Kahawai is a self-hosted, modular media server that streams your own movies, series, anime and music from wherever the files live. Point it at read-only media roots and a hub will index content, fetch artwork/metadata, and serve a browser-based web app or native Android/Google TV clients. Its architecture separates hub, mediahosts (which serve bytes) and transcoders so storage and compute can live on different machines or run all-in-one in Docker. Playback decisions are made per stream by comparing measured client capabilities to available streams and choosing the cheapest workable plan: direct play, remux, audio-only transcode, or full video transcode (hardware-accelerated when available). Sessions report what actually happened, and nothing in your media folders is rewritten or renamed.
Distinctive choices include first-class anime support (AniDB/AniList, ED2K hashes, fansub naming), faithful subtitle handling (ASS with embedded fonts, PGS/VobSub overlays or OCR), subtitle search from OpenSubtitles, measured loudness normalization (EBU R128), and gapless music playback. Hardware acceleration is probed and dry‑run across VA-API, Quick Sync, NVENC and VideoToolbox and jobs go to machines that can keep up in real time. The hub exposes a public OpenAPI, stores state in SQLite, and ships as a pinned GStreamer-backed container image. It’s pre-release software without DVR/live TV; expect breaking changes and keep backups before upgrading.
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