This intro goes through the profile screen, your library, the player, and the editor, and then visits every page in the admin menu, so you know where everything is before you start organizing.
TvT can be installed on Windows, Debian Linux, and with a Docker Image.
1. Profiles
TvT opens on the Who's Watching screen. Each profile keeps its own watch history, likes, and comments. A profile marked Kids only sees videos that have been set as kid-friendly, and it never sees the admin pages. Click a profile to sign in. If it has a password, TvT asks for it here.
The Who's Watching screen. Megan is a Kids profile.
Manage profiles (at the bottom of the screen) lets an administrator edit any profile. Click a profile while managing and you can change its picture and name, set an optional password, switch Kid profile on, give it a daily Time limit that stops playback when the allowance runs out, and decide whether it is an Administrator. You can always get back to this screen from the profile menu in the bottom left corner, under Switch Profile.
The profile settings, opened from Manage profiles.
2. The library
After signing in you land on the home page, your library. Every category, video group, genre, and tag you set up shows as its own row, and your categories are also listed in the sidebar on the left. Currently Watching sits at the top so you can pick up where you left off, and All Videos lists everything.
The home page: one row per category, group, genre, and tag.
The Search box in the sidebar finds videos by name as you type. The Filters button next to it narrows the results by category, group, genre, tag, folder location, whether a video has a thumbnail, kid-friendly, and length. Unassigned is the first chip in every label section, for videos that have no label of that kind yet.
Search results for "cat", with the Filters panel open.
3. Watching a video
Click any video to start watching. Here is what is around the player.
Up next and its gear
The Up next list on the right is what plays after the current video. Its gear sets Autoplay (start the next video when this one ends), Play new finds (jump to newly found videos while you watch), the Sort order of the list, and Configure shortcuts.
The Up next gear: autoplay, new finds, sort order, and shortcuts.
Configure shortcuts gives every player control its own key: play and pause, next and previous, skip forward and back, mute, volume, captions, speed, repeat, the gear, fullscreen, and the menus. The keys are saved for your profile.
Keyboard shortcuts. Click a key to change it.
The player gear
The gear in the control bar is about the current video. From here you can set the skip intro and skip credits points at the current position, add a chapter or get chapters from the original file, screenshot the current frame, or download a full MP4 of the video for offline viewing.
The player gear: skip points, chapters, screenshots, and offline MP4.
Repeat and speed
Repeat has three modes: repeat this video, repeat the whole Up next list, or play that list on shuffle. Speed runs from a quarter speed up to four times.
The repeat modes.
Captions and Audio Tracks
If your video has multiple audio tracks and captions, TvT will show those automatically and you can switch between them seamlessly with the CC button in the player. In TvT you can also manually create captions for your videos, edit captions, or have the built-in and offline whisper model generate them for you automatically.
Labels under the title
Under the title are all the labels the video belongs to: its categories, groups, genres, and tags. The one marked Up next is the list the player is following. Click a different label and Up next switches to that list instead.
After clicking the "beach" tag, Up next follows that tag.
Likes and comments
Likes, dislikes, and comments are per profile, so everyone sharing the library can weigh in on a video.
Likes, dislikes, and the comments section.
4. The editor, at a glance
All actions, next to the title on the watch page, holds everything you can do to a video. Edit video opens the editor.
The All actions menu on the watch page.
The editor puts the video on the left, the timeline under it, and a panel with three tabs on the right: Edits, Tracks, and Chapters.
The editor.
Drag on the timeline to select a range, then Cut it out or adjust its Volume, Brightness, or Contrast. Each change is queued in the Edits tab, and Apply runs them all in one encode. The original file stays untouched until then, and it can be restored later from All actions. With a range selected, Download clip exports just that part as its own MP4.
A range selected on the timeline, with a volume change queued.
Insert video drops another MP4 into this one at any point, and everything after it shifts along. Insert audio lays a sound clip over the video without changing its length.
The Insert MP4 panel.
The Tracks tab lists the audio tracks and caption tracks. Rename them, pick the default audio track, and add captions four ways: retrieved from the original file, generated on this computer with Whisper, uploaded as a VTT or SRT file, or written by hand.
Adding a caption track.
The Chapters tab adds a chapter at the playhead or pulls chapters from the original file. They show as markers on the timeline and in the player. A dedicated guide goes deeper into the editor.
The Chapters tab.
5. The profile menu
Everything for managing TvT is in the profile menu in the bottom left corner of the sidebar: Switch Profile, Video Locations, Manage Videos, Organize Videos, AI Settings, Customize Design, Backup & Restore, System Activity, View Downloads, and Advanced. The same pages are tabs across the top of every admin page, and Customize menu at the bottom of the menu lets you arrange it your way.
The profile menu.
6. Video Locations
Video Locations lists the folders TvT watches. Type a path or Browse to one, click Add folder, and TvT imports every MP4 and MKV it finds inside, sub-folders included. Upload videos sends files in from any device that can open TvT, like a phone.
Video Locations, with the folder path box and Add folder.
Each folder has five automation switches for new videos, left to right. Hover the info icon in each column header for the full explanation, and use the gear next to a switch to configure it.
- Auto-sync: scans the folder and its sub-folders every few seconds and imports new MP4 and MKV files as soon as they appear. Each new video then runs through the other switches in order.
- Auto transcode: converts each new video into the streaming format so it plays smoothly everywhere. The original file is never touched. The gear picks the quality-to-speed trade-off.
- Auto caption: adds captions, pulled from subtitle tracks already inside the file or transcribed on this computer with Whisper. Videos that already have captions are left alone.
- Auto thumbnail: gives each new video a poster, either a frame from the video or an AI title guess with artwork from TheMovieDB.
- Auto organize: puts categories, groups, genres, and tags on each new video, with AI or from a fixed set of labels you pick for the folder.
The automation switches. Hover an info icon for the explanation.
7. Manage Videos
Manage Videos is the full list of everything in your library. Search and Filters narrow it down, Columns picks which details you see, and the page size and sort are up to you.
Manage Videos with the Filters panel open.
Each row has its own actions menu with everything you can do to a single video: play or edit it, organize it manually or with AI, get chapters, change the thumbnail, hide it, mark it kid friendly, transcode it, and more.
The row actions menu.
Every menu in TvT can be rearranged. Look for the pencil: it opens a customize panel where you drag items into the order you want, add headers and dividers, remove the items you never use, and add them back later. Each profile keeps its own layout.
Customizing the actions menu.
Tick a few videos and a bulk bar appears at the bottom. Everything on it applies to the whole selection. Select all on this page ticks the current page, and the banner then offers to select every matching video in the library, not just the ones on this page.
The bulk bar, with every video in the library selected.
8. Organize Videos
Organize Videos is where you create categories, video groups (an ordered set that plays straight through, like a series), genres, and tags. Pick one on the left to see what is in it. Drag rows to reorder them, which sets the order of the home page rows, and drag videos to set their order, which is the order they auto-play in.
Organize Videos. Drag a video to change its position.
Add videos picks more from your library, with the same search and filters. You can do the same job from Manage Videos, whichever is handier.
Adding videos to a category.
Organize with AI does the sorting for you. Pick which videos, choose what the AI is allowed to assign (categories, groups, genres, tags) and whether it may create new labels, then start it. By default you review the suggestions before anything changes, and you can turn on Apply automatically if you would rather skip the review.
The Organize with AI panel.
9. AI Settings
AI Settings is where you pick the provider behind the organize features. Ollama and vLLM run on your own hardware, so nothing leaves your network and there is no key to pay for. If you would rather use OpenRouter, Claude, or OpenAI, bring your own key and paste it in.
AI Settings, with the provider choices.
The TheMovieDB API Key tab takes a key from The Movie Database, which lets TvT fetch real poster art for movies and shows. The Captions tab manages the Whisper speech-to-text models that write captions and the OCR packs that turn disc image subtitles into text. Download one, switch between them, or remove them, all from here.
The Whisper models and OCR packs under Captions.
10. Customize Design
Customize Design lets you restyle TvT with your own CSS and JavaScript. The preview on the right is the real app: the pills switch which page you are looking at, and dragging the divider resizes the preview so you can see how a design behaves at other widths.
Customize Design, with the preview resized.
The Snippets are ready-made starting points. Style for All Users picks who a snippet applies to, everyone or a single profile. Click Light mode and the preview flips right away. Nothing changes for real until you click Save & apply, and Discard changes throws the draft away.
The Light mode snippet, applied to the preview only.
11. Backup & Restore
Backup & Restore takes snapshots of your library data: the organization, profiles, settings, and your custom design. Video files are never included, so backups stay small, and you can roll back to an earlier setup at any time. Automatic backups run daily, weekly, or monthly while TvT is open, and Create backup makes one right now. Restoring creates a safety backup of the current state first.
Backup & Restore, right after creating a backup.
12. System Activity
System Activity is where all the background work shows up: transcodes, captions, thumbnails, applied edits, and AI organize runs. Anything that failed lands here too, with a retry. Settings tunes how many jobs run at once, overall and per kind of work, so you can match the load to your hardware, and Pause background work holds everything until you are ready.
The background work settings.
13. Advanced
Advanced shows the application log as it happens. Filter it, pause it, or download it when you need to troubleshoot. Terminate application at the bottom shuts TvT down completely, until you start it again.
Advanced: the log stream and Terminate application.
Good to know
- The admin tabs: every admin page has the same tabs across the top, so you do not have to go back to the profile menu each time.
- Kids profiles: a Kids profile never sees the admin pages, and clicking its profile card goes straight to the Who's Watching screen.
- Per profile: menus, shortcuts, likes, comments, and watch history are all kept per profile.
- Nothing is hidden: if a page seems to be missing, check that you are signed in as an administrator.