About kino

kino is a self-hosted media automation and streaming server. One Rust binary; nothing extra to wire together. Free software, forever.

Why this exists

The self-hosted media stack works, but the standard recipe is seven separate services in a docker-compose file, each with their own database, their own settings page, and their own ideas about how to talk to the others. When something breaks, you have to know which service owns the problem before you can start debugging.

kino takes the same set of concerns — discovery, automation, library management, transcoding, streaming, casting, privacy networking — and puts them in one process behind one UI. One database. One log. One thing to update. One thing to back up.

What kino doesn't do

• No telemetry — kino contacts no third-party uninvited. The only outbound HTTP calls are to services you explicitly configure.
• No SaaS tier — there's no paid version, no upsell, no future commercial fork. kino is free OSS forever.
• No account required — you don't sign up to use kino. There's no central server we run. Your install is yours.
• No data extraction — your library, watch history, ratings, and config never leave your machine unless you explicitly export them.

License

kino is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. You can run it for any purpose, modify it, fork it, redistribute it. The catch: any derivative work you distribute publicly must remain under the same license. This protects every kino user's freedom to inspect and modify the software they run, and it forecloses the "wrap kino as a paid SaaS" failure mode.

Who's behind this

kino is built by a single maintainer (UK-based) with help from Anthropic's Claude. Code contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

If you'd like to support development financially, the GitHub Sponsors page is the preferred channel. Sponsorship is genuinely appreciated; it doesn't unlock anything in the product.

Naming

kino is the application — lowercase, like git, vim, ffmpeg. kinostack-app is the GitHub organisation that hosts the source. kinostack.app is this website.