aniani

A desktop GUI for searching, watching, and downloading anime -- a discover dashboard (Continue Watching / Trending / Popular cover-art rows, click one to jump to search) → episode list → play, with resume-from-timestamp, AniList tracker sync, and Discord Rich Presence. Rust, egui/eframe, real slate-and-amber theme (not a copy of the old Python version's Catppuccin Mocha look).

This is a full rewrite, not a port. The old Python/PyQt6 version is still on the main branch if you want it; this branch replaces it going forward.

Install

Grab the latest build from Releases:

• Windows -- download aniani.exe, drop it wherever, run it.
• Linux -- download aniani-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, then:

  tar -xzf aniani-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
  chmod +x aniani
  ./aniani
  

Either way you'll also want the runtime tools in Setup on PATH (mpv/vlc, ffmpeg, curl_chrome136, qbittorrent-nox) -- aniani itself is a single binary, no installer needed. Building from source instead:

git clone --branch rust-remake https://github.com/arshnah/aniani.git
cd aniani
cargo build --release

Why the rewrite

The Python version's dashboard has to decode 25+ anime cover jpegs just to render the Discover tab, and that decode cost adds up fast in an interpreted language. Going systems-mode: Rust for this, Go/Zig staying in rotation for whatever else needs them. Confirmed the actual perf gap before writing that as a claim: the same egui code, unoptimized debug build vs. release build, showed multi-second slow-frame stalls on startup in debug and zero in release -- compiled-and-optimized is the part python can never do for cpu-bound work like image decode.

Sources

• anidb.app (default) -- scraped directly, needs curl_chrome136 (curl-impersonate) since anidb rejects plain curl's TLS fingerprint with a 403. Checked for on PATH first, then next to the aniani binary itself -- so dropping curl_chrome136/curl_chrome136.exe in the same folder as aniani/aniani.exe works with no PATH setup. There's no official prebuilt Windows binary for this; the closest thing is yuzd/curl-impersonate-win, which needs building from source via MSYS2 (a build.bat script, no ready-made .exe). On Linux/macOS the upstream lwthiker/curl-impersonate releases page has real prebuilt binaries. Without it, anidb search just fails silently in the UI right now (logged to debug.log as anidb_search(...) failed: ...) -- yuma and nyaa don't need it and work regardless.
• aniwatchtv.to (yuma) -- search and episode listing work, scraped directly. Stream resolution is not implemented: the site's embed needs a per-request client key plus a CryptoJS-AES decrypt of the sources payload, both of which shift whenever the site's own JS changes. Reimplementing a moving-target crypto scheme from scratch wasn't worth faking; genuinely unimplemented, not a stub pretending to work. Tracked in TODO.txt.
• nyaa.si (torrent) -- RSS search, no scraping, no anti-bot. Streams via sequential download through qbittorrent-nox once enough has buffered (first/last-piece priority), or downloads fully for offline viewing.

Players

• mpv -- driven over its JSON IPC socket (Unix domain socket on Linux/macOS, named pipe on Windows).
• VLC -- driven over its HTTP control interface, fresh random port and password every launch so a stale leftover VLC process can never get silently polled instead of the current one.

Switchable from the top bar at any time.

Downloads / offline

ffmpeg remuxes HLS to mp4 (same approach ani-cli itself uses for -d/--download). Total duration is fetched up front with ffprobe and live progress comes off ffmpeg -progress pipe:1, so the bar reflects real percent/ETA instead of guessing, and downloads are cancellable. A Downloads tab shows in-progress jobs with a percent + ETA readout, a failed/cancelled section with retry, and a browsable library of what's already saved, playable with no source or network needed at all -- including video files dropped into a show's folder by some other source, not just ones aniani itself downloaded.

AniList tracker sync

Two-way. Optional push, off by default: when enabled, finishing an episode pushes your progress to your AniList list. One-time setup: create a free client at anilist.co/settings/developer with redirect URL https://anilist.co/api/v2/oauth/pin, paste the client id in, open the authorize page, paste the token back. No local webserver or redirect handler needed. Pull happens automatically once connected: your CURRENT/REPEATING list shows up as its own row on the Discover tab, click one to jump to search. No in-app editing of AniList entries beyond what playing an episode already pushes.

Discord Rich Presence

Shows "Browsing aniani" on launch and while picking something, then the full watching state (cover art, elapsed time, a "View on AniList" button) during playback. Same shared Discord application id the Python version used, works with zero setup.

Continue watching

Built from local watch history, covers fetched from Jikan first (MAL's own image CDN) with an AniList GraphQL fallback if Jikan's having one of its documented outages. Clicking a continue-watching card checks if that episode is already downloaded and plays it straight from disk if so, instead of re-resolving a live stream.

Closing the window

Closing means quit, full stop: playback is stopped (mpv/vlc killed, no orphans), prefs are saved, then the process exits for real -- no hide-in-background trick, no tray icon to restore from. Launching aniani/aniani.exe again while it's already running doesn't open a second window though -- an fd-lock-based single-instance lock plus a signal file (checked in platform.rs/main.rs) makes the new launch just focus the existing instance and exit.

VLC window-close handling (Linux/Hyprland)

VLC's -I dummy interface means its process lifecycle isn't tied to its own video window -- closing that window directly (e.g. Super+Q) leaves the process running as an orphan otherwise. On Hyprland, the worker thread polls hyprctl clients -j to notice when a window it saw has gone missing while the process is still alive, and cleans it up the same as a normal stop. Also reattaches to an already-running VLC instance after a relaunch, instead of always starting from a blank slate, by reading the port/pid/password a previous run wrote to shared temp files. Windows/macOS get neither -- hyprctl doesn't exist there, so this safely does nothing rather than breaking anything.

Other extras

Update checker (pings this repo's GitHub releases API on launch, shows a banner if newer), a disk-backed cover image cache (cover_cache.json in the state dir, so covers aren't re-fetched over the network on every launch), keyboard shortcuts while playing (space to pause, left/right arrows to seek ±10s, / or ctrl/cmd+F to jump to search), an anime detail popup before committing to a source search (synopsis, genres, score, episode count), batch episode selection + download, a full History tab (all watch history, not just the last 20), and genre/sort filtering on Discover. A panic hook writes crashes to debug.log instead of vanishing with the hidden console window.

Setup

Needs curl_chrome136 (curl-impersonate, for anidb.app), mpv and/or vlc, qbittorrent-nox (for the nyaa.si source), and ffmpeg (for downloads) on PATH.

cargo build --release

Platform support

Built and daily-driven on Linux (Arch/Hyprland). Windows now compiles and runs on real hardware, confirmed on two separate machines, not just via this repo's GitHub Actions Windows runner. qbittorrent-nox has no Windows build, falls back to the regular qBittorrent GUI (same WebUI API, just shows a window). Still only tested on a couple of machines -- not broad hardware/driver coverage.

macOS: untested, not a current target. The dirs-crate-based paths and the Unix-socket mpv IPC path should carry over as-is; VLC/mpv binary discovery would need /Applications fallbacks added.

What's left

See TODO.txt -- yuma stream resolution (not planned), a real system tray icon with click-to-restore (currently: hide-on-close + relaunch-to-restore, not a tray icon), macOS support (completely untouched), and broader Windows hardware testing.