What's new in 0.15.0
- Moving around works the same everywhere. Remote, keyboard and mouse now take you to the same place on every screen: Home, the grids, title and actor pages, Settings, first run, dialogs and the player. The ring never covers text, scrolling is one smooth glide, and Back lands where you left.
- Matching finds more, and still leaves doubtful ones in Needs attention. "Wrong title?" on a title's page fixes a match right there. First run no longer loops back to Welcome.
- Posters: choose a title's poster, a picture named like the film beside it is used, and a title with no picture gets a drawn poster.
- Title pages: ends-at time, directors, show status, the other films of a collection, file details, and actor pages from the cast.
- Smart collections (Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, HDR10+, 4K, and your own), a menu on cards, and mark a whole show watched in one press.
- Sound and access: volume levelling and a dialogue lift (desktop), audio description, subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing first, High contrast. Subtitle timing can be moved by hand.
- Player: says when it is waiting for data, shows how long the first picture took, asks "Still watching?" after three episodes in a row.
- Bring in what you watched elsewhere (Kodi, Jellyfin, Emby, Plex, Trakt export) and Move to a new computer in one file.
- Trailers play inside Kinema on Windows; the YouTube app on Android; the browser on Linux.
- Windows: running a newer setup updates in place and keeps your taskbar pin and shortcuts.
- Android: films keep their shape, with bars around them.
Not in this one: levelling on Android, automatic subtitle sync, seek preview pictures, Letterboxd import.
Windows
Installer: download kinema-windows-x64-setup.exe
and run it. It installs for your Windows account only (no
administrator) and adds Kinema to the Start menu. Uninstall it
from Settings → Apps: it removes the program, its shortcuts and its
"Open with" entries, and asks before deleting your library and
settings.
Portable: or download kinema-windows-x64.zip,
extract it anywhere, and run kinema.exe. Nothing is written
outside the folder and your app data.
Windows 11. Needs the WebView2 runtime, which ships with
Windows 11; on a PC without it the installer fetches it from
Microsoft, and the ZIP needs it installed first.
Windows will ask once whether to run it
Kinema is not code-signed, so the first time you open it Windows
shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then
Run anyway; Windows remembers. To check that the file you
downloaded is the one that was published, run this in PowerShell
in the folder you downloaded it to:
Get-FileHash .\kinema-windows-x64-setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256
Get-FileHash .\kinema-windows-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256Expected: 7fec5ab2eb1cc37f2f08b028412e54c3a685e9da7b810e7c9cb425373a70ff8b for the installer,
8c2ea0e76f92ea92ac55ca7ea4f3892a404fb04aef40489b85bcec1e3d42ebf6 for the ZIP.
The two must match exactly. Each file also has a .sha256 beside it.
Linux
Kinema uses your system's mpv and WebKitGTK; the packages install
them for you. For x86-64 PCs take the amd64 / x86_64 files,
for ARM the arm64 / aarch64 ones.
Ubuntu 24.04 or later, Debian 13:
sudo apt install ./kinema-linux-amd64.debFedora:
sudo dnf install ./kinema-linux-x86_64.rpmAnything else: unpack kinema-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
and run ./kinema; its README.txt names the two libraries (mpv
and WebKitGTK) to install. HDR on Wayland needs mpv 0.40 or later — Ubuntu 26.04,
Debian 13, Fedora 43 and Arch have it.
To check a download, put the file and its .sha256 in one folder
and run sha256sum -c <file>.sha256 there.
Android (early version)
For Android TV boxes, installed by hand (sideloaded): download
kinema-android.apk, copy it to the device and
open it (Android asks once to allow installs from that source).
It is an early version, tried on one TV box and the emulator; a
phone has not been tried. See the README for what has been tested
and what is still missing. Check the download with
sha256sum -c kinema-android.apk.sha256; the
certificate it is signed with is named in the README.
First run
Kinema asks where it will be watched and where your movies and TV
folders are, then scans — with a few skippable setup pages while it
does. Posters and descriptions come from TMDB through a key Kinema
carries, so there is nothing to sign up for; a free key of your own
can be entered in Settings instead.
The Windows ZIP bundles an unmodified LGPL build of libmpv, which
you may replace; on Linux the system's libmpv is used; Android uses
Google's Media3 (Apache-2.0) — see NOTICE.md.
Something not working, or it works on a device the README does not
list? Say so: bug report
or device report.