Colosseum

A native desktop media environment for manga and comics, books and audiobooks, movies, shows, and anime.

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Overview

Your media library lives in five different apps: one for manga, one for comics, one for books, one for audiobooks, one for film and TV. Each has its own catalogue, its own reader or player, its own idea of progress — and none of them talk to each other.

Colosseum is one fullscreen home for all of it. Three worlds — Tankoban (manga and western comics), Biblio (ebooks and audiobooks), Theatre (movies, shows, anime) — share a single shell: one Continue row across every medium, one Collection, one Downloads surface, one taskbar of open sessions, and Vault, a local-media library for files you already own. Each medium keeps the surface it deserves: a real comic reader, a real book reader with audiobook read-along, and a real video player. Browsing is catalogue-first and discovery-rich; downloaded media remains local so reading and listening can continue offline.

Important

Colosseum 1.1.3 is the current Windows 10/11 desktop release. The 1.1.4 release was withdrawn. Download the installer from Releases for a per-user install — no administrator required. Building from source is documented below.

What's new in 1.1.3

• Release builds open again. Colosseum.Activity is registered unconditionally, fixing the release-only startup failure that caused 1.1.2 to exit before a window appeared.
• Updates relaunch correctly. Installer result flags now reach the updater instead of being mistaken for a QML file path, so the post-update relaunch path no longer exits immediately.
• A much smaller installer. Release packaging strips build intermediates, test harnesses, and source trees, with a size gate preventing the old 647 MB packaging failure from returning.
• Vault hardening and a Home portal. Live delete/replace reconciliation, revision-guarded enrichment, honest CBR failure handling, and a permanent Vault entry point shipped together.
• Watch Party ships configured. The hosted relay is the default, and exact torrent rooms can fetch the room source for joiners instead of requiring it to exist locally first.
• Catalogue and reading polish. Tankoban gained a Library tab, Biblio's catalogue was reworked, ScrollGlide landed across grid/reader surfaces, and the Living Guide was removed.

Full release notes: docs/release-notes/v1.1.3.md.

Highlights

• Three worlds, one shell. Universal Continue, Collection, Downloads, search history, wallpapers, local Vault media, and window sessions across manga, comics, books, audiobooks, and video.
• Real readers and players, built in. A from-scratch comic reader (long strip, paired pages, RTL, exact resume), an ebook reader with typography control and audiobook read-along, and an mpv-based player with subtitles, skip segments, episode queues, and seek thumbnails.
• Local media is first-class. Vault indexes folders in place, watches confirmed roots for arrivals, keeps a recent-arrivals view, preserves unavailable roots, and routes supported local files back into the same readers and player used elsewhere in Colosseum.
• Deep catalogues with offline backbones. Theatre shelves are ranked by a local IMDb index; Tankoban discovery and series pages use local MAL/Tankoban catalogues; Biblio blends Apple Books with Open Library most-read, classics, and subject discovery.
• Stremio-compatible extensions. World-aware Sources, community/curated Browse, Installed management, configured manifests, and direct/torrent Theatre stream results. NoTorrent ships by default and is removable like any extension.
• Download-fed reading. Tankoban volumes, comics, and Biblio retain native acquisition paths so the media you keep does not depend on the source remaining online after download.

Screenshots

Tankoban series — volume view	Comic reader
Biblio book page	Reader — themes and typography
Theatre series page	Native player
Cinematic loader

The three worlds

World	For	Built-in sources
Tankoban	manga and western comics	local/managed MAL + Tankoban catalogues; AniList metadata; Nyaa volume source (off by default); GetComics + local comic catalog
Biblio	ebooks and audiobooks	Apple Books + Open Library discovery, LibGen, AudioBookBay
Theatre	movies, shows, anime	Cinemeta + offline IMDb catalogue, Jikan/AniList/Kitsu; installed Stremio extensions

Vault

Vault is Colosseum's library for local files you already have. It is separate from the Downloads screen: Vault can index ordinary folders anywhere you choose, while Downloads continues to track media acquired by Colosseum's own backends.

Vault has a permanent Home portal, so the local-library door is present even on a fresh install with no roots configured. Add one or more roots and Colosseum scans them without relocating the originals. The Browse face has recent arrivals, a root rail, breadcrumbs, nested folder navigation, media-shaped cards, and in-place identity correction. Confirmed roots are watched for new files, while disconnected or missing roots remain represented as away instead of making your library silently shrink. Deleting or replacing files is also reconciled live, and stale background enrichment is revision-guarded so older work cannot overwrite a newer file identity.

Artwork follows the media rather than one generic poster rule. Comics and books can reuse covers inside their files; recognized movies and shows can receive locally cached canonical posters; episodes, clips, and other local video can receive persistent ffmpeg frame grabs. The resolver keeps the result local once it has been acquired, so the Browse wall can keep its art offline.

Vault also has identity continuity for files that move or appear as copies. When a likely-copy ceremony needs a decision, you can keep existing state or treat it as a separate copy rather than letting the scanner silently merge the two. Supported books, comics/manga, and video then open through Reader2, the comic reader, or the Theatre player instead of a second set of local-only viewers. Colosseum's Downloads tree can also appear as a synthetic Vault root without deleting or moving the underlying download data.

Players and readers

• Theatre player — fullscreen QML surface over MpvQt / libmpv. Resume, warm minimize, audio and subtitle selection, online subtitles, track delays, speed, fill and aspect, PiP, skip segments, episode queues, source failover, Up Next, A-B loop, sleep timer, captures, GIF tools, chapter markers, loudness normalization, and ffmpeg-backed seek thumbnails.
• Player 2 — an experimental from-scratch D3D11 / FFmpeg engine, integrated behind an opt-in build and boot gate. Not the default player.
• Custom comic reader — built from scratch and shared by Tankoban volumes and western comic editions. Long strip, single and double page, MangaPlus-style pairing, LTR / RTL direction, fit and zoom, wide-page splitting, prefetch, page grids, spread knowledge, scrub navigation, and exact resume.
• Reader2 — native QML chrome over a least-privilege WebEngine paper. Contents, bookmarks, annotations, search, footnotes, typography, themes, keyboard navigation, and minimizable sessions. The audiobook engine lives behind its Audio surface with Follow my reading read-along.

Watch Party

Colosseum 1.1.3 includes the Player 1 Watch Party client and defaults to the hosted protocol-v3 relay, so creating or joining a room no longer requires endpoint configuration. A Join action lives on the taskbar; room controls live inside Player 1. The client supports guest and signed-in identity, participant rosters, chat and reactions, host/shared control, reconnect and host grace, kick/rejoin, room end, source readiness, sync status, catch-up, and room timeline commands.

Source portability is intentionally strict. The UI proves torrent identity from infoHash + fileIdx, so exact torrent sources can be shared and a joiner can fetch the room's source automatically. Generic direct-stream URLs are not eligible, and the verified-debrid seam is not inferred from ordinary QML rows.

COLOSSEUM_WATCH_PARTY_URL remains an override for self-hosting and testing. The repository includes the Cloudflare Worker + Durable Object relay and deployment notes in server/watchparty-relay/DEPLOYMENT.md. Guest room flows are accountless and work today; public signed-in hosting does not, because it needs bearer authority from the account service, which is not deployed (see Accounts and sync). Multi-client room membership/chat/kick/rejoin/grace/end behavior has runtime coverage; final in-app synced-playback acceptance remains a field-testing boundary.

Extensions

The extension system is Stremio-compatible and has three surfaces: Sources (world-aware source chains), Browse (curated/community discovery and manifest preview), and Installed (enable, order, configure, and remove).

In Theatre, compatible add-ons can return ordinary torrent streams or direct HTTP streams. Direct results can carry the add-on's request headers into the player, while configured manifests can hand their own setup/authentication flow back to the provider. Colosseum does not try to own a provider's debrid credentials or authentication state.

Tankoban and Biblio can consume compatible extension catalogues in their Discover surfaces, while their acquisition/download paths remain native to those worlds rather than pretending every Stremio stream shape maps cleanly onto a book or manga volume.

NoTorrent, an HTTP streaming source extension, ships enabled by default in Theatre and is removable like any extension. Explicit-content manifests are hidden by default, but they follow the same global Explicit Content preference as the rest of Colosseum when that setting is enabled; direct manifest installation and community Browse use the same gate so the two paths cannot drift.

Downloads, Collection, sessions

• Downloads — one taskbar surface across Tankoban volumes, comics, LibGen ebooks, and Theatre video, with open, retry, pause, cancel, and delete routed to the owning backend. Tankoban volume acquisitions expose resolving/progress/done state both in the source sheet and on the volume shelf.
• Collection — a durable manual library across all three worlds, separate from progress and local ownership.
• Sessions — open books, comic / manga readers, and video surfaces, switched from the taskbar. Audiobook playback stays inside the open book session.

Accounts and sync

Not wired up yet — you cannot sign in. There is no account service running, so account creation, sign-in, and cloud sync do not work in any released build, and every attempt reports that the account service configuration is invalid. Everything Colosseum does with your library works fully offline and is unaffected; accounts are an unfinished addition, not a dependency.

What exists today is the desktop half: onboarding, remembered-session restore, an account medallion/flyout, and a six-page Account Centre — Profile, Your Colosseum, Security, Devices, Recovery, and Data & privacy — plus the server that answers them, which lives in this repository at server/account-service but is not deployed anywhere. See its deployment runbook for what closing that gap requires.

The rest of this section describes what those surfaces do once a service is running.

Profile can rename the account and choose a built-in avatar. Security owns new-device protection, pending sign-in approvals, password changes, and sign-out-everywhere. Devices can refresh and revoke trusted devices. Recovery can replace the recovery key without exposing the secret through the normal page state. Your Colosseum is backed by a profile-owned activity ledger and projects monthly watch time, pages read, completions, active days, highlights, and recent activity.

Portable sync remains narrower than "sync my computer": Collection, Continue/progress, ordinary history, and profile preferences have sync adapters. Machine-specific paths, downloaded/local media files, window state, search history, and the raw Your Colosseum activity ledger stay local. The Data & privacy page can clear local search history and activity history; its policy switches, data export, and account-deletion flow do not yet have authoritative service wiring.

The account service endpoint is configurable rather than hard-coded into the public desktop source: a build sets it with -DCOLOSSEUM_ACCOUNT_SERVICE_URL=https://<host>, and the COLOSSEUM_ACCOUNT_SERVICE_URL environment variable overrides it at runtime. Released builds set neither, which is why sign-in is unavailable. To exercise the surfaces locally, run tests/mock-account-service and point the environment variable at it.

Wallpapers

Each world can persist its own wallpaper. The picker ships original Colosseum shaders — Noir Flow and Low Poly (animated) and Aurora Flow (adapted from an LGPL KDE Plasma wallpaper) — plus native mesh-gradient stills (Twilight, Ember, Mint). A curated KDE Plasma still shelf and Wallhaven search are also available. Animated scenes freeze while immersive media owns the screen.

Tech stack

Qt 6 (Quick / QML, WebEngine, SQL, Concurrent) · C++ · MpvQt + libmpv · FFmpeg · libtorrent-rasterbar · SQLite catalogues · Stremio-compatible extension protocol. QML owns presentation; native C++ owns durable state, files, catalogs, readers, playback engines, torrent transport, WebEngine bridges, downloads, Vault indexing, accounts/sync, and system integration.

Code quality & security

Every push runs a multi-stage quality and security pipeline:

• CodeQL static analysis (security-and-quality queries) across C/C++ and the Python / JavaScript / GitHub Actions scripting.
• clang-tidy correctness gate on the native C++.
• AddressSanitizer — the app and its lifetime/ownership harnesses run instrumented and clean.
• Coverage-guided fuzzing of the untrusted-input parsers — the comic/CBZ archive reader, the Watch Party network protocol, and the update manifest — under AddressSanitizer. Initial campaigns ran past 10 million executions with no memory-safety defects.
• Dependency scanning — reachability-aware vulnerability checks on bundled and service dependencies.

See SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability.

Install

Download the installer

Grab the latest Colosseum-x.x-setup.exe from Releases. It installs per-user — no administrator needed — and runs on Windows 10/11.

Automatic updates

Colosseum's installed updater checks the stable GitHub Releases channel and shows a quiet Update control in the Home top bar when a newer signed release is available. The Update page can show a full-bleed release chronicle, download into a resumable cache, verify the signed manifest and installer hash, and then launch the side-by-side installer. The installed release also ships with a bundled, signature-verified chronicle so the page has trustworthy history before any network check completes. In 1.1.3, updater result flags also survive the relaunch path instead of being mistaken for a QML file override.

1.1.1 closes the installer handoff that was incomplete in 1.1.0: once the verified installer has successfully launched, Colosseum persists the Installing state and requests its own orderly shutdown, allowing the installer's /WAITPID contract to continue. The public 1.1.1 release ships all three required assets: the installer, colosseum-update-v1.json, and colosseum-update-v1.json.sig.

Release acceptance remains fail-closed. Drafts, prereleases, malformed manifests, unsigned assets, wrong hashes, and unsafe URLs are rejected; source-tree/development launches do not perform normal automatic checks. Because the 1.1.0 GitHub release did not contain the signed manifest assets, 1.1.0 users need one manual install of 1.1.1 from Releases. From 1.1.1 onward, later stable releases can use the Update page when their signed release assets are present. Manual download remains the fallback.

Build from source

Windows source builds use Visual Studio 2022 C++ Build Tools, CMake/Ninja, Qt 6.11.1 MSVC 2022 64-bit, MpvQt/libmpv, and libtorrent/Boost/OpenSSL. Contributors should pass their own dependency locations explicitly when configuring the build.

See Build Colosseum on Windows for the supported dependency shape, neutral-path configure command, development launch, runtime deployment, and verification boundary. Player 2 remains an opt-in experimental build path; mpv/MpvQt is the default player.

Development verification

The repository also contains Lanista, UI journey fixtures, and the Night Watch / Guardian pipeline used to exercise the assembled app in isolated runs. Night Watch can collect failed journeys and quality signals; the current Guardian policy is document-only, so its automated path may reproduce, triage, diagnose, and write a bug record, but it does not silently merge a repair into master. This is development infrastructure, not part of the installed media UI.

First run

1. Launch Colosseum — it opens fullscreen on Home, with each world one click away.
2. Pick a world and browse its Discover shelves, or search within the world.
3. On a series, book, or title page: Read / Watch streams or opens immediately; download actions pull media into Downloads for offline reading and listening.
4. Add folders to Vault when you want Colosseum to index media already on your machine without moving the originals.
5. Everything you start appears in Continue on Home and in each world; open surfaces live on the taskbar as switchable sessions.
6. Extensions, wallpapers, preferences, account access, and updates live behind the shell's top-bar/taskbar controls.

Known boundaries

• Home-wide cross-world search is not implemented (per-world search is).
• Tankoban remains volume-only. The old chapter browser/downloader is unrouted, and first launch removes the obsolete chapter tree plus manga progress. Downloaded Tankoban volumes are kept.
• After dismissing the Tankoban volume sources picker, volume cards can remain unresponsive for a few seconds before recovering. This is a known issue in 1.1.3; no released fix has been verified yet.
• Tankoban and Biblio can consume compatible extension catalogues for discovery, but their native acquisition paths are not generic Stremio stream consumers. Theatre is the world with generic torrent/direct-stream playback from compatible add-ons.
• Accounts and cloud sync do not work: no account service is deployed, so sign-in fails in every released build. The desktop surfaces and the service implementation both exist — Profile, Security, Devices, Recovery, and Your Colosseum are built out — but nothing hosts them yet. Separately, and even once a service is running, the Data & privacy policy switches, data export, and the account-deletion flow still lack authoritative service wiring.
• Watch Party uses the hosted relay by default; COLOSSEUM_WATCH_PARTY_URL is only an override. Exact torrents are eligible and can be fetched automatically by joiners; generic direct URLs are deliberately not. Guest rooms work; public signed-in hosting does not, because it needs bearer authority from the account service that is not deployed. Final in-app synced-playback acceptance remains a field-testing boundary.
• The calendar implementation is banked but has no live navigation route.
• Player 2 is integrated but opt-in and Windows / D3D11-oriented; mpv remains the default.
• Vinyl is visible as a coming-soon world, not yet implemented.
• Catalogue databases such as data/comics_catalog.db, data/mal_catalog.db, data/tankoban_catalog.db, and data/imdb_catalog.db are pipeline/deployment artifacts rather than normal Git source. Current source builds prefer local copies and otherwise use the catalogue vault to fetch published databases into AppData; they do not download or rebuild raw source dumps at runtime.
• Casting and live TV / DVR remain less mature than core playback.

Design principles

• Each medium gets the surface it needs. Manga, books, and film are not the same problem.
• Share transport, not policy. One acquisition layer; each medium keeps its own rules.
• Separate browsing from acquisition, and collection from progress.
• Treat local files as media, not anonymous paths. Vault can identify, decorate, and reopen local works without taking ownership of the originals.
• Match conservatively rather than opening the wrong work.
• Show real fallbacks and empty states instead of invented content.
• Credit influence instead of styling it away. The Vault's Browse card language — poster grid, near-square corners, a centered one-line title with a dim fact line beneath, circular corner indicators, dim-and-reveal hover, 16:9 episode cards — is adapted from Jellyfin's library view as rendered.

Repository layout

Colosseum/
├── qml/         Shell, worlds, media surfaces, components, providers
├── native/      C++ launcher and native services
├── resources/   Reader assets and vendored runtime resources
├── data/        Pipeline-deployed, gitignored SQLite catalogs
├── scripts/     Catalogue bake, installer, verification, maintenance
├── assets/      Icons, extension logos, fonts, wallpaper assets
├── docs/        Architecture, research, mockups, specifications, release notes
├── tests/       Contract, harness, source, journey, and smoke tests
├── archive/     Retired implementations and preserved universe pages
├── dev.bat      Standard Windows QML live-reload loop
└── dist/        Built installers

Contributing and project help

Colosseum is developed in the open and steered by real use. Focused bug reports and pull requests are welcome; larger changes should start with an issue so the direction can be agreed before implementation.

• Contributing guide
• Bug reports and feature requests
• Support and troubleshooting
• Security policy
• Code of Conduct

License

MIT © 2026 Hemanth Ganneni

Note

Colosseum is a client and does not host media. External APIs, sites, extensions, indexers, datasets, and scrapers are independent services and can change or disappear. Use sources and content only where you have the right to access them.