Observation Deck

A small Plex replacement for one household. A Windows server indexes a movie and TV folder, an Android app browses it from the couch, and a custom receiver plays it on a Chromecast Ultra.

The Android app home screen on a tablet, with Continue watching and Recently added movie rows — The Android app on a tablet: Continue watching and recently added rows.

The Cast receiver on a TV showing a film with a subtitle line near the bottom — The receiver playing, with its own subtitles.

The Windows server settings window showing library folders, access token and library counts — The server settings window.

Screenshots use a made-up library of generated test clips and artwork. Conan the Barbarian (1982) stands in as the film being played; the artwork and frames are drawn for the page, not taken from the film.

The pieces

ServerWindows tray app that scans the library, serves an HTTP/HTTPS API and remuxes video for the Chromecast.
- C# / .NET 10
- SQLite
- ffmpeg
Android appBrowse, resume and cast, with a remote screen, an on-phone player and a home-screen widget.
- Kotlin
- Compose
- Cast SDK
Cast receiverA custom Chromecast receiver that keeps absolute positions, draws its own subtitles and reports progress.
- Cast CAF v3
- JavaScript
- Cloudflare Workers

How they fit together

The server is the source of truth for a single HTTP API. The Android app and the receiver are both clients of it.
Chromecast playback was designed from a feasibility spike. The Chromecast Ultra rejected multichannel audio, hev1-tagged HEVC and Matroska, so the server's planner remuxes to fragmented MP4 with stereo AAC and an hvc1 tag unless a file can be played as it is.
The receiver page is HTTPS, so the server also speaks HTTPS, using a real certificate it obtains and renews itself without being reachable from the internet.
The app finds the server by mDNS at home and can fall back to a remote address, probing both and preferring home.

A personal project built for one household's own library. It does not ship any media and is not a general-purpose media server.