Skip to content
MaiPai Home MaiPai Home MaiPai Home

Videos

One place for all your video stuff. Videos brings YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Reddit, and your own creations together in a single app played through your own server - one home feed, one search, one library, one watch history, one set of subscriptions, and one set of controls, instead of five apps each fighting for your attention. No “recommended for you” engineered to keep your kids glued to a screen - just a calmer, more honest way for the people you love to watch. You decide what your family sees, not an algorithm.

The Videos home: billboard, shelves, and your sources

One app, many sources

The Home page interleaves what’s popular and trending across every source you have enabled, along with a “Continue watching” shelf and uploads from creators you follow. Filter by source with one tap, drag the card-size slider next to the settings gear to make cards as big or small as you like (each app remembers its own), or browse categories (Comedy, Sports, and so on) that mix results from everywhere. Each source also has its own space - YouTube with its full channel pages, topic shelves, and a swipeable vertical Shorts feed; TikTok and Vimeo browsing; Reddit’s video communities - and an admin chooses which sources appear.

Two more “sources” round it out:

  • Mine - your own videos: screen recordings, uploads, AI-generated clips, and anything you cut together in the built-in Create studio.
  • Clip a Link - paste a video link from almost any website and MaiPai Home resolves it, plays it, and can save the video (or just its audio) to your library.

One search box covers every source at once: results from YouTube, Reddit, and Vimeo interleave on a single page, with chips to narrow to one source. Paste a video or creator URL instead of a query and you jump straight to it. Videos also show up in the app-wide search (Cmd+K), and you can ask your companion to play something by name.

Watching

Videos play right in the app, streamed through your home server. While one plays you can:

  • Watch privately - route the stream through your server so the platform never sees your browser (YouTube’s “Private stream” mode; TikTok, Vimeo, and Reddit always play without an account).
  • Switch to audio mode - play just the audio to save bandwidth, with the video’s artwork as a backdrop and a live audio-reactive EQ visualizer dancing to the sound.
  • Minimize to the mini player - keep watching in a docked corner player while you browse the rest of the app; it follows you everywhere and can advance through a queue.
  • Pop out Picture-in-Picture - float the video over other apps and windows.
  • Take control of playback - speed from 0.25× to 2×, a quality picker, a volume boost up to 4× for quiet recordings, fullscreen with a zoom-to-fill option, and frame previews when you hover the scrubber.
  • Skip the junk - sponsor reads, intros, and self-promo skip automatically (see “A safer, calmer watch” below).
  • Record live streams from the start - a livestream can be captured as it happens and lands in your Offline library.

Chapters appear on the scrubber, comments and restored like/dislike counts show where the platform has them, cards play a silent preview when you hover them, and an Up next column with autoplay (and a cancellable countdown) keeps a session going. The app quietly remembers where you stopped, so every video resumes right where you left off - on any device.

A safer, calmer watch for your family

Not everyone in a household can tell a pitch from the content. Kids take sponsor reads at face value. Seniors are the favorite target of “giveaway” scams, miracle-product pitches, and look-alike links in descriptions. Videos presents the same content more honestly, so the people you love watch what they came to watch:

  • Nothing to fall for - clickbait titles and thumbnails are replaced with community-voted ones that plainly describe what the video actually is, so nobody gets baited into something it isn’t.
  • Fewer interruptions - community-submitted markers let sponsor reads, subscribe reminders, and self-promo skip automatically, and you choose exactly which categories to skip (or none at all).
  • Cleaner descriptions - AI tidies the description box down to the creator’s actual notes, filtering out the promo codes and giveaway links that scammers love to imitate - and where a video has no useful description, the AI writes an honest one. “View original” brings the raw text back anytime.
  • Smart titles - where a source gives videos no real titles at all (TikTok), local AI writes one from the video’s captions.
  • No profile of your family - everything streams through your own server, so no viewing profile is ever built on your kids or grandparents to target them with.

And local AI helps everyone judge what’s actually worth their time:

  • AI summaries give you the gist of a long video before you commit half an hour to it - or before you hand the tablet over.
  • Transcripts let you read along, search within a video, highlight the current line as it plays, and jump anywhere with a click.

The AI runs on your own hardware - nothing is sent to a cloud service.

You’re in control

On the platforms, an algorithm decides what your family sees, what plays next, and what gets pushed at them. Here, every one of those decisions is yours:

  • You choose the sources. An admin decides which platforms appear in the app at all - and a household without TikTok simply has no TikTok.
  • Your feed is your subscriptions, newest first. No algorithm reordering it, no engagement bait mixed in, no infinite rabbit hole engineered for “just one more.”
  • Every cleanup is a toggle, and every toggle is reversible. Anti-clickbait, AI descriptions, sponsor skipping (category by category), autoplay - all optional, and “View original” always shows you exactly what was changed.
  • Automation answers to you. Per-creator offline rules do only what you set (keep N, remove once watched), and one master switch pauses all of it.
  • You set the limits. Per-source quality ceilings, which household members see adult content (through MaiPai Home’s content profiles), and what’s shared with the family versus personal.
  • Your library is yours. Saves live on your own server as ordinary files - watch them in the app, in Plex, or copy them anywhere. Nothing is locked in, and nothing disappears because a platform changed its mind.

Following creators

Subscribe to YouTube channels, TikTok creators, Vimeo channels, and subreddits, and their newest uploads collect into one subscriptions feed - no algorithm reshuffling it. Every creator gets the same kind of page: banner, avatar, back catalogue in tabs (Videos, Shorts, Live, Playlists where the source has them), and an about section with links. Add a creator by search or by pasting their link.

Bringing an existing YouTube life with you is easy:

  • Import your subscriptions from a Google Takeout CSV in one go.
  • Connect a YouTube account for watching. YouTube sometimes blocks homes that watch without an account. When that happens, Videos shows a Connect banner: sign in once with a YouTube account (a code from Google may be asked for), and your server keeps that sign-in alive so playback just works. Each person can connect their own account, and an admin can set up one shared household account for everyone in Videos > Settings > Connect. The password is stored encrypted on your server and goes only to Google.
  • Link your YouTube subscriptions (optional) with a TV-style code and your subscriptions, Watch Later, and Liked videos sync both ways - changes here push back to your account, and changes there flow in.

Creators can also work for you automatically: besides the offline rules below, a creator or playlist can auto-generate podcast episodes from each new upload, and a single master switch pauses all automation when you want quiet.

Your library

  • Watch Later and Liked work across every source and follow you to every device.
  • History is one private, cross-source record of what you’ve watched - searchable, grouped by day, with per-item removal or a full clear.
  • Playlists hold videos from any source side by side. Play all or shuffle, drag to reorder, download the whole list for offline in one go, share a playlist with the family, and clone someone else’s shared playlist into your own library.

Offline

This is where Videos really earns its keep:

  • Save offline - one click on any video (or just its audio) downloads it to your server, so it plays on a road trip or anywhere with no signal. Household members who save the same video share one copy.
  • Configure a creator for offline - instead of saving videos one by one, set rules per creator: keep the latest N videos offline automatically and, optionally, remove each one once you’ve watched it. New uploads download themselves; old ones roll off. Your own manual saves are never touched by the rules.
  • Offline mode - flip the app-wide Online/Offline toggle and Videos becomes a pure local library: everything saved plays instantly, everything else gracefully steps aside.
  • Enhance - saved videos can be denoised and sharpened in the background into a crisper rendition, per source, so low-quality sources look their best on a big screen.
  • Download to device - pull a one-off copy of the video file (or audio) straight down to your phone or laptop, like any web download.

The Offline page shows everything saved across all sources with live download progress, cancel buttons, and bulk select for cleaning up. An admin can set per-source quality ceilings, and you pick your own quality up to that limit.

Plex

If your household runs Plex, every person can have their own private Plex libraries of their saved videos - one per source (YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Reddit, and your own creations). Saves appear in Plex automatically, sponsor segments can be cut from the exported files, and each library has its own policy: keep everything, keep only the most recent per creator, or delete a video from Plex once it’s been watched - just like Plex’s own downloads. See Plex for setup.

Turn videos into podcasts

Pick a video, a whole creator, or a playlist - from any source - and hand it to your AI hosts, who turn the content into a listenable podcast episode; creators you follow can even feed a show automatically as they upload. Back on the watch page, a “Featured in podcasts” shelf links to episodes made from that video. See Podcasts for how shows work.

Create your own

The Create studio turns Videos into more than a viewer:

  • Generate clips with AI - text-to-video or image-to-video, with style models to pick from and live progress as frames render.
  • Edit in a real timeline - a media bin, preview player, timeline with undo/redo and autosave, and an export dialog that renders a finished video.
  • Everything you make lives under Mine, plays like any other video, joins playlists and Watch Later, and can be shared with the household - shared videos even land in the other person’s Plex library.

Privacy in plain terms

Everything runs through your home server: the video streams, the thumbnails and avatars, the subscription feeds, even the sponsor-skip lookups. The platforms never learn who’s watching, nobody in your house is being profiled, and household content-profile rules apply here like everywhere else in MaiPai Home. It’s the parts of these services you want, without the parts you don’t.

The community data behind sponsor-skipping and anti-clickbait comes from the SponsorBlock and DeArrow projects (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) - thank you to their contributors. MaiPai Home is a self-hosted app for personal, non-commercial use and isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by any video platform.