMDb/TMDB ids; subtitles made for that exact file come first, then the preferred languages in their order. The chosen one is saved next to the video as <video>.<lang>.srt (.sdh, .forced when so); one already there with that name is kept as .old. Each download counts against the account's daily quota, shown in the window. Key and password are stored like the TMDB key.

Moving between library folders

Move to (right click on a poster, or the ••• menu of a page) moves a movie or a show to another library folder of the same kind. On the same drive it is a rename. Otherwise everything is copied into a hidden .<name>.kinora-moving folder next to the destination, every size is checked, the folder is renamed into place, and only then is the original deleted; a cancel or an error before that removes the partial copy and leaves the original as it was. A name already at the destination stops the move before anything is touched. The library keeps the same entry (watched, TMDB match). On Windows the copy uses CopyFileEx, which lets a server that supports it copy between its own shares; a 1.8 GB movie between two shares of the NAS took 19 s at about 100 MB/s.

Deleting

Delete… (right click on a poster, the ••• menu of a page, or the selection bar) deletes a movie or a show from the disk and from the library; Delete episode… (right click on an episode) one episode. First a question says what goes: the folder, how many files and how big. Enter answers Cancel; only a click on Delete deletes. Files are deleted for good: network shares have no Recycle Bin.

• A movie or a show in its own folder goes with the whole folder (subtitles, nfo, pictures, extras), videos first: a video that is playing stops the delete before anything else goes. A loose movie, or an episode, goes with the small files named like its video (Heat.nfo, Heat.en.srt, Heat-poster.jpg, all listed in the question), never with another video: deleting S01E01.mkv leaves S01E01-E02.mkv and its files alone.
• Never a library folder, never a folder with other titles or another library folder inside, never a title inside another library folder, never through a link (a junction inside a title folder goes as a link; what it points to is not touched). Names ending with a dot, like S.W.A.T., are taken as they are.
• Videos in the folder that the library doesn't count as part of the title (a movie folder put inside another one, which a scan doesn't read) are named in the question.
• The library changes only for what really went: if the NAS drops out, nothing is removed from it; if a delete stops halfway, the title is read again from the disk.

Installing

Every package has the .NET runtime inside: nothing else to install. installer\build.ps1 makes them all (tests first) and copies them to Z:\Dropbox\Software\Kinora.

• Windows (10 1809 or later, x64): Kinora-Setup-<version>.exe. Installs for the current user without admin rights, or for everyone. Not signed: SmartScreen may warn the first time. Updates install over the old version; Kinora's data in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Kinora is never touched, not even by the uninstaller.
• Linux (x64): Kinora-<version>-linux-x64.tar.gz. Unpack and run ./install.sh (menu entry, kinora command, all in the home folder; install.sh --uninstall removes it), or run ./Kinora from the folder. Needs X11 or XWayland; the built-in player needs the vlc package.
• macOS (12 or later): Kinora-<version>-macos-arm64.zip for Apple silicon, -x64 for Intel. Unzip and drag Kinora.app to Applications. Not signed or notarized: the first time, right-click it → Open (or xattr -cr /Applications/Kinora.app). The built-in player needs VLC in Applications.

Only the Windows installer has been tried on a real machine; the Linux and macOS packages are built from Windows and have not been run yet.

Updates and releases

Kinora looks at the latest release of FirekeeperPhate/Kinora on GitHub once a day (Settings → Updates: on by default, "Check now"). On Windows, installed with the setup, it downloads the new setup, checks its size and SHA-256 against the release, runs it silently and closes; the setup waits for it, updates and starts Kinora again. On Linux and macOS it opens the release page.

To publish a version: raise <Version> in Directory.Build.props, commit, write the notes, then installer/release.ps1 -Notes notes.md (packages, v<version> tag, GitHub release with the packages; their names are the ones the updater looks for).

Building

dotnet build Kinora.slnx
dotnet test --project tests/Kinora.Tests
dotnet run --project src/Kinora

bin and obj go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\KinoraBuild (or ~/.cache/KinoraBuild), not next to the sources: the repository lives in a synced folder.

Kinora's data (database, settings, picture cache) is in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Kinora, ~/.local/share/Kinora or ~/Library/Application Support/Kinora. Set KINORA_DATA to use another folder, e.g. to try things without touching the real library.

The icon is drawn by tools/IconMaker:

dotnet run --project tools/IconMaker -- src/Kinora/Assets

Layout

• src/Kinora.Core: models, scanning (nfo, names, artwork), SQLite, image cache, launcher. No UI.
• src/Kinora: the Avalonia app (MVVM with CommunityToolkit.Mvvm).
• tests/Kinora.Tests: xUnit v3 (Microsoft Testing Platform, see global.json).

License

Kinora is released under the MIT License. The software it uses, and ships in its packages, is listed with its licenses in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Subtitles come from OpenSubtitles.com.