Watching
Cardinal Cinema plays your files as they are. The server sends the file, the browser decodes it, and nothing is converted in between. Playback starts immediately, your server does no work beyond reading from disk, and quality is exactly what the file holds.
The player
Pressing play opens a picture-in-picture window in the bottom-left corner of the screen. It floats above whatever you are browsing, so moving around the app never interrupts it, and there is no watch URL to lose your place in.
- Move it by dragging it anywhere. Let go and it snaps to the nearest corner of the screen.
- Resize it from the corner that faces the middle of the screen. It stays in its corner as it grows, up to a quarter of the screen.
- Go fullscreen with the button in its controls, by double-clicking the picture, or with
F. - Close it with the button in its top corner. Closing a window stops its playback.
Watching more than one thing
Every play opens a new window, so two films can sit side by side, or four can fill the screen. Each new window takes a free corner. Once all four corners are taken, windows share them.
How many windows can be open and how many can play at once are both settings, under Settings → Video Playback. Both start at one:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Max video players | How many windows can be open. Opening one more closes the oldest. |
| Max playing videos | How many of them can play at the same time. Playing one more pauses whichever started playing longest ago. |
| Freeform picture-in-picture | Windows stay wherever they are dropped instead of snapping to a corner. |
What plays
Anything your browser can decode plays. mp4, m4v, mov and webm play everywhere; mkv plays in Chromium-based browsers only. H.264 video and AAC audio are universal; HEVC, AC-3 and DTS depend heavily on the browser and the machine.
The full matrix is in Movie & TV indexing.
When a file's video or audio cannot be decoded by the browser you are using, Cinema says so plainly — this file needs transcoding, which is coming in the next release — instead of showing a black screen. Two things are worth trying in the meantime:
- Open the same movie in a different browser. Safari plays HEVC and AC-3 that Chromium refuses; Chromium plays
mkvthat Safari and Firefox refuse. - Play a different version of the same movie, if you keep more than one.
Conversion on the server, which removes the problem entirely, arrives in the next release.
Versions, editions and parts
One movie can have several files behind it, and Cinema keeps them together rather than splitting them into separate entries.
| Kind | Example | How it plays |
|---|---|---|
| Versions | … (2017) [4K HDR].mkv and … (2017) [1080p].mkv | Both listed on the movie; you pick which to play |
| Editions | … (2017) - Director's Cut.mkv | Listed as its own choice on the same movie |
| Parts | … (2001) - Part 1.mkv, … - Part 2.mkv | One choice; the parts play back to back without asking |
The naming that produces each of these is covered in Movie & TV indexing.
Subtitles
Subtitle files that sit next to the video are read from your folders every time you open a movie or episode, and converted to a browser-native format as they are served. A subtitle file you drop in tonight is available the moment you reload the page — indexing is not involved.
The subtitle menu shows each file's language and its flags, so a forced track and a hearing-impaired track for the same language are told apart. See Subtitles for the naming.
Subtitles stored inside an mkv or mp4 are a different matter. They are listed in the menu, because the file's tracks are read during indexing and the languages are known, but they cannot be selected yet: pulling a track out of the container needs the same conversion work as transcoding, and arrives with it in the next release. Image-based subtitles (PGS and VOBSUB, as used on Blu-ray and DVD rips) need to be drawn onto the picture itself, and arrive at the same time.
Keyboard shortcuts
These act on the window you last clicked or started:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Space or K | Play / pause |
J | Back 10 seconds |
L | Forward 10 seconds |
Left arrow | Back 5 seconds |
Right arrow | Forward 5 seconds |
M | Mute / unmute |
F | Fullscreen |
C | Toggle captions |
Esc | Leave fullscreen |
These belong to the player. The app-wide playback shortcuts — play/pause, next, previous, mute and volume — also control the same window. They are covered, along with how to change them, in Keyboard Shortcuts.
Resume
Your position is reported to your Media Server as you watch, so a movie you stopped halfway through resumes where you left it — including on a different device, in a different browser, on the other side of the house. The position belongs to your account on the server, not to the browser you were using.
Anything unfinished is waiting for you on Watch Now, under Continue Watching. See Watch history for exactly when a title appears there, and when it is counted as watched.
Watching away from home
Cinema works over Remote Access with no setup of its own. Playback over the relay is capped per request at about 10 GB, which is smaller than a large movie file; the player simply asks for the next stretch and keeps going, so files of any size play through. It does mean an evening of films uses relay bandwidth, and a direct connection does not.
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