PearCinema plays the film and television collection on a machine you own - an
Umbrel, a NAS, an old desktop - from anywhere, over a direct encrypted
connection between your phone and that machine.
No port forwarding, no VPN, no dynamic DNS, no account, and no copy of your
library in anyone's cloud. Your files never leave your hardware: they stream
through the live connection while they play, and you can skip to any point in
a film without downloading it first.
It reads the library you already have. Point it at the Jellyfin or Emby you
already run and it uses that library, its artwork, its seasons and its
episodes. Or point it at a plain folder of files and PearCinema reads them
itself: it works out films from shows, sorts episodes into seasons, and picks
up the descriptions and posters that Kodi, Sonarr or Radarr already left on
the disk. So a folder is a real library rather than a list of filenames, and
it needs no internet lookup and no account with anyone.
It makes your files play. Anything your phone can already handle goes straight
through untouched. Anything it cannot, the machine holding the films
repackages or converts as you watch, using its own graphics chip - Intel, AMD,
NVIDIA or Apple - so it costs that machine very little and never changes your
original file. Subtitles come along, including the picture subtitles from
discs, which are drawn onto the film where a phone cannot show them by itself.
Features:
- Browse films and shows with posters, descriptions and episode thumbnails
- Search the whole library
- Carry on where you stopped, and when an episode ends the next one is offered
- Resume points and watchlists that follow you between your own devices
- Everyone in the house has their own list rather than sharing yours
- Downloads: keep a film on the phone for a flight, converted in advance if
your device needs it - Send a film to a Roku or a Samsung television and drive it from your lock
screen - Pair with more than one machine and they look like one library
- Ask the owner for something you cannot find, and see what they did with it
- Pair a phone by scanning a QR code - there is no password to type
The library does not have to be yours. Someone can let a friend or a family
member in, each as their own person with their own devices, their own place in
whatever they were watching, and no login to pass around. The owner sees every
device and can revoke one, or everything one person holds, within seconds -
mid-film, not "on next login", and it stops a television that device had
started. Nobody who is let in ever receives a copy of a file.
Two things worth stating plainly. First, PearCinema needs that machine running
the free PearCinema host - it is the source of the films, so this is not a
player for files on your phone, and it comes with nothing to watch. Second,
some mobile networks and locked-down wifi stop a phone and a host connecting
directly. When that happens PearCinema can fall back to a relay PeerLoom runs,
which forwards encrypted data it cannot read and keeps no copy of it. Your
phone always tries a direct connection first, and while a film is coming
through the relay its quality is held down so that watching away from home
does not quietly consume a data plan. One switch in Settings turns the relay
off, and you can paste in your own instead.