Disclaimer: This app was vibe coded. If the use of AI in software development is a dealbreaker for you, regardless of how much human taste, direction and decision-making went into it, that's understandable. This app probably won't be for you.
My app has libraries for manga, comics, books, TV, film & anime, and a comic reader, ebook reader and a video player. So I had an idea to build a taskbar where you can open multiple comics/manga/videos, minimise them and open them back up again.
And since then, I ended up only having more ideas that kept steering my media app deeper and deeper into the OS aesthetic.
The video side of the app is built around mpv. Theatre is basically a stylised Stremio client with an mpv player, while Vault is the local media side of the app.
The player itself takes heavy influence from Harbor's and Kodi's video players. I wanted the actual playback experience to mimic how video players, or apps in general, operate in an OS.
I did that by making the taskbar allow the user to open multiple videos, books and comics at a time, minimise, maximise and switch between them seamlessly.
A movie isn't a player screen that takes over the app until I close it. It just becomes another open session. I can minimise it, open a book, open another video, jump into a comic and then go back to the first movie from the same taskbar.
The player remembers the session position when you minimise it and restores the player and seek position when you open it again. Streamed and downloaded video both go through the same player and the same Continue system.
II've also ended up piling a bunch of other stuff into the player over time: online subtitles, episode navigation, switching sources from inside the player, Up Next, Skip Intro/Recap/Credits, PiP, screenshots, GIF recording, a metadata-rich pause card that shows what you're watching (you can see this in the trailer), A-B repeat, a sleep timer, work-in-progress Watch Party support and playback statistics.
For local video, you can watch videos through the same mpv player in Vault, the local media side of my app.
Vault is part of a much larger streaming and media aggregation engine, but for me local media still remains a priority because I watch a lot of fan cuts of movies, TV and anime, stuff like Clone Wars movie fan edits, Naruto Kai or One Pace, and there isn't a catalogue in this world that keeps track of them.
Colosseum is open source under MIT and currently available for Windows.
Colosseum on Github, if you’re interested.