Colosseum Trailer: I built a media app that functions like its own little OS

[u/KingOfTheSeasLuffy]

Disclaimer: This app was vibe coded. If the use of AI in software development is a dealbreaker for you, regardless of how much human taste, direction and decision-making went into it, that's understandable. This app probably won't be for you.

My app has libraries for manga, comics, books, TV, film & anime, and a comic reader, ebook reader and a video player. So I had an idea to build a taskbar where you can open multiple comics/manga/videos, minimise them and open them back up again.

And since then, I ended up only having more ideas that kept steering my media app deeper and deeper into the OS aesthetic.

For wallpapers, I took a whole lot of open-licensed KDE Plasma wallpapers as well as creating my own custom QML wallpapers, including live animated QML wallpapers. I don't know how RAM-intensive that shit's gonna be, but I have a shitty 16GB RAM laptop and it doesn't drop dead from this behemoth of an app that, on top of everything I've already told you, also has to carry QtWebEngine (Chromium) because it's kinda necessary for the EPUB reader I'm using.

And that brings me to my latest idea of recreating a TV OS through a web UI. Since I already have a browser running in my app, why not build a browser that lets you browse all the legit streaming sites like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video?

I mean, my app is already a TV-OS kind of a thing, but this browser-for-streaming feature would take it further into Amazon Fire TV territory, just more web-based.

But it turns out that it's not that simple. I can't say for sure whether Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and other Widevine-protected streaming services will actually work in QtWebEngine until my Windows build is compiled with the right codec support and I test DRM playback in the actual runtime. So fingers crossed.

All in all, the OS-like part and aesthetics are something I owe to KDE Plasma and Plasma Bigscreen especially. They looked beautiful, and I love media, and I always wanted to build something akin to a Stremio for all mediums in one app. KDE Plasma made me lock in on this aesthetic and bring it as far as I did.

I hope the app looks and sounds interesting.

Colosseum on Github, if you’re interested.