I built The Movie Hub — a self-hosted Windows media automation app in C++23

TheMovieHub — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:19:06 +0000

I’ve been building The Movie Hub, a self-hosted Windows media automation app designed to bring movie discovery, downloading, streaming, playback, and library management into one local-first system.

The idea started simple:

Search for a movie, verify it, download it, play it, and manage the whole library from a browser or phone.

Now it has grown into a full local automation stack.

What The Movie Hub does

The Movie Hub can:

Search and discover movies
Verify movie metadata through TMDB
Fetch torrent results through Jackett
Send downloads to a custom torrent engine
Stream and play movies
Manage a local movie library
Display movies in a browser-based Netflix-style layout
Let users control playback from a phone
Run automation in the background

The goal is to make a portable, self-hosted movie automation system that runs locally on your own Windows machine.

Built with C++23

The Movie Hub is mainly built in C++23.

Some of the stack includes:

C++23
libcurl
cpp-httplib
nlohmann/json
TMDB API
Jackett
qBittorrent / custom torrent handling
MPV / media playback
Local WebUI with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

I wanted the app to stay lightweight, fast, and portable instead of becoming a heavy server platform.

Why I built it

Most media automation setups require users to connect multiple separate tools and configure everything manually.

The Movie Hub is my attempt to make that workflow simpler:

Discover → verify → download → stream → play → manage

All from one local app.

The long-term goal is to make it easy for someone to run their own private media automation system without needing to understand every tool underneath.

Current status

The project is live and working.

I’m still improving:

UI polish
automation reliability
download status updates
dashboard monitoring
startup handling
signed updates
Smart Torrent integration
Smart Player integration
customer release packaging

I’m also working on keeping the app portable so users can download, run, and control everything locally.

GitHub

The project is here:

https://github.com/TheMovieHub/The-Movie-Hub

Feedback from C++, self-hosted, automation, and media-server developers would be really valuable.

I’m especially interested in thoughts on:

C++ architecture
local-first app design
WebUI performance
torrent engine integration
self-hosted software packaging
Windows portable app distribution

Closing

The Movie Hub is still growing, but the core idea is already working:

A local-first, all-in-one media automation system for Windows.

I’m building it to be fast, simple, portable, and powerful enough to replace a messy stack of separate tools.****

DEV Community: TheMovieHub

I built The Movie Hub — a self-hosted Windows media automation app in C++23