My TV

Fourteen thousand six hundred films and almost five thousand series. A monster, and nobody could find anything: the categories were a mess, every film showed up twice in HD and 4K, and the search only found the exact name.

On top of that, the app I used had ads, updated itself and remembered nothing: not what you’d watched, not where you’d left off.

I wanted something like Netflix, but better: easy with the remote and with a player that never fails.

• Search the way you talk. It forgives accents, typos and fragments: “tiburn” finds Tiburón (Jaws). It searches by title, actor, director, genre, character and even plot.
• Tags that add up. What you type turns into tags you can combine: “De Niro + Pacino”, “like Alien”, “from 2010 on”.
• It never leaves you stranded. If a combination finds nothing, it tells you which tag to drop.
• Dictate with the remote. Talk into the remote’s mic and it searches.
• A Home your way. Pin films, whole sagas or searches. A saga tells you which one is next and how many you’ve seen.
• Pick up where you left off. At the exact second you stopped.
• Full details. Synopsis, cast with photos and age rating. If there’s an HD and a 4K version, it shows up once and you choose when you press play.
• Clear audio and subtitles. “Spanish · 5.1” instead of cryptic codes, and it remembers what you picked.

The first job was putting the data in order. I threw away the server’s categories and matched every film with TMDB to get its proper page: synopsis, cast, director, keywords and similar films. 11,300 pages, downloaded in about twenty minutes. HD and 4K versions merge into one, and everything is indexed on the TV itself so search is instant.

Then the rest, plan by plan, each with its own sketch, tested on the real Fire TV with the remote: first the player, which mattered most, then the details pages, Home and the search. All in two days.

The search started out as “AI-powered” and I stopped it in time: better a traditional one, but a damn good one.

That monster of a catalogue is now usable. At home we search, explore and keep watching without fighting the TV, and search works offline, on what the TV already has stored.

Series come next.

It’s for me. It isn’t for sale.

Kotlin with Compose for TV. Media3 for the player. Room to keep everything on the TV itself. Film data comes from TMDB.

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