sestudio

Download episodes from fstream — via CLI or a local web UI.

Casting from a phone

Casting, in general, need the receiving TV to have access to the network address of the sestudio server.

If you are outside of your network, and use tailscale to access to your server, you will need to set up a port forwarding from your phone on your incoming wlan connections to your server's tailscale address.

Then, you will have to connect on your phone browser to your your phone's local network address (that will be forwarded to your server).

By doing this, the TV will connect to your phone's local network address, and your phone will forward the stream to your server, making the cast work.

The server serves HTTPS by default (self-signed) on port 8443, which is what Chromecast/AirPlay require — no Caddy or reverse proxy needed. The certificate is self-signed, so trust it once on the casting device (see HTTPS built in below).

To sum this up, here are the steps to follow to have full casting functionality:

• Be connected to tailscale
• Having port 8443 forwarded from your phone lan ip to the server's tailscale address
• Connect to https://:8443 from your phone browser

The phone ip address can be easily found on Android by long pressing the wifi widget, and then clicking on "advanced info" icon next to the current wifi name.

Requirements

• uv — that's the only thing you install.

Everything else is bundled: uv provides Python, and yt-dlp plus a static ffmpeg ship as dependencies (a system ffmpeg on PATH is preferred when present, giving a real ffprobe and fuller codecs). Node 18+ is only needed to rebuild the frontend during development.

Supported platforms

The wheel bundles a static ffmpeg, so it targets the platforms imageio-ffmpeg ships wheels for:

Install / run

Run it directly, without installing (recommended):

uvx sestudio                  # web UI (default command)
uvx sestudio download <url>   # CLI

With no command, sestudio starts the web UI — uvx sestudio --port 9000 is the same as uvx sestudio serve --port 9000.

Or set up a source checkout for development:

uv sync

Usage

CLI — download a season

# All episodes, VF (default)
uv run sestudio download <season-page-url>

# Specific episodes, VOSTFR, custom output folder
uv run sestudio download <url> -e 1,3,5-8 --lang vostfr -o ~/Videos

# Dry-run: resolve URLs without downloading
uv run sestudio download <url> --dry-run

Web UI

uv run sestudio serve

Starts two servers by default — http://<host>:8080 and https://<host>:8443 (self-signed cert). Open the HTTP one for hassle-free browsing and DLNA casting; open the HTTPS one for Chromecast/AirPlay (which require a secure context — trust the cert once, see below). The server keeps running in the terminal — downloads continue in the background even if you close the browser tab. Stop it with Ctrl-C.

The default 0.0.0.0 binding makes the UI reachable from other devices on your network — needed for casting. There is no authentication, so run it only on a trusted home network. Pass --host 127.0.0.1 to restrict it to the local machine.

Features:

• Search fstream, browse season cards with posters and language badges

• Expand seasons to episode level; cascading checkboxes (series → season → episode)

• Global language and output folder settings (persisted to ~/.config/sestudio/config.json)

• Per-episode progress bars via SSE; downloads keep running after closing the browser tab

• Play an episode in the browser (▶ per row) — streams through the server, so provider referer/TLS quirks are handled for you, with automatic fallback across providers

• Cast to a TV (⧉ per row) — send an episode to any DLNA renderer on your network; Chromecast and AirPlay are available from the player when served over HTTPS (see below)

• Continue Watching & Next Up — the home screen resumes what you were watching (browser or cast progress counts), suggests the next episode per series, and marks watched episodes; remove an item with its ✕. Stored locally in the browser.

• Web ↔ TV handoff — the player's ⧉ button casts the current episode from the current position; "Watch here" on a cast pill pulls it back into the browser where the TV left off

• Player niceties — resume with "Start over", 5-second auto-next countdown with cancel, volume/speed remembered across episodes and reloads

• Download to the server or to this device — the confirm dialog offers both (default in Settings). Direct MP4 sources are relayed straight to the browser; HLS has no single file to relay, so it downloads as a normal server job (with full progress, provider fallback and retries) and the browser collects the finished file. Device files are staged in a temp dir and removed when you clear the download history.

Metadata: results are enriched with posters, ratings, synopses, cast and a "Trending this week" row, via themoviedb.org. Released builds ship a default TMDB key, so uvx sestudio works with no setup. To use your own key instead, set TMDB_API_KEY=<your key> in the environment or save it in Settings (it lands in ~/.config/sestudio/config.json); either takes precedence over the built-in one. Keys are free. The key is never sent to the browser, and builds from a source checkout have no default key — there, enrichment stays off until you supply one.

Audio/subtitle tracks: the streaming proxy passes HLS alternate renditions (#EXT-X-MEDIA audio/subtitle tracks) through untouched, so when a provider's stream carries multiple tracks the player's menus expose them automatically. In practice the current providers serve single-rendition streams, so the menus usually have nothing extra to show; side-loaded subtitles (e.g. OpenSubtitles) are not supported yet.

Downloads are organised automatically, with a per-language subfolder (VF / VOSTFR / VO):

<output_root>/<Series Name>/Season 01/VOSTFR/S01E01 - Title.mp4
<output_root>/fstream_films/VF/<Film Title>.mp4

The "already downloaded" check is per-language, so the same episode in VF and VOSTFR are tracked separately.

Watch & cast on your network

Start the server so other devices can reach it (this is the default bind):

uvx sestudio serve --host 0.0.0.0

• Google Cast (Chromecast) and AirPlay need a secure context (HTTPS) — the Cast Web Sender SDK refuses to run over plain HTTP. sestudio serves HTTPS by default, so this works out of the box once you trust the cert (below).
• In-browser player and DLNA "Cast to TV" also work; the ⧉ button scans for renderers (a ~4 s SSDP scan) and pushes the stream to the one you pick. DLNA renderers fetch the media over plain HTTP, which the server always exposes on --http-port (8080) alongside HTTPS — so casting works without any extra flags.

HTTPS built in (default)

sestudio terminates HTTPS itself with a self-signed certificate covering your LAN IP — no extra tools. By default it runs both an HTTP and an HTTPS server:

uvx sestudio serve                # both: http://…:8080 and https://…:8443
uvx sestudio serve --no-https     # HTTP only (:8080)
uvx sestudio serve --no-http      # HTTPS only (:8443)

The HTTPS certificate is self-signed (cached at ~/.config/sestudio/cert.pem), so a client that uses the HTTPS site must trust it once:

• Desktop browser: open the URL and accept the certificate warning, or import ~/.config/sestudio/cert.pem into the system trust store.
• Android phone driving the cast: install ~/.config/sestudio/cert.pem as a user CA (Settings → Security → Encryption & credentials → Install a certificate → CA certificate). Without trusting it, the Cast button won't list devices.

Development

# Run tests
uv run pytest

# Backend for the dev proxy: plain HTTP on 8080 (the Vite proxy target)
uv run sestudio serve --no-https

# Frontend dev server (proxies /api to localhost:8080)
cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev

# Rebuild frontend (commit the result — frontend/dist ships in the wheel)
cd frontend && npm run build

Providers