Build log

Building Hearth

Hearth is a self-hosted streaming server for the video files you already have: point it at folders, it scans them, and you watch from a browser — direct play when the file allows it, transcoded on the fly when it does not. These are notes written as it is built. RSS

  1. Three weeks — phones, televisions, and what a show is

    Since the first entry Hearth has grown subtitles, sharing and closed libraries, an iPhone app, two television packages and a Chromecast receiver, then spent its last week on the unglamorous question of what counts as "the same film" or "the same show". What got built, and the bugs that taught the most.

    8 min read

  2. One day, from the first scan to a public front door

    Hearth went from an empty folder to a media server with hardware-detected transcoding, TMDB metadata, accounts, and a public hostname in a single sitting. What got built, what broke, and what the numbers say.

    5 min read