basswaves/kinema v0.15.2

on GitHub

What's new in 0.15.2

Mostly matching, keeping your library safe, and Android fixes. Your library is upgraded the first
time you start it; Kinema makes a safety copy before that.

Fixed

• The search box no longer sits on a black band across the window when you scroll the
  results. Only the box stays in place now, and you see the posters around it.

Finding the right film

• When Kinema can't tell, it asks now. Two real films or shows with the same name and no year
  in the file (Dune.mkv, Doctor Who) used to go to the better-known one. Now they go to Needs
  attention. So after this update a few more files may land in Needs attention. Add a year to
  the name, or choose once there.
• Sequels kept in one folder are no longer all the first film. Back to the Future Part II in a
  Back to the Future (1985) folder stays Part II.
• Hyphenated titles are read whole. Spider-Man.2002.mkv was read as a film called "Man".
  Same for Ant-Man, X-Men style names and names like Jean-Claude.
• Titles in any alphabet can match (Japanese, Russian, Greek, Hindi and others).
• Films and shows named with a number: 1917 (2019), 300, 24.
• Season folders in other languages (Staffel 1, Sesong 1, Säsong 1) and Specials no longer
  become the show's name.
• Two shows with one name and different years stay two shows.
• Shows named by date in a TV folder are matched to the show. They don't appear in its episode list
  yet, and play from Folders.
• Folders called Shorts, Other or Extras are only skipped inside a film's or show's own folder.
  Directly under a library folder they are scanned now, so a folder of trailers kept there shows up
  in Needs attention, where you can ignore it.
• Files in Needs attention are looked at again once at the next scan. Your own matches and ignores
  are never changed.

Worth a look

After this update Kinema reads the names of films and shows it matched by itself once more. Where
the new rules doubt an old match (a sequel linked to the first film, or a pick between two of one
name with no year), it lists it in Needs attention under "Worth a look", with the reason.
It changes nothing by itself. You choose: keep it, or find the right match. No internet needed,
and nothing is shown if nothing differs. On one real library: 8 files of one show, out of 349.

Your library is safer

• A film swapped for a better copy keeps its watched tick. A file that changed size used to lose
  it, so a tool rewriting a whole library could take every tick at once. The tick now only goes when
  the old copy was clearly a part of a download.
• A library that won't open offers its safety copy. Kinema says which copy and from when, and
  puts it back when you say so. On Linux, this message and every other one Kinema gives before its
  window opens never appeared at all. They do now.
• A restore that can't finish changes nothing, and says so. It used to remove the library first
  when another program held one of its files.
• Part of a folder going away is said. A folder that can't be read hides nothing and is named. A
  disk that isn't mounted keeps its films. Films gone from a folder are counted on Home, with the
  folder named, and come back when the disk does.

Android

• A scan now waits while Kinema is off the screen. Behind another app it used to keep a whole
  processor core busy, with nothing to say why the device had gone slow. It goes on when you come
  back and says "Picked up after a pause". Nothing is lost or read twice.
• The first scan keeps the screen on, so it doesn't stop when you walk away. Later scans still
  wait for you, and the screen goes back to normal when the scan ends, when you leave Kinema or open
  a film.
• A plain message instead of a black screen on a very old Android System WebView, saying what to
  update.
• Dark box behind subtitles, as on a computer.
• Resuming a film shows a picture sooner: about 0.7 s instead of about 2.8 s on a slow device.

What I couldn't check

The Android changes were tested on one old, slow Android TV device as well as emulators: the first
scan holding the screen, the dark subtitle box, and the scan waiting while Kinema is behind. Only one
device, so yours may differ. The start-up message offering the safety copy was tested with a damaged
library on Windows, Linux and an Android emulator, not after a real crash. If something looks off,
the logs help a lot.

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 SHA256

Expected: 8e8bafc0f7ded138c773ef832d6232266dea089241a30c553de59ce9b6a1da6c for the installer,
db6190ce04ad8a9d623e9c0126c4d057701aa06354e7642281a38901286c6cc9 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.deb

Fedora:

sudo dnf install ./kinema-linux-x86_64.rpm

Anything 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.