Using Quvito
User guide
Everything you can do once you're set up — on your PC, and on your Android phone & TV. New here? Start with the setup guide first.
Getting around
The top tabs are your map. Which ones appear depends on what your sources provide:
- Home — your discovery hub: Continue Watching plus Popular and Trending rows.
- Live — channels and the TV guide.
- Movies and Series — your on-demand library.
- My Library — favorites, your lists, and Downloads.
- Search — find anything across every loaded source.
- Settings — providers, integrations, profiles and preferences (hidden on kids profiles).
Your library appears instantly from a local snapshot and refreshes quietly in the background — playback never waits on metadata.
On your phone & TV
Quvito's Android phone, tablet and Android TV / Google TV / Fire TV apps show the same library as your PC — the same movies, series, live channels, music, favorites and Continue Watching, kept in sync. Pair each device once (Settings → Share & Devices on the PC — see the setup guide) and it's ready.
- Same everywhere — start a movie on the TV, finish it on your phone; favorites and history follow you.
- Second-screen remote — a paired phone can drive the PC or TV: fling a title or channel to the big screen, then play, pause and seek from your hand.
- On its own — no PC on? The phone or TV app can run Quvito by itself and play your sources directly. That library stays on that device: other screens cannot connect to it.
- Built for the remote — on Android TV / Fire TV the whole interface is D-pad friendly, with a proper ten-foot layout.
Watching
Click any poster to open its page, then press Play. While playing:
- Resume — Quvito remembers where you stopped and offers to continue; titles you're partway through show up in Continue Watching.
- Subtitles & audio — pick subtitle and audio tracks from the player. With an OpenSubtitles key, extra languages are fetched on demand.
- Subtitle auto-sync — if subtitles drift out of sync, Quvito can offer to re-sync them to the audio; you approve before anything changes.
Playback is designed to start the instant you press Play. If artwork or details are still loading, the video won't wait for them.
Home & search
Home collects Continue Watching alongside Popular and Trending movies and series, so there's always something to jump into. Prefer to start elsewhere? You can turn Home off in Settings → Personalization → Home and open straight into Live or your Library.
Search looks across every connected source at once. Results are grouped by type so you can tell a live channel from a movie from an episode.
Favorites & Continue Watching
Tap the heart on any title to add it to Favorites, found under My Library. Continue Watching tracks anything you've started but not finished and keeps your position up to date as you watch, so you can pick up on the exact frame.
Live TV & the guide
The Live tab lists your channels with a scrolling TV guide (EPG) showing what's on now and next. Click a channel to start watching; click a programme in the guide to see its details.
- Recent channels and favorites keep the ones you watch most within reach.
- Refresh — if a live stream stalls, the Refresh button restarts it cleanly from a fresh point.
- Guide fixups — if a channel's guide is wrong, you can pin it to a better community guide, the provider's own guide, or none.
Recording & DVR
Quvito can record live TV to your recordings folder.
- Record a programme — in the guide, pick a show and press Record, or use the Record button while watching.
- Schedule & recurring — set a timer, or a series rule that auto-records every airing of a show and skips duplicate episodes.
- Commercial skip — finished recordings are scanned for ad breaks; the player then offers Skip, or jumps them automatically.
- Catch-up — where your provider supports it, you can play programmes that already aired.
Recording happens on the machine holding your library, so Quvito needs to be running there when a recording is due — it lives in the tray, so closing the window is fine. Scheduled jobs are saved to disk and re-armed if the app restarts, and a recording in progress keeps the machine from sleeping.
On Windows a sleeping PC is not a problem: Quvito registers a wake timer shortly before each scheduled recording, so the machine wakes itself in time. On other platforms, leave it awake.
Sports multiview
Watch several channels at once. Arrange a grid, then save it as a multiview preset to bring back your favorite set of games in one click. Recorded matches support spoiler protection — the duration and timeline stay hidden until you choose to reveal them, so a long recording doesn't give away that the game went to overtime.
Series & movies
Series pages list seasons and episodes with watched ticks and a Play button that jumps to your next unwatched episode. Extras that make binges smoother:
- Skip intro — teach a show where its intro ends once, and Quvito offers to skip it on every episode after.
- Seek-preview thumbnails — scrub recordings and downloads with a thumbnail preview so you land exactly where you want.
- Auto continue — the next episode starts after a short countdown when the current one ends. Turn it on or off under Settings → Personalization → Playback.
Downloads
Use the Download button on a movie or episode to save it for offline / smoother playback. Downloads land in the folder you set under Settings → Download location and appear under My Library → Downloads, where series are grouped by show. Settings → Downloads & Recordings lists everything saved by the profile you are using. Every download button opens a version picker so you can choose quality or source.
Music
Point Quvito at a music folder and it becomes a proper, audiophile-friendly player. Browse by artist, album or playlist, mark the tracks you like, and open the full-screen Now Playing with lyrics, an up-next queue you can reorder or trim, and a live visualizer.
Under Settings → Personalization → Playback you get real control over how it sounds:
- Gapless playback — remove the short silence between tracks; ideal for live albums, classical and DJ mixes.
- Crossfade — fade the ending track into the next, adjustable from 0 to 12 seconds.
- Volume normalization — level loudness across tracks using each track's ReplayGain tag (or measured once on first play), so a quiet song isn't followed by a blaring one.
- Graphic equalizer — shape the sound to your taste.
- Output device — send audio to whichever device you choose, and control volume and mute right in the player.
- Exclusive mode — under Settings → This device → Playback on this PC, since it belongs to the machine rather than your profile. Bit-perfect output that takes the audio device for itself, bypassing the OS mixer and any resampling (WASAPI exclusive on Windows, CoreAudio hog mode on a Mac). While it's on, the EQ, gapless, crossfade and normalization step aside, since those need the shared audio path.
Radio & podcasts
Quvito can add two free, public sources of its own — no account, no subscription, and nothing to paste in. Both are off until you switch them on under Settings → Providers, so if you are looking for them and they are not there, that is why.
- Radio — thousands of internet radio stations. Once enabled, Radio appears as a provider and its stations live under My Library → Radio. Like a station and it lands in your favorites.
- Podcasts — browse Apple’s public podcast directory by category and top charts. Shows appear under My Library → Podcasts, and episodes play in the music player.
Each one can be shared with the whole household or kept to the profile that added it — the Who can use… choice beside each switch.
Trakt & Last.fm
Both connect under Settings → Profiles, and both are per profile — each person in the house links their own account, and nobody scrobbles onto anyone else's history.
- Trakt — connect your Trakt.tv account and everything you finish is sent to your Trakt history automatically, keeping your watched list in sync with the other apps you use.
- Last.fm — connect your Last.fm account to scrobble the music you play. It also unlocks the Similar tab in Now Playing, for finding your way from a track you like to the next one.
Connecting is a click and an approval on the service's own page — Quvito ships with its own Last.fm app registration, so there are no API keys to create. If you would rather use your own, there's an Advanced box under the same setting.
Profiles
Switch profiles from the profile menu — the app reloads your library, favorites and Continue Watching in place, without a full restart. PIN-locked profiles ask for the PIN first. Each device remembers which profile it uses and which one to start on.
Your devices
Everything about other screens lives under Settings → Share & Devices on the machine holding your library.
- Share with your devices — the master switch. Until it is on, nothing else on your network can see your library.
- Pair a device — scan the QR from a phone, or type the code on a TV. Requests wait for your approval rather than connecting straight away.
- Paired devices — everything you have accepted, listed, so you can revoke one whenever you like.
- Keep available when Quvito is closed — by default sharing stops when you quit. Switch this on and Quvito keeps serving quietly in the background, so a phone or TV can still reach your library after you close the window.
- Cast and follow — start something on one screen and pick it up on another; a paired phone can drive whatever is playing elsewhere.
- Quvito Everywhere — the desktop app is free forever; the phone and TV apps are free during the alpha. The one-time unlock that covers them later is entered under Settings → Server, and one purchase covers every device paired to your server — see the unlock page.
Out-of-home access is switched off in alpha builds — the app is LAN-only for now, so your library is never exposed to the internet while things are still settling. It turns on by itself in the first stable release.
Personalize
- Accent color — under Settings → Personalization → Appearance, pick an accent and Quvito derives a matching theme. It is saved with your profile, so your colour follows you to every screen that profile opens on.
- Home tab — turn the discovery Home tab on or off. Also per profile, so one person can open straight into Live while another keeps Home.
- Home genres — choose which genres appear as filters on this profile’s Home page, so the shelves match what that person actually watches.
- Subtitle style — size, colour, background and edge, set once and used for every title.
- Subtitles & playback — default subtitle languages, subtitle styling and playback behaviour all sit under Settings → Personalization, so they travel with your profile. Machine-specific things — backups, display, dependencies — are under Settings → This device.
Backups & upkeep
Under Settings → This device and Settings → About & Legal:
- Backup & Restore — save every profile, provider, favorite, watch history and playlist into a single file you can keep somewhere safe or carry to another computer. You can protect it with a password. Restoring replaces what is currently in Quvito, so it is a move, not a merge.
- Automatic backups — have Quvito write a fresh backup to a folder once a day and keep the most recent few. Worth switching on before you spend an evening setting providers up.
- Automatic refresh — reload your channels, movies and series in the background so new additions turn up on their own. Quvito picks a quiet moment — while you are watching, overnight, or once you have stepped away — so you never catch it happening.
- Updates — see the version you are on and check for a newer one.
- Diagnostics — app events and errors from your server and every connected device, kept for troubleshooting. They stay on your own server and never leave your network unless you choose to send them to support.
- Reset Quvito — back to a fresh install: profiles, providers, keys, history, favorites and playlists all go. Files you have downloaded or recorded are left alone. There is no undo, so export a backup first.
Getting help
Something not working? Under Settings → About & Legal you can view logs to see what happened, and the Terms and Privacy details live there too. This is an early alpha, so please send anything rough our way — your reports directly shape what gets fixed next.