Phantom Media

Free, open-source media tools, led by Still: an ad-free alternative Twitch player for live streams, subscriber-only VODs, and live rewind through broadcast archives. Watch without a Twitch account, with no app analytics or tracking cookies.

Still documentation and local setup.

Still: watch on your terms

• Ad-free Twitch playback: live streams and past broadcasts without Twitch ad breaks.
• Subscriber-only VODs: play sub-only broadcasts without signing in when their source playlists are available.
• Live rewind and seeking: open the current broadcast’s archive to catch up while the channel is still live, when an archive is available.
• More playback controls: quality selection, playback speed, broadcaster captions, keyboard shortcuts, picture-in-picture, and VOD downloads.
• Live chat and VOD chat replay: read chat alongside playback, with replay synchronized to pauses and seeks.
• Account-free viewing: no Twitch login, app analytics, or tracking cookies. History, resume positions, and preferences stay in your browser.

Local testing at 720p measured 1.85–1.94 seconds of live delay, with no rebuffering after startup. Playback results.

Media availability depends on Twitch. Deleted or unavailable source media cannot be recovered. Third-party media, chat, and hosting services still process network requests; the app does not promise network anonymity or zero infrastructure logs.

Phantom Media also includes Phantom Downloader, for downloading videos and playlists, and Phantom Stream, a film and series frontend. The three apps share a design system and toolchain in this monorepo.

Work in progress. The apps and their architecture are under active development; features and platform compatibility may change.

Workspace

Package	What it is
apps/downloader	Phantom Downloader pulls a video or a whole playlist down as a file.
apps/stream	Phantom Stream finds a film or series and plays it.
apps/still	Still: ad-free Twitch player, subscriber-only VODs, and live rewind.
packages/theme	Design tokens, base layer and CSS primitives. Tailwind v4.
packages/ui	React components the apps share, consumed as source.
packages/config	tsconfig, ESLint and PostCSS bases.

Phantom tools

A Phantom tool does one job. That is the whole idea: a small, focused tool that does its single thing well, rather than a growing suite that does everything badly. This monorepo holds the tools that happen to share a design system and a toolchain, and it is not otherwise a boundary. When a need appears that none of the current tools serve, the answer is a new tool built alongside these ones rather than another feature bolted onto an existing one.

The shared interest running through all of it is a free, open internet. That means circumvention, bypasses, and keeping pace with platforms as they change underneath you. There are walls that will not be climbed, and they do not get climbed.

Scope and roadmap

Downloader grows outward. Today it resolves and downloads YouTube; the goal is inexpensive YouTube downloading plus Spotify, Twitch, and the other video and audio platforms worth supporting. Twitch is already covered by Still, so the work there is making the downloader the front door to it.

Still broadens into a fuller client than the channel and VOD player it is today.

Stream narrows, on purpose. It is a stream frontend, and that is what it stays: the sources are on their way out of this repository and the app is heading toward being agnostic about where playback comes from. That is the destination rather than the current state. The sources are still here, and the app is still coupled to them.

Getting set up

corepack enable
pnpm install

Node 22 or newer, pnpm 12.6.0. Everything else comes from the lockfile.

Working on it

pnpm dev                              # all apps
pnpm --filter @phantom/stream dev     # just one
pnpm --filter @phantom/still dev     # Still only
pnpm check                            # typecheck, lint, test and build everything
pnpm deployment:check                 # Worker/OpenNext dry runs, no deployment
pnpm container:build:downloader       # real Downloader image build

Turborepo fans tasks out across the workspace and caches what has not changed, so a second pnpm check on an untouched tree finishes in seconds.

Dev servers listen on 0.0.0.0. From another device, open http://<development-machine-LAN-or-Tailscale-IP>:<port> using the port printed by Next.js. The dev origin allowlist includes the machine's interface addresses, its hostname, *.local names, and Tailscale **.ts.net names. Hot reload supports both ws: and wss: in development.

For custom DNS names, short Tailscale names that differ from the machine hostname, or a container/VM whose interfaces do not include the host's address, add the browser-facing hostnames or IP addresses explicitly:

PHANTOM_DEV_ORIGINS=devbox,192.168.1.50,dev.example.test pnpm dev

You can also set PHANTOM_DEV_ORIGINS in an app's .env.local. Entries are comma-separated hostnames (no scheme or port); Next.js hostname wildcard patterns are supported. Restart the dev servers after changing names or network interfaces. These origin allowances apply to Next.js development resources; production CSP and API CORS policies keep their existing behavior.

There is no dev server in the verification path on purpose: pnpm check is what tells you the tree is sound.

Versioning

Every app and package carries its own SemVer version, starting at 0.1.0, and moves only through a changeset. A pull request that touches a workspace needs one:

pnpm changeset                        # record which workspaces change, and how
pnpm release:version                  # apply pending changesets: bump + changelog

Committing that bump to main is the release. Tags are created for you, and only once the commit has passed CI and built on Cloudflare.

The rules for choosing a bump are in docs/VERSIONING.md.

How the sharing works

All apps are Next.js 16 with React 19 and Tailwind v4, and pin the same majors through the pnpm catalog in pnpm-workspace.yaml. A split there would break @phantom/ui, which ships as TypeScript source and is compiled by whichever app imports it. The apps’ next.config.ts files therefore include transpilePackages: ["@phantom/ui"].

Styling starts with the shared base. Each app's globals.css keeps the shared Tailwind source scan and then loads the media surface appropriate to that app:

@import "tailwindcss";
@import "@phantom/theme";
@import "@phantom/theme/media.css";
@source "../../../packages/ui/src";

Stream and Still add their additional cinema/player layers. The @source line is not optional: Tailwind only ships classes it can find, and the shared components live outside the app it is scanning.

Anything genuinely local stays local. The downloader keeps its locale-switcher transition and its download/format workflows. All three apps now use the shared media header, search field, artwork, and media surface. Stream and Still also import @phantom/theme/player.css for shared video chrome; their playback engines remain app-specific.

The theme also ships a dark media surface. @phantom/theme/media.css re-points the palette variables to ink for all three apps. Stream adds @phantom/theme/cinema.css for its catalog and watch pages. Downloader keeps its download-specific layouts and queue state, while all apps use the shared media shell. Stream and Still use @phantom/theme/player.css and player controls from @phantom/ui. Still keeps its playback engine and chat behavior.

Still, formerly Phantom Twitch, was imported from the separate twitchsubonlybypass checkout. Its channel, VOD, and playlist routes remain local to that app; the source checkout is unchanged.

Design

Sora anchors the interface across all three apps. Still uses its local outlined SVG wordmark and resting-face symbol, with the shared Phantom identity in its “Part of Phantom Media” footer signature. Downloader and Stream retain the shared Phantom wordmark; JetBrains Mono serves that treatment and technical readouts. All three use the shared dark media palette, search field, buttons, artwork, media header, and media tiles from @phantom/ui. Stream and Still also use the shared player controls; app-specific catalog, channel, playback, and download workflows stay with their apps.

The media layout and size reference records the shared content frame, spacing, type, and element variants used by Still.

Deployment

Production deploys on release, not on push. Every push to main is built by Cloudflare as a preview. A new version is tagged only on a commit that passed CI and that preview build; its deploy/<app> branch then moves to that commit and Cloudflare Builds deploys it to production. See docs/VERSIONING.md.

All three apps have Cloudflare deployment configuration. Downloader uses a Container; Stream and Still run as Workers through OpenNext. Deploy only the apps intended for the current environment.

Downloader runs in a Cloudflare Container. It shells out to yt-dlp and FFmpeg, so it needs a real filesystem and real binaries. The Worker in apps/downloader/cloudflare/worker.ts caches immutable assets at the edge, rejects junk routes there, and routes build-coupled HTML and dynamic download APIs to the container.

pnpm deploy:downloader

The image builds from the workspace root because the app compiles against packages that live outside its own folder. The image_build_context setting is in apps/downloader/wrangler.jsonc.

Stream and Still run on Workers through OpenNext. Build each app, then deploy its Worker with wrangler --domain and NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL set to its canonical HTTPS URL. Keep production hostnames in deployment settings rather than this repository.

NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://your-host.example pnpm --filter @phantom/stream exec opennextjs-cloudflare build
pnpm --filter @phantom/stream exec wrangler deploy --domain your-host.example --var NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL:https://your-host.example

For local work, copy an app's .env.example to .env.local in that same app directory. For production, configure values through the target host. In particular, the Downloader's Cloudflare deployment requires EWYOUTUBE_PROXY_URLS to be provisioned with Wrangler as a Worker secret; do not commit proxy credentials in an environment file.

The Downloader dry run uses --containers-rollout=none: it validates the Worker and container binding without requiring Docker or publishing an image. The separate container command validates the real image. Neither command authenticates, provisions resources, uploads secrets, or proves that the production account and custom domains are correctly configured. Those remain explicit operator checks before the first deployment from this repository.

Extraction provenance

This repository retains the media products' Git history, including Downloader's pre-monorepo root history. The current shared config, theme, and ui packages are owned here as independent copies so the two repositories can evolve without a permanent cross-repository build dependency. See docs/EXTRACTION.md for the exact source checkpoint, history method, dependency boundary, and deletion gate.

Legal

This repository is licensed under the MIT License. Third-party software, assets, and services retain their own licenses and terms.

The apps are independent projects, affiliated with none of the services they talk to, and none hosts any media. Use them only for media you own, control, or are legally authorized to access.