Wovin
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Features

What sets it apart.

The headline abilities first — then everything you’d expect from a great media server, built in, with no sidecars to run.

Wovin is in development. Public downloads are coming soon; this is a preview of the product.

The differentiators

The parts you won’t find anywhere else

These are the reasons Wovin exists — not a checklist, a point of view.

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The Guide

Most media servers are great at browsing, and bad at “just put something on.” The Guide brings back the feeling of live TV — channels you flip through, always mid-program — except every channel is built from your own library.

Flip between channels with a live on-screen preview, and tune in at the live offset — the same moment everyone else on that channel is watching — and you can always restart a program from the top. (Authoring your own channels is its own feature below.)

And it’s one unified guide for everything you watch: your own library channels and real live TV from a network tuner or an IPTV playlist, side by side in the same grid. One place to answer “what’s on,” whether it’s your collection or live TV.

Build your own channels

Point a channel at a show, a genre, a smart rule, or a hand-built schedule, give it a logo, and it’s on the air. Shuffle a comfort-sitcom channel, marathon a series in order, round-robin a few shows at once, or program blocks like real TV — cartoons Saturday morning, dramas at eight.

Layer it like a real station: appointments that win their time slot, new seasons drip-fed an episode at a time, pre-rolls and bumpers between programs, and sub-channels that share a lineup. Every channel runs around the clock, and if a source goes quiet the channel falls back instead of going dark.

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An anime powerhouse

Anime is where most media servers quietly break — absolute vs seasonal numbering, specials, cours splits, and metadata that disagrees with itself. We treat it as a first-class problem, not an afterthought.

Season resolution follows TheTVDB and the way your own library is laid out, so episodes land in the order you actually watch, and matching understands anime instead of fighting it. The right ordering — seasonal or absolute — is resolved automatically from the evidence in your files and sources, with no knob to babysit, and the parser reads absolute numbering, episode ranges, and release-group filenames without flinching. A double-episode file shows up as the two episodes it is — own titles, own stills, own progress — and starting the second one drops you at the boundary, not the top of the file.

New

It studies every episode

The Media Analysis engine fingerprints each episode’s audio on your own hardware and compares it with its season siblings: the shared opening becomes an intro marker, last week’s ending at the top of this week’s becomes a recap, and the credits snap to the black frame where they begin. Skip intro, recap and credits with one tap — or let the player skip them for you.

Chapters surface automatically — read from the file when they’re embedded, synthesized from the markers when they’re not. And every episode gets artwork: when no source has a still, the server grabs a clean frame from the file itself, and real art supersedes it automatically the moment one appears.

Detection runs on your hardware, and your audio never leaves it. What does travel, by default, is the result: the marker boundaries you detect, keyed by a fingerprint of the episode so other Wovin servers can match them, go to the community pool — and markers the community has already found arrive for episodes you haven’t analysed yet. Your own edits always outrank both. Sharing is a single switch in the server’s settings. Analysis runs in the background at low priority, on a tight concurrency budget that keeps it out of playback’s way, and it heals itself: add a missing tool later and the backlog fills in on its own.

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Make it your own

Your home screen should be yours. Build the homepages — Home, Shows, Movies — and decide exactly which rows appear, in what order, for everyone or just for you.

Pin a row to a slot, reorder by drag, disable what you don’t want, and author custom rules to surface anything your library can express. The same rule engine powers smart collections, so a row you love can become a collection in a click — and a rule set you’re proud of can be shared to the community, or installed from it.

And the defaults take care of themselves: connect a source — TMDb, TheTVDB, Sonarr, Radarr — and the ready-made rows it powers light up on their own. Turn one off and it stays off; the server never overrules you.

It goes as deep as you want to go. Decide, per title, which source wins for a field and override anything it gets wrong. Upload your own posters and backdrops, or paint badges and banners onto them in the overlay studio. Nudge an intro marker by a second and your edit sticks. Build a franchise the official lists never thought of, a channel with its own logo, bumpers and pre-rolls, a collection that fills itself from a rule you wrote. Install a community pack and edit it like it was yours — because the copy is. Viewers get their own layer too: profiles, a spoiler shield, subtitle and speed preferences that the server remembers per show. Every one of these is a setting, not a plugin.

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Streaming-grade discovery

Big streaming apps are sticky because there’s always something to start. We bring that feel home with smart, auto-curated rows and a deep catalog of ready-made rules — over content you actually own.

Recently Added, Trending, Returning Soon, and finders like “I have N minutes” or a random episode keep the next thing one glance away — and rows like Recommended for You and Because You Watched are scored per viewer against the whole server’s viewing history, not one static list for everyone.

It learns you — on your own box. Every play, finish and abandon feeds a profile that belongs to that viewer: the home rows reshape around what you actually watch — down to rows named for the genres you rate highest — and every visit reshuffles the page so the same titles are never pinned to the same spots. Every title page carries its own rails — “Because you watched,” “More with” the people in it — that are always on. It’s plain rules over your own history, not an AI guessing from someone else’s, and none of it leaves your server. At the end of the year, everyone gets their own look back at what they watched.

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Franchises, assembled for you

Own a piece of a saga and the shelf assembles itself, growing as the rest arrives. Franchises build themselves from official franchise lists the moment items enrich — made of what you actually own, never a hollow shell of things you don’t. Franchises that span movies and shows come together as one shelf: the films, the series, and the specials in between.

It curates as it builds: editorial junk lists are filtered out, and a franchise that would just mirror one of your collections stays hidden — no duplicate shelves. Every collection gets a page of its own, with all its members in one place. Prefer your own canon? Author custom franchises and put anything in them. Even brand-new groupings look finished: collections without artwork get a generated poster on the house palette, replaced the moment real art exists.

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Watch parties

Movie night with the people on your couch — and the people who aren’t. A watch party puts everyone you invite into one synchronized room: a single shared play / pause / seek timeline, a ready check so nobody starts early, and host controls for the inevitable “wait, go back.”

Chat sits beside the picture, so reactions stay in the room instead of a group text. Host hand-off and moderation stay in your hands — because it’s your server. And when the party is just you, play on the TV from your phone: one Wovin player drives another.

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A community that feeds your server

The best curation isn’t done alone. Franchise and collection sets, poster overlays, homepage rules, artwork and channels can all be published from your own server to community.wovin.tv under your username, and installed by any other Wovin server owner as an editable local copy. Updates arrive as suggestions you accept, never as changes you didn’t ask for.

Underneath it sits the Wovin community database: ratings, age certifications and readable genres gathered from Wovin servers and supplied back to every one of them. Your own TMDb and TheTVDB keys still identify titles and fetch artwork; the community fills in what they don’t.

Reviews and discussions live in the player, right where you watch — on a show, a season or a collection. Reviews are always shared; kids’ profiles never see any of it. Friends — a shared list of people you watch with across servers — are coming soon. Wovin never publishes which server installed what.

Visit community.wovin.tv
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Watch anywhere, sign in once

Open app.wovin.tv in any browser, sign in with Wovin, and every server you’ve been invited to is right there — nothing to install. The same account signs you into the apps on Windows, Android and Android TV, and into your own server’s portal. There are no local passwords anywhere; a short PIN on your phone is only a shortcut back in.

Profiles are yours to shape: up to five per account, with a kids mode that keeps ratings in bounds, bedtime windows, and channels marked kid-safe. Passkeys and two-factor sign-in are a setting on your account, not a chore for whoever runs the server.

Spoiler shield

Thumbnails and titles can spoil what’s next. The spoiler shield blurs and redacts episodes you personally haven’t reached — decided per viewer, so your progress is yours and your housemate’s is theirs.

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Own your whole stack

This isn’t a client bolted onto someone else’s closed server. The server, the players on every screen, and the thin cloud tier are one product designed to work together — and the media lives on your hardware.

Run it on a mini-PC, a NAS, or a home server — as a native binary or a Docker image on x86-64 and arm64. Local-disk or NAS-mounted libraries are both first-class, whole-database backup and restore is a button in Settings, and your watch history and markers from the usual media servers import with a confirm step. You’re the operator, with full administrative control — and your files stay yours to organize: rename or move them and the server re-homes each one, keeping its identity, watch state, artwork, and markers intact.

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Private by design

Wovin’s account service handles sign-in and helps devices connect to your server. Your media streams directly between your player and your server, never through Wovin’s cloud.

A Wovin account is required to administer a server. Your media stays on your storage. Remote access is HTTPS only — Wovin issues your server its own certificate — and your watch history stays on your server; what syncs between your devices travels encrypted, and Wovin can’t read it.

Table stakes, done properly

Everything you’d expect, built in

The essentials every great media server needs — no sidecars, no companion apps, no nightly batch jobs.

One player, every screen

Windows, Android, Android TV and any browser — one designed app with resume, chapters, and real subtitle support.

Cross-device sync

Your device owns your watch state and posts it to every server you use — it works offline and is never overwritten by someone else.

Direct play first

Every file plays as-is wherever it can. Transcode only when nothing else will play — and then only as much as needed. HDR stays HDR.

Smart collections

Describe a rule once — genre, decade, rating, watch state — and the collection keeps itself in sync as your library grows.

Metadata, your way

Bring your own TMDb and TheTVDB API keys. Enter them in the server portal to enrich your library with titles, artwork and episode information. Ratings, certifications and readable genres come from the Wovin community database on top.

Operator command center

Live sessions, bandwidth, viewership charts, per-engine health cards and a one-click diagnostics bundle — the monitoring others make you self-host separately.

Custom poster overlays

Design badges and banners in a live-preview studio; the server paints them straight onto your posters — no asset packs, no batch jobs.

Every edition, your call

The theatrical and the director’s cut, the 4K remaster and a light copy — one title, and you can switch mid-playback.

Two episodes, one file

A double-episode file becomes two real episodes — each with its own title, still, metadata and resume point. Start the second and playback begins at the boundary; a channel plays the pair as one program.

Watchlist, built in

Add anything — in the library or not. Feed it to your download tools as a list, and it flips to watchable for every watcher the moment a title lands.

Offline downloads

Take it with you — download to your device, watch on the plane, and your watch state syncs back the moment you’re home.

Subtitles that fix themselves

Subtitle files beside your videos — .srt, .ass, a Subs folder — are picked up on scan. Out-of-sync ones are detected and drift-corrected on your own box, and the fix applies everywhere you play, web included.

Playback comfort

Session speed control, a sleep timer that finishes the episode, per-show subtitle memory — the little things, built in.

Live TV, in the same guide

Plug in a network tuner or an IPTV playlist and real live TV sits beside your own channels. Pause and rewind live, and mark channels kid-safe.

Two engines on Android

The player carries two playback engines and picks the one that plays your file best — invisible to you. Plays teach the fleet, and none of it is tied to your account.

How it compares

Side by side, honestly

Wovin against the usual media servers and the big subscription streamers. We win most of these rows — and where we don’t, the table says so.

Wovin Plex Jellyfin Netflix & co.
You own the libraryNothing disappears unless you delete it
Licensed catalog includedSomeone else’s library, ready to browse
Live TV channels built from your libraryFlip on, always mid-program, one guide
Watch together, in sync, with chatOne shared timeline for the whole room
Offline downloadsOn your device, watch state syncs back
Intro, recap & credits skipDetected from your own files, on your box
Your anime collection, ordered rightAbsolute vs seasonal resolved automatically
Multi-episode files become separate episodesOwn title, still and resume point for each
Everyone you invite watches freeAny device, no account fees for viewers
Every feature at every priceNo feature-gating pass, no premium tier
Private by designNo ads, no tracking, media never leaves your hardware

Based on each product’s publicly documented capabilities at time of writing; ecosystems change, so check current docs. “Netflix & co.” stands in for subscription streamers generally. And yes — they have the licensed catalog. Everything else on this table is why your own library deserves better.

On the roadmap

Coming to your box

Named because we mean it — and marked honestly until they ship.

Coming soon

Friend federation

Share your library with friends and family by email invite. They sign in with one account and watch on any device — no server of their own required. You stay in control of who has access, and to what.

Later

More screens

Apple devices, the Linux desktop and Roku are on the plan. Until then, a Mac, an iPhone or a Linux desktop can open the web player in a browser.

Explore your future streaming service.

Public downloads are coming soon. Open the web player today, or see what you’ll need to host.

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