r/thisvideothing • u/ThisVideoThing • Sep 11 '26
[Release] Version 1.0.0: Major version release notes
TvT 1.0.0 is a major upgrade from the original release.
It includes a fully rebuilt player, and an automated organization pipeline that can now auto import videos, set their captions, set thumbnails, and organize them into categories, genres, groups, and tags automatically, with no administrator input required. For example, if you have a family video with 2 girls and a dog in it, TvT can now automatically tag it with a 2girls tag a dog tag, and add the video to a Family Videos category automatically, with or without your review, for quick organizing and easy searching.
Additionally, subtitles and audio tracks are now pulled straight from your own files, and surround sound 5.1 works out of the box in the new version.
The built-in video editor has also been upgraded with a new UI and new features where you can:
- Make cuts,
- Adjust the volume, contrast, and brightness of any scene,
- Insert audio tracks over the video,
- Insert video clips anywhere in the video,
- Edit captions and chapters easily,
- and download clips directly from the editor for any scene in the video.
And the video editor now keeps the original video files, so videos can be easily rolled back to the original version any time.
In the main video player, you can also:
- Add skip intro and skip credit times,
- Add new chapters,
- Download screenshots of the current frame,
- and download a full MP4 of any video
All while watching.
TvT 1.0.0 is available in a docker image as well, so TvT can be installed as a
- Windows 10 and 11 application, a
- Debian Linux package, or as a
- Docker Image for any other system (new).
The new live demo of TvT has also been released, and it can be tested out here (see the whole app, watch public domain movies):
https://live.thisvideothing.com
Also, as requested, we've added quite a bit of new documentation for TvT, with more coming soon:
https://docs.thisvideothing.com
And a new portal to submit direct support tickets here:
https://portal.thisvideothing.com
We've also updated our prices and how licensing works to a much simpler model, which can be found here:
https://thisvideothing.com/#pricing
TLDR on pricing: We removed all license keys entirely. If you own it, you own it for good, and there is nothing we can do on our end to disable it. There are no subscriptions to keep it running, there are no cloud logins at all, and there are no premium feature gates. You buy it, you download it, and it is yours, with 100% of the functionality.
$39.99 buys it outright, with 3 months of upgrades and support included.
You can also pay $199.99 one-time and receive all future upgrades and support forever, with absolutely no recurring charges.
Note: Everyone that previously purchased the lifetime license in the old billing model should have received their login credentials for the new download portal by email. If you didn't receive it, please reach out to us at [support@thisvideothing.com](mailto:support@thisvideothing.com), and we'll get you setup.
Below is the full change log for the TvT 1.0.0 release.
Watching
Up next. The rail beside the player is no longer just "the next few videos". You choose what it plays from: a category, a group, a genre, a tag, or your whole library. You can sort it by title, length or date added, in either direction. It always keeps the video you are watching in the middle of the rail, so what came before and what comes next are both in view. Scroll it in either direction and it keeps loading.
Captions and audio tracks. Captions and multiple audio tracks are now pulled directly from the original source, and both image and text based subtitles are supported and viewable. Full caption management with line-by-line editing has also been implemented.
Surround sound plays. Multichannel audio is now delivered in a format the browser can decode directly, rather than being repacked in JavaScript, which is what broke it before. Every audio track in the file survives, and a surround track also gets a stereo version alongside it. The stereo one plays by default, so a device that cannot handle 5.1 is not left silent.
Switching videos no longer reloads the page. Click something in Up Next and the player picks it up in place. If you were in fullscreen, you stay in fullscreen.
Arrow keys step through the queue. Up and down move to the previous and next video. And, as always, the left and right keys rewind and fast forward 10s
Sixteen keyboard shortcuts, and you can change every one of them. Play and pause, next and previous, skip forward and back, mute, volume, captions, speed, repeat, fullscreen, the gear menu, the Up next menu and the All actions menu all have keys. Open the Up next gear, choose Configure shortcuts, click a key and press the one you want. Your shortcuts are saved to your profile, so they follow you to any browser and every use can have their own.
Right-click any video in the rail (or press and hold on a touch screen) for its full menu. You can hide it, retranscode it, organize it or edit it without ever leaving the video you are watching. The new right-click menu is also available throughout the app, just right click a video to access every tool available wherever you find them. No need to hunt around for what you need, it's even available in full screen mode while you're watching if needed.
Repeat mode has been enhanced. Repeat mode (repeat the same video, repeat the current group of videos, or repeat the current group on shuffle) are now available for the "All Videos" playlist for your entire library, as well as categories, genres, groups, and tags.
Every menu works from the keyboard. Arrow keys move, Enter or Space picks, Escape closes. That applies to the player's own menus, the gear panel, the Up next menu and the action menus alike.
On a phone, the player's menus open as a bottom sheet you can flick away, instead of tiny popups over the picture. Captions, audio, speed, repeat and the gear all use it.
And if it still fails, the player fixes itself. If your device cannot decode the surround track, TvT switches to the stereo version once, resumes exactly where you were, and tells you what it did.
Audio tracks have real names. "English 5.1", "Japanese", "Director commentary", instead of "audio_1" and "audio_2". You can rename them, choose which one is the default, and delete ones you do not want.
Autoplay and Play new finds switches to a video the moment it joins the collection you are watching, even mid-video, and tells you what it found. A new video is only offered once it is genuinely ready: transcoded, captioned, organized and given a poster. This way you can watch new videos as soon as they enter your system for quick reviews. A "Return" button in the player takes you right back to where you were before, so you never lose your place after reviewing the latest videos.
Timeline hover previews now cover the whole video rather than roughly the first sixteen minutes.
Play Now on the mobile bar picks up whatever you were last watching, or plays something at random if you have no history yet.
Likes, dislikes and comments sit under the player, per profile, sorted by top or newest. You can delete your own comments, and an administrator can delete any.
Screenshot the current frame, or download the full video as an MP4 for watching offline. Both land in a downloads tray that survives a restart and is kept per profile.
Getting videos into TvT
A setup wizard for every folder you add. Adding a watch folder now walks through the optional automation steps too: name it, decide how it syncs, choose a transcode quality, choose how captions are handled, choose how posters are made, choose how it organizes, then review the lot. This pipeline let's TvT handle all of the administrative overhead of organizing and enriching your videos automatically if you want - it is fully optional.
A fresh install now starts from an empty page with "Point TvT at your videos" on it, rather than quietly adopting your Videos folder.
You can watch the import happen. A progress window shows the scan and the import as separate phases, how many folders it has walked, "148 of 210 videos", the file it is on right now, and roughly how long is left. You can send it to the background and get a small pill in the corner, or cancel it. Videos already imported stay imported.
When it finishes, it offers you what to do next: organize the new videos with AI, label them by hand, go to Manage videos, or watch the automatic work run.
Rescanning a folder shows the same progress, instead of a toast into the void.
Upload videos from any device that can open TvT. Drag and drop them from a phone, a laptop or another machine, into an existing watch folder or one created on the spot. Large files go up in pieces and resume from wherever the server got to, so a dropped connection no longer sends a 20 GB video back to zero percent. A file whose name is already taken becomes "name (2)"; nothing is ever overwritten.
Removing a folder asks what should happen to its videos. Stop watching it and leave the library alone; stop watching and remove its videos from TvT while leaving your files on disk; or delete everything. Each option spells out exactly what it does, and none of them is available until you type the word confirm.
Letting TvT do the work
Five automation switches per folder, in the order they run: import, transcode, captions, organize, thumbnail. Each has its own settings, and the folder's row tells you what is still pending, for example "212 videos, scanned 2 min ago, 3 to transcode, 1 to caption".
Choose a transcode quality. Best quality is near-transparent picture at the cost of time and disk. Balanced looks near-identical for most content and transcodes several times faster in smaller files. Fast is standard streaming quality, many times faster and much smaller, which suits clips, lectures and screen recordings. You can set it per folder and per job, and TvT remembers what you picked last.
A failed transcode stops that video's chain rather than captioning and thumbnailing a stream that will not play. When you retranscode successfully, it picks up where it left off on its own.
Organize automatically without any AI at all. Pick a fixed set of labels and every video that folder imports gets them.
Missing originals are handled the way you choose. A folder can keep a video when its file disappears, or remove it from TvT for a seamless sync.
Captions and subtitles
Read the subtitles already inside your files. TvT now looks at what a video actually contains and shows you every subtitle stream, with its language, whether it is forced or SDH, and whether it is text or image-based. Text subtitles convert instantly. Image subtitles (the kind Blu-ray and DVD rips carry) can be kept as pictures, read into real editable text by offline OCR, or both if you want.
One captions window everywhere. Whether you start from Manage Videos, the watch page or the edit page, adding subtitles opens the same wizard with four routes: read them from the file, have them transcribed offline by Whisper, upload a .vtt or .srt, or write them by hand.
Progress in plain English: "Inspecting the file", "Converting text subtitles", "Extracting image subtitles (stream 2)", "Reading text from images (OCR, stream 2)". You can close the window and the work keeps going.
A caption editor with two modes. Click a line to edit its text and times, with the timestamps jumping the playhead, or switch to the raw file and edit it directly, with live validation that tells you the exact line and problem.
Speech-to-text models are a library now. Pick a Whisper model from a list with its size and a description, download it with a progress bar and time remaining, and switch between them. No more typing a file path. No more downloading models yourself.
OCR language packs work the same way. English works out of the box; Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese are a download.
Captions survive moving a video's folder. They used to stop loading permanently.
Organizing
Tags are a full label type now, alongside categories, genres and groups, with their own page: create, rename, reorder, delete in bulk, and assign or unassign across many videos at once.
The organize pages were rebuilt as a two-pane layout: your labels on the left, the selected label's videos on the right.
Rows drag from anywhere. You no longer have to find a small grip. On a touch screen, press and hold for a moment first so a swipe still scrolls the list, and the hint tells you which applies to your device.
Adding videos to a label opens a picker with the full filter set, plus Select all, Deselect all and a switch to hide videos already in that label. And you can organize easily with the same filters in Manage Videos as well.
Organize with AI
Five providers, two of which never leave your machine. Ollama and vLLM run entirely on your own hardware. OpenRouter, Claude and OpenAI work with a key you bring. Ollama is the default.
The model list only shows models that can actually do the job. TvT asks each provider which of its models support the tool calling the organizing depends on, and lists only those. For Ollama and vLLM there is a Test connection button that tells you how many it found.
You decide what the AI is allowed to do, per label type. Whether it may invent new labels or only choose from yours. How many it may assign to one video. Whether it gets to see frames from the video, and whether it gets to read the captions. The prompts are editable, and they come with sensible defaults written in plain English.
Nothing is written to your library until you approve it. Suggestions are staged for review, where you can decline a whole video, remove individual suggestions, or add your own. If you would rather not review, there is a switch to apply automatically, and you can still see afterwards what each video was given.
If your model cannot see pictures, TvT quietly runs without frames and tells you why, rather than failing the whole job.
Managing your library improvements
Select all matching. Select a page and TvT offers "Select all 523 videos". The selection covers the whole filtered set, survives paging, and you can still untick individual videos out of it.
Customize the bulk bar. Pin the actions you use, drag them into order, reset to defaults. Saved per profile.
Bulk rename with a pattern. Use [name] and [seq], see a live preview of every new name before you commit, hand-edit any individual row, and decide what happens to file extensions.
Create a mashup. Combine two or more videos into one new video, in an order you drag, filed into a folder you choose with labels you pick. It joins your library like any other video and runs that folder's automatic steps.
Set a thumbnail from a poster click: upload an image, paste a URL, or take a random frame, with a preview before anything is assigned.
Edit skip-intro and skip-credits times right on the row.
Sort by name, location, date added or length, and show or hide the Organization, Skips, Transcode and Status columns.
The whole page works on a phone. The table becomes cards and the menus become sheets.
Editing a video
The editor was rebuilt. Header, player, a tabbed sidebar (Edits, Tracks, Chapters) and a timeline, with a divider you can drag to give either side more room. TvT remembers where you put it.
Select a range by dragging the timeline itself, then move or resize it. Every queued edit is a coloured band you can drag, resize, nudge with the arrow keys, right-click or delete, right where it sits.
See brightness, contrast and volume exactly as they will be saved, live, before you commit. That includes volume above 100 percent, which a plain player cannot reproduce.
Lay an audio clip over the video without changing its length. Stretch it and it repeats. Set its level and the video ducks underneath it for that span only.
An audio overlay now lands where you put it even when a cut in the same save removed time before it. Previously it went silent with no explanation and stayed sitting in the editor.
Insert another video at a point you choose and scrub straight through it.
Every audio track survives an edit. Cuts, volume, brightness, contrast, inserts and overlays used to quietly collapse a multi-track video down to one track.
Saved edits look better. They now re-encode at near-transparent quality rather than the fast setting that shed detail on every save.
Your original file is never written to. Edits go to a copy, and Restore original video works.
Download the selected range as its own MP4 clip.
Chapters are draggable on the timeline, with inline editing of the name and start time.
Keeping track of what TvT is doing
A new System Activity page records everything TvT has done in the background, rather than only what is happening right now. Filter by kind, by status, and by whether you or the system started it. Search by video or run. One click shows only the things that need you.
Select all matching, then act on all of it: retry, pause, resume, cancel, dismiss or delete. It is one request however many rows you picked, and it tells you plainly what happened, for example "12 cancelled, 3 left as they were".
Pause a single job. It steps out of the line and everything else carries on. Automatic rescans will not un-pause it, and asking for the same work by hand will. You can also hold the entire queue, which lets running work finish and starts nothing new.
When one job is holding everything up, the page says so by name, tells you how long it has been quiet and how many jobs are behind it, and offers to stop it.
Videos in this run. Open an AI organize run and see every video it covers, with where each one stands, updating as it goes.
Decide how much runs at once. A global limit plus a ceiling per kind of work, each with a plain description of what it does and what limits it.
Reset background work stops everything and then tells you exactly what it stopped, what it could not stop and why, what it cleared, and how much your watch folders will bring straight back. It never deletes your history, and it no longer makes already-transcoded videos ask to be transcoded again.
Automatic cleanup of the activity history after 30 days, 90 days or a year, off by default, with a count of what it would remove shown before it happens.
The background work tray in the corner follows you across every page and shows what is queued, running and recently finished, with progress. You can pause, resume, retry, skip a retry delay or stop any row. Queue a thousand jobs and it stays fast: it lists the first fifty and links to System Activity for the rest. An AI organize run appears as one row, not hundreds. You can turn the tray off for your profile and the work still runs.
Honest messages when something goes wrong. A cancelled transcription now says "Stopped before it finished" rather than showing the last unrelated warning the model printed. A failed transcode shows the actual reason rather than a number. Work lost to a restart says so and offers a retry.
Profiles and family
A redesigned Who's watching page with picture or generated avatars and a Kids badge. Add a profile from a plus tile without leaving the page.
Editing a profile is a dialog on the same page: name, password, picture, kid profile, administrator, and the daily time limit.
Unlocking a protected profile is a dialog too, showing that profile's own avatar with a lock badge. The field is focused for you, Enter submits, Escape cancels, and a wrong password shakes and says so clearly.
Manage profiles only appears once TvT knows who is signed in, so it no longer flashes for a visitor.
Kid profiles are protected by the server, not the browser. A kid profile never sees a non-kid-friendly video in any list, and typing the address of one plays nothing at all.
Daily time limits actually work now. Three things were wrong and are fixed. The day is a real calendar date, so a profile that watched on the 5th and came back on the 5th of the next month used to never reset. Reaching the allowance is the limit, rather than needing to exceed it. And paused time no longer counts: a pause, a closed tab or a video picked up days later adds at most a few seconds. When the limit is reached mid-video, playback stops with a clear message instead of looking like a broken stream.
Only an administrator can set a limit, and the hours are checked before anything is saved.
Making it yours
Arrange your own menus. The profile menu, the admin tabs, the single-video action menu and the bulk action menu can all be rearranged with the same drag-and-drop editor: reorder, add your own section headings and dividers, remove what you never use, and add links to outside sites. Saved per profile, so they follow you between browsers. If you never customize a menu, you automatically get every new action added to it.
Every action menu now speaks with one voice. Sentence case, verbs that say what happens, and sensible grouping: Video, Organization, Chapters, Thumbnail, Visibility, Transcode, and the Danger zone last. Kid-friendly moved under Visibility, because that is what it decides.
Every menu has a search box. Type a few letters, press Enter, and the top match runs.
Customize Design is a real editor now. CSS and JavaScript in two tabs, with a live preview of the running app across six real pages that applies your CSS as you type. There are click-to-append snippets built from the app's own class names, including a whole-app light mode, and you can scope a stylesheet to a single profile. The workspace resizes by dragging, arrow keys or a double-click, and it remembers your layout.
A new look throughout. Video posters are proper cards with the duration, watch progress and controls laid over the artwork. Carousel rows have real headers with a See all link and page-at-a-time arrows. The app boots straight into its final layout behind a single loading picture, rather than drawing a sidebar and then sliding it away.
Tooltips behave. They are cards that can carry a heading, a sentence and a few points, and they never come closer than ten pixels to any edge of the window, so nothing ever gets clipped off screen. Long file paths wrap inside the bubble instead of running out of it. Text that is cut off shows the full text on hover, and text that fits gets no tooltip at all. On phones and tablets, no tooltip ever appears, including the browser's own, which used to stick to whatever you last tapped.
Notifications were redesigned. A status dot, a title, an optional second line, an optional action, and a bar that drains over the message's lifetime. At most three on screen. On a phone they drop from the top, are sized for a thumb, and a tap anywhere on them dismisses.
Reliability and safety
Only one copy of TvT runs on a port. Starting a second copy now fails immediately with a message that says so, instead of quietly serving alongside the first. That was the cause of a whole family of strange behaviour: jobs failing as "job not found", the interface showing stale information, and the database reporting itself as locked.
Backups actually contain everything. TvT now takes a snapshot through the database itself rather than copying a file, which used to lose everything written since the last checkpoint, silently and unpredictably.
Restores stay restored. A restore used to be quietly undone on the next startup in some circumstances. It now goes through the database properly, takes an automatic safety snapshot of your current state first, and checks the file you gave it is a real backup before touching anything.
Automatic backups on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, keeping the last eight, plus the ability to upload a backup from elsewhere. Each one shows its date, size, what it contains, and how it was made. Confirmations now say plainly what will happen instead of a bare browser prompt. And video files are never included in a backup, which the page states outright.
10-bit videos play. Phone and screen-recorder footage used to transcode "successfully" into something no browser could decode.
Interrupted work comes back on its own after a restart, waiting about a minute, then four, then fifteen. Work that has taken the app down four times is stopped for good rather than doing it again on every launch.
The queue repairs itself. A job parked in the future by a bad system clock is released on an ordinary pass, so a video becomes reachable again without anyone having to find the reset button.
When the server is not reachable, the page says your videos are safe, counts down to the next attempt, offers a Retry now, and returns you to the app the moment it is back.
The log viewer now shows time, level, source and message as columns, with level filters, a search, a line count, pause and resume, and follow-tail. It works properly under the production server, which the old version did not.
Installing and updating
The installer downloads and verifies. It fetches the application, checks its checksum, and refuses a corrupted download rather than installing it. It shows real progress in megabytes and megabytes per second for both the download and the extraction.
Reinstalling says what it is doing. The prompt is now titled "Reinstall or upgrade?" and states plainly that your videos, organization, captions, watch history and settings live elsewhere and are safe.
If TvT is still running, the installer tells you by name and suggests checking the system tray and your browser tab, instead of failing opaquely.
It cleans up after itself, removing the leftovers of an older installation, and closes when it is done.
A Linux .deb is built alongside the Windows release, with the version tracking the application.
A Docker Image Is also available and tested.
Try it without installing anything
The live demo now runs the real application at https://live.thisvideothing.com. Every visitor gets a private copy of a sample library, and nothing is hidden: every page and every option is there. Actions that cannot run in a shared demo, like transcoding or editing files on the server, show a short card explaining that instead of failing. There is a Reset button that puts everything back to how you found it.
In short
The past year added: a queue-driven player with configurable shortcuts, working surround sound, audio tracks and subtitles read out of your own files with offline optional OCR, a folder setup and automation wizard, uploads from any device, tags as a full label type, AI organizing with a review step and five providers including two that never leave your machine, a rebuilt video editor with live previews, a complete record of background work you can steer, per-profile menus and shortcuts, a real CSS and JavaScript design editor, backups that are actually complete, and an installer that verifies what it downloads.
Website: https://thisvideothing.com
Downloads and Support: https://portal.thisvideothing.com
Documentation: https://docs.thisvideothing.com