mythos

Setup wizard, alphabet jump bar, mini-bar player, and a desktop client

A 3-step onboarding wizard, a Plex-style alphabet jump bar on library browse, a persistent mini-bar player that survives navigation, the start of a native Tauri desktop client, and a TMDb identifier that finally gets Blade Runner 2049 right.

· status

Editor’s note (2026-05-19): the desktop client described below — a Tauri 2 shell with libmpv-via-IPC — was retired two days after this post landed. The production client is now Qt 6 + cxx-qt at apps/mythos-qt/, with libmpv rendered into a QQuickFramebufferObject and IPC over QWebChannel. See Retiring Tauri for Qt 6, and the library-admin polish round for the rewrite and the reasons.

Another batch of work landed in main overnight — none of it opens a new phase, all of it takes the rough edges off how Mythos feels. The themes: first-run, library browse, the player, and (newest) a native desktop shell.

A 3-step setup wizard

First-run used to be a single form: pick a username, pick a password, optionally drop in a TMDb key, optionally point at a library — submit, hope. It worked, but it asked you to make every decision at once before you’d seen anything load.

/setup is now a three-step wizard:

  1. Admin account. Username + password, argon2id-hashed.
  2. TMDb key (optional). Skip it and scans still index files; add it later from admin settings without a restart (the live TmdbHandle swaps on save).
  3. First library. Point at a directory; the scan starts immediately.

The route re-uses the existing POST /api/auth/register, PUT /api/settings/tmdb, and POST /api/libraries endpoints — the wizard is purely a frontend reshape that advances in-page via local state, so the +layout.svelte “redirect setup → login once an admin exists” rule doesn’t fight us mid-flow.

A Plex-style alphabet jump bar on library browse

Bigger movie libraries hit the same wall every browse view eventually does: scrolling to T takes forever. /library/[id] now renders a full-height vertical alphabet rail down the right edge — click T, the view jumps to the T bucket. Two things worth pointing at:

  • Leading articles are stripped before bucketing. “The Matrix” buckets under M, not T. “An American Werewolf in London” goes under A (American), not the article. This matches how the rest of the UI sorts.
  • Scroll alignment respects the sticky top nav. Buckets are anchored by id="bucket-…" with scroll-mt-20, so clicking a letter doesn’t bury the first row under the floating TopNav.

The rail itself uses a pointer cursor on the letter buttons — small thing, but <button> defaults to the text cursor and the rail read as “label, not control” until that flipped.

The PiP button is now a real mini-bar

The biggest behaviour change in this batch. The player used to be a modal: open it, watch, close, gone. If you opened a movie, then clicked back to browse, you got the equivalent of pause + close.

The player is now hoisted into the root layout (web/src/routes/+layout.svelte) and managed by a singleton playbackSession (web/src/lib/player/session.svelte.ts). Pages don’t mount the player — they call playbackSession.open(...) and a single overlay component decides whether to render as a fullscreen modal or as an 88 px bar pinned to the bottom of the page.

What that means in practice:

  • Playback survives navigation. Hit the PiP button on a playing movie and the player collapses to a mini-bar; the underlying <video> / media-controller / HLS session aren’t torn down — the same instance is just re-styled. Browse anywhere else on the site, the bar stays.
  • Click the small video to expand. playbackSession.expand() restores the modal layout. Esc on the modal minimizes rather than closes — the explicit X is the only true “close” affordance.
  • Modal-only chrome is {#if mode === 'modal'}-gated. Top overlay, scrubber + buttons bars, subs menu, up-next countdown, info strip — all hidden in mini mode. The mini chrome is a .mini-row sibling of <media-controller> driven by the same backendPaused / backendPositionMs mirrors the modal uses, so it works identically in browser and (new) Tauri/mpv modes.

The fullscreen modal got its own polish pass at the same time — Plex-style: backdrop blurred out behind a centered black player frame, scrubber and controls breathing into the chrome bars below the video, info strip (title, episode label, year, runtime) under the controls.

A native desktop client (early)

This one is the biggest shape change of the batch. There’s now a Tauri 2 desktop client living at apps/mythos-desktop/, sharing the exact same SvelteKit codebase as the embedded server SPA. Same routes, same components, same Player.svelte — runtime backend selection in playback.ts checks '__TAURI_INTERNALS__' in window and dispatches to libmpv via IPC instead of <video> + hls.js.

The shape:

  • One UI, two playback backends. Browser builds keep using <video> + media-chrome + hls.js. The Tauri build forwards every play / pause / seek / setVolume / loadUrl to libmpv running in the Rust host process via a Tauri IPC command surface — and mirrors mpv’s position / paused state back into the same Svelte stores the browser backend writes to, so Player.svelte doesn’t branch.
  • Wire contract is mythos_core::playback. PlaybackRequest and PlaybackDecision are the same types the future Jellyfin shim will speak, so the desktop client and the shim are isomorphic from the server’s point of view.
  • libmpv embeds into the Tauri window. The setup hands libmpv the window’s raw handle (via raw-window-handle’s WindowHandle::as_raw) and sets mpv’s wid property. Mpv renders with alpha=yes + background=none, and the SPA reports its <video> bounding rect back to Rust so mpv’s video-margin-ratio-{l,r,t,b} carve out the exact rectangle the SvelteKit chrome wants — the webview shows through everywhere else.
  • mpv’s event loop runs on its own thread, with a separate EventContext::new(mpv.ctx) (the libmpv2 test pattern), because Mpv::event_context_mut wants &mut Mpv and IPC commands need Arc<Mpv>.
  • Dev links system libmpv via pkg-config; release ships libs/<platform>/libmpv.*. See apps/mythos-desktop/README.md in the source tree.

It’s a scaffold — usable, but rough. Two known limits today:

  • The embed surface is the top-level Tauri window. mpv’s child surface overlays the SvelteKit chrome during playback; a child native widget below the webview (so chrome and video coexist natively) is the next milestone.
  • Wayland sessions that report wl_surface handles aren’t supported by the current attach path. There’s a Mpv::enable_standalone_window fallback that flips force-window=yes so video still plays — just in a separate window from the chrome.

The motivation is the same as Phase 6’s Jellyfin shim: meet people where their devices already are. The Tauri client is the first non-browser surface on the same UI codebase.

TMDb year-in-title rescue

A small-but-satisfying fix. Files whose title contains a year were getting misidentified — Blade Runner 2049 (2017)/... was scanning as “Blade Runner 2049 → search 2049” instead of “Blade Runner 2049 → search 2017”. Same story for Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968, anything where a year token is part of the name rather than a release-year tag.

mythos_scan::identify_movie now:

  • Prefers (YYYY)-bracketed years anywhere over bare year tokens — so Blade Runner 2049 (2017) parses as title="Blade Runner 2049", year=2017.
  • Greedy-matches the last year token in the stem when there’s no paren form — so 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968 parses as title="2001 A Space Odyssey", year=1968 rather than the other way round.

enrich_pass also retries the TMDb search without the year hint when the first attempt misses — which rescues year typos too (Independence Day 1966 finds the 1996 film instead of returning nothing).

What’s next

Still Phase 3: music, photos, books. Phase 6 (the Jellyfin-API compatibility shim) waits for that to land. The desktop client gets its child-native-widget embed surface and proper Wayland support as follow-ups in parallel.

Source on GitLab .