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.

The differentiators

The parts you won’t find anywhere else

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

Headline feature

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. It’s deterministic, so every device agrees on what’s on right now, 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 today, and — coming soon — real over-the-air broadcast channels from an antenna or tuner, 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.

And layered weekly schedules — coming soon — let a base channel carry daypart overrides that win by time of day: “comedy all week, cartoons weekday mornings, the big show Tuesday at ten,” all as one coherent channel.

Headline feature

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-authority resolution reconciles TMDb, TheTVDB, and Trakt 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.

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. One-tap skip lands in the apps soon — the detection is already done.

Chapters surface automatically — read from the file when they’re embedded, synthesized from the markers when they’re not. Seek-bar frame previews are generated and ready for every device. 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.

It’s all local. No cloud service, no community marker database, no credentials — not even an audio fingerprint leaves your box. 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.

Headline feature

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 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.

Headline feature

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 household’s history, not one static list for everyone.

New

Franchises & universes, 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. Universes 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. Prefer your own canon? Author custom universes 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.

New

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.”

It’s live in the apps today: one synchronized timeline for the whole room, host hand-off when life happens, and moderation that stays in your hands — because it’s your 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.

Headline feature

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. Local-disk or NAS-mounted libraries are both first-class. 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.

Headline feature

Private by design

The cloud tier is deliberately thin: it handles identity, push notifications, NAT traversal signaling, and a directory of your servers — and that’s it. Your media bytes flow directly between your client and your server, on your network or peer-to-peer, never through us.

We can’t see your library because it never leaves your storage. Connections are signed and encrypted; on your LAN it works with no cloud at all.

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, macOS, Linux, Android, Android TV, and the web — 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.

On-the-fly transcoding

Direct play when it fits, adaptive transcode when it doesn’t — HDR preserved, lossless audio passed through where the target allows.

Smart collections

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

Rich, keyless metadata

TMDb, TheTVDB, Trakt, and OMDb reconciled as co-equal peers — no API key required, in your language, movies and shows alike.

Operator command center

Live sessions, bandwidth, viewership charts, and per-engine health cards — 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.

Watchlist, built in

Add anything — in the library or not. It flips to watchable for every watcher the moment it arrives, and signed webhooks can tell your other tools.

On the roadmap

Coming to your box

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

Coming soon

Live TV & DVR

Plug in an antenna or a network tuner and watch real over-the-air broadcast TV right alongside your own channels, in one unified guide — with a built-in DVR that records straight into your library. Cable-style live TV and recording, with none of the cable.

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.

See it on your own library.

Start free for yourself, then bring in the people you watch with.

Get started — free See pricing