A tool to share videos with clients, friends, and collaborators. The owner records or has a video, publishes it from their laptop, and gets a URL. Anyone with that URL opens a nice player and watches. That is the whole product.
- A single, polished video player page.
- Reached by an unguessable URL:
https://<host>/<slug>. - No accounts, no login. The link is the access.
- Optionally protected by a password for sensitive client work.
- The player itself is where we spend our effort. It should feel good.
Player features wanted:
- Custom styled controls (branded, not raw browser UI).
- Chapters / timeline markers with jump-to.
- Poster / title screen before play.
- Keyboard shortcuts (space, arrows, f, m).
- Used only by the owner, only on their laptop.
- No auth on purpose. It is local-first; it never needs to be reachable by anyone else.
- Workflow: upload an mp4, transcode it to HLS, set title / description / chapters / poster / optional password, then publish.
- Publishing pushes the video files to cloud storage and the metadata to the cloud database that the viewer reads.
- Solo indie developer. Ship fast, validate, iterate. 80/20 over perfection.
- No premature scale engineering. This is for a small number of videos and viewers.
- The viewer must be cheap to run and reliable. The admin can be as scrappy as needed since only the owner touches it.
- Effort budget goes to the player, not to infrastructure ceremony.
- Slug is the secret. It is long and random (16+ chars), so links are effectively unguessable.
- Optional per-video password gates both the page and the media, since all requests flow through the Worker on a single domain.
- Links could later support expiry; not built yet (YAGNI).
- User accounts, teams, sharing permissions beyond slug + password.
- Comments, analytics dashboards, view tracking.
- Adaptive multi-CDN, signed media URLs, DRM.
- Mobile admin app (admin is laptop-only).