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Clean-Room Engineering & Compliance

Kinema is developed in strict accordance with Clean-Room Software Engineering standards to ensure complete copyright compliance, maintainable architectural independence, and freedom from proprietary lock-in.

Clean-Room Principles​

  1. No Proprietary Code or Binaries:
    • Kinema contains no reverse-compiled, decompiled, or disassembled code from Plex Media Server, Jellyfin, Emby, or any proprietary streaming products.
    • Proprietary assets, logos, and closed client packages are strictly forbidden in the codebase.
  2. Open Standards Alignment:
    • Media parsing adheres exclusively to publicly documented ISO and RFC standards:
      • ISO/IEC 14496-12 (ISO base media file format / MP4 / fMP4)
      • Matroska Specification (MKV/MKA)
      • RFC 8216 (HTTP Live Streaming / HLS)
      • W3C WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks)
  3. Open Metadata APIs:
    • Metadata is retrieved from public community-governed endpoints:
  4. Isolated Scratch Workspace:
    • The research/ directory is isolated from all build pipelines and package outputs. It is permanently ignored in .gitignore and never committed or compiled into release binaries.

Clean-Room vs. Conventional Media Servers​

Licensing Architecture​

  • Kinema Backend & Clients: Released under the permissive MIT License.
  • FFmpeg & Media Binaries:
    • Kinema does not link statically or dynamically against libavcodec, libavformat, or libavutil.
    • Instead, Kinema interacts with ffmpeg and ffprobe exclusively as external child processes via OS pipes (stdin, stdout, stderr).
    • This architecture cleanly adheres to GNU General Public License (GPL) requirements while preserving the permissive MIT license of the core Kinema application.