Now showing: your library.

Reel's menu system is a left-hand rail that shows only when you want it, and hides discreetly when you don't. Browsing the nav rail never changes it or the room - only choosing does. When you focus the nav rail with your remote, the world slides politely aside and the labels unfurl.

Do you define lots of libraries on your private media server? With "accordion" mode, your libraries unfold beneath Movies, TV Shows, and Collections with counts. If multiple libraries aren't your thing, "single" mode provides common-sense navigation to one room where all of your movies or TV shows live. Libraries are populated from per-user permissions you've already established on your self-hosted server. An account with nothing in it still gets a graceful rail, never a broken one.

Media server owners define the default, user-overridable, style: compact, default, oversized. Back is always defined on every navigation border so you never get stranded or end up where you didn't expect to.

Reel was built to provide a pleasant and intuitive user experience with an interface that dissolves into the background. The grid is a hunt surface: seven columns with fast navigation to find the media that slipped your mind but is "on the tip of your tongue". It starts with "M"? The star button on the remote reveals a jump-to keyboard instead of 20 button clicks plus one "OK".

Not sure if you "have that one" in your collection? Search offers an easy-to-navigate, common-sense keyboard layout, and instant, beautifully-presented results that re-search and re-populate with every character you select - we don't even have a button labeled "Search". Movie and TV show results are intermingled in the results feed from your media server in a way that makes sense instead of forcing you to pick one media type or the other.

Sort & Filter replaces the navigation gymnastics of some apps and provides smarter filters your users will actually use instead of 150 combinations they won't. ONE BUTTON CLICK gets you there.

The entire show is one continuous river of episodes; seasons are milestones you scroll through, not modes you switch between. Visually segregated, but not navigationally, season and episode columns are easily scrollable. It never opens at the beginning - it opens at your next episode, one watched card above for context.

A filament of gold runs the river's full height: bright where you've already been, an ember where you are now, and quiet ahead.

A facts line rides under every episode: resolution, codec, size, embedded streams, all configurable. The season map fast-travels, and a 73-season, 1,130-episode show (you know the one) arrives fast and scrolls without a hiccup.

A 4.5-second ticket stub, and then the film owns the screen - that's the app's only brand moment. One press summons everything: one thread of elapsed light, chapter ticks, and an ends-at time in your own clock.

The House Clock answers the living room's realest question - "is it too late to start this?" - with analog hands pointing at the moment the credits will roll. Pause grows the poster into a lobby card on a surface lit by the film itself, with honest format plates that describe the file, never the pipe.

The Console puts subtitles, audio, and quality in three columns on one sheet - everything visible, one press applies and resumes. Chapters ride UP and DOWN - a courtesy almost nobody extends - and titles without chapter data get honest ten-minute landmarks that name the target time, never a made-up unit. Skip intro and skip credits appear when your server knows the markers; credits hand off to up-next with a draining ring and an any-key cancel. First frame in 799 ms on the direct-play path.

When a reel ran out, the projectionist watched for the cue dot and changed projectors without the house ever knowing. That's the standard Reel holds for the unglamorous parts of playback.

Hold the seek key and the picture freezes on a clean frame while a destination plate walks with you - a big target clock and a signed distance from where you started. Let go, and exactly one jump happens. At no point does the picture fall into a black hole - measured under a storm of presses: zero black frames.

If your server needs a moment to prepare a part of the film, the wait says so honestly at the target - nothing counts down, because a fake countdown lies twice. If a stream dies behind the scenes, it rebuilds where you were: "session survived" and "session rebuilt" are indistinguishable from the couch. And a busy server is a designed state with honest words and a patient retry - never an error you wear.

Subtitles on a TV usually have two owners, and neither admits it. In Reel there is one subtitle truth: every choice routes through one dispatcher that picks the honest delivery route and refuses the combinations that silently fail.

Set audio and subtitles on the title's own page before you press play, in a dropdown that opens right under your cursor - no detour screens. Choices persist and preselect by language next time. Formats that must be burned in say so plainly - burned-in means your server re-encodes the video, and Reel never starts that quietly.

"Foreign parts only" works the way the filmmaker intended: the moment a film drops into another language, the right track appears. Prefer SDH, and every automatic pick honors it. And if a subtitle choice has to touch the TV's own system-wide caption switch, Reel says so on the glass - an off-device consequence is never silent.

Settings is the configurator - flip a toggle and the running app re-skins the same frame, and your key re-cuts on screen as you watch. A short code, typeable on a remote in under a minute, carrying 22 choices: four full themes, rail styles, badges, freshness, quality - the shape of your house.

Paste the key into a collection named Reel Config on your server and every TV in the household discovers it on its own. The key hangs on your server's own door - no new account, no new cloud, nothing new to host.

New features arrive dark and off. A key cut today opens every future Reel to exactly the experience its owner chose. An update cannot change a configured experience - not a promise in a changelog, a structural property.

And the house has two planes: comfort belongs to the person holding the remote - captions, hints, chrome timing. The owner seeds the defaults; your own choice wins forever after on your own device, and it's never part of any code.