Arjun would sigh, put down his work laptop, and walk to the Mac Mini. He’d open the folder, scroll past 400 files named FAM_1997_02.mkv , find the right clip, and AirPlay it to the Apple TV. It was clunky. It was analog thinking in a digital world.

That night, fueled by cold coffee and the arrogance of a full-stack developer, Arjun began building .

#EXTINF:-1 tvg-logo="vhs.png" group-title="Family Archives", 1997 Pongal - Well Incident http://192.168.1.105:8080/stream/family_1997_02.mkv #EXTINF:-1 tvg-logo="vhs.png" group-title="Family Archives", 2001 Diwali Fireworks http://192.168.1.105:8080/stream/diwali_2001.mp4 He called it —a two-word name for a two-step process: take the Mac ’s files, turn them into an M3U .

The architecture was insane, held together by duct tape and Swift. He wrote a Python script that scanned the external drive, indexed every .mp4 , .mov , and .mkv file, and extracted metadata using ffprobe . He then built a tiny local web server—a FastAPI app—that transcoded the videos on the fly using ffmpeg . The Mac Mini’s fan screamed like a jet engine.

“Arjun,” his father would say, pointing a shaking finger at the TV. “I want to watch the 1997 Pongal celebration. The one where your cousin fell into the well.”