OfflineU

Self-hosted course viewer for a local video/audio/text training library. Runs as a single Flask app in Docker, tracks watch progress and notes per lesson, and gives the whole library a dashboard-style home page instead of a bare file browser.

This is a personal deployment, not a public project — this doc is internal reference for running/maintaining it, not a pitch.

Screenshot predates the current theming/icon work — kept for a rough idea of layout, not pixel-accurate.

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Deployment

Deployed via docker-compose.yml, built directly from the Dockerfile in this repo (pull_policy: build, not a registry pull):

services:
  offlineu:
    build: .
    pull_policy: build
    container_name: offlineu
    network_mode: host
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=10
      - TZ=America/New_York
      - FLASK_ENV=production
    volumes:
      - /volume1/files/training:/app/courses   # course library
      - /volume2/docker/offlineu/data:/app/data # settings/progress/notes
    restart: unless-stopped

Auto-deploy: the Gitea repo has a webhook to Dockhand — a push to main triggers a full image rebuild from the Dockerfile (confirmed, not just a container restart), so Dockerfile changes (e.g. adding ffmpeg) take effect on the very next push without any manual step.

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Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python offlineu_core.py --library-path /path/to/courses --debug

Opens on http://127.0.0.1:5000. ffprobe (from ffmpeg) needs to be on PATH for video-duration lookups to work locally; without it those just silently stay blank instead of erroring.

CLI options

Option	Description
--host	Bind host (default 0.0.0.0)
--port	Bind port (default 5000)
--debug	Enable Flask debug mode
--create-templates	Regenerate default templates if missing
--library-path	Course library root (overrides COURSES_LIBRARY_PATH)
course_path (positional)	Load a specific course directly at startup

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
COURSES_LIBRARY_PATH	/app/courses	Course library root
OFFLINEU_DATA_DIR	/app/data	Where settings/progress/notes data lives
AUTO_LOAD_COURSE	—	Course path to load automatically on start

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Features

Library browsing

• Lazy-loading folder browser (grid or list view) with search, including an opt-in transcript search across subtitle files
• Course cards show media file count, total video/audio runtime, and completion % at a glance
• Cover art: uses a manually-placed cover/folder/thumbnail/thumb/ poster image if a course has one, otherwise auto-generates one via ffmpeg from a frame of the course's first video
• Hide courses/folders from the browser without touching anything on disk; bulk-select to hide or queue several at once
• Bulk rename across course/folder names (find & replace)

Dashboard

• Library-wide stats (courses, lessons completed, time watched, time remaining, day streak) and a 90-day activity heatmap
• Next Up queue (manually curated, reorderable)
• Pick Back Up (courses with progress that have gone stale)
• Recently Added / Recently Viewed
• Surprise Me — dice icon in the header, random pick weighted toward incomplete courses

Playback & progress

• Video/audio player with resize, playback-speed presets, and resume-from- last-position
• Auto-tracks watch progress and completion per lesson
• Video/audio durations read via ffprobe and cached persistently per course (.offlineu_duration_cache.json), so total runtime and per-lesson length show up before you've ever pressed play — not just after; the same cache backs the library-wide "time remaining" stat
• Settings → "Precompute Lengths & Cover Art" walks the whole library in the background to populate durations and thumbnails up front, with live progress

Notes

• Timestamped notes per lesson, capturable via a keyboard shortcut without leaving the player
• Notes Hub: every note across the whole library, searchable, in one list
• Per-course study guide export (markdown, organized by section)

Personalization (Settings)

• 54 built-in themes (grouped in the dropdown: Base, Editor Themes, and 5 categories of website-inspired schemes sourced from Figma's "53 Unique Website Color Schemes" - 42 of the 53 kept, after cutting a couple of neon-bright ones and several that ended up near-duplicates of another scheme once mapped into actual UI colors), or a fully custom accent color, corner radius, and card style
• Font, text size, page width, and spacing density
• Default library path override + manual "Refresh Library" (bypasses the 5-minute filesystem-scan cache)

Backup & integrations

• One-click backup export and restore: settings, hidden-path choices, the Next Up queue, recent-view history, Outline config, and every course's progress/notes as a zip (not the course files themselves). Restore overwrites current data and needs a matching course folder to already exist for each course's progress to land - it's a "put my data back" action, not a merge
• Optional Outline integration — push a lesson's notes to an Outline document/collection

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Data files

Everything under OFFLINEU_DATA_DIR (app-wide, not tied to a course):

File	Contents
settings.json	Theme, layout, library path, etc.
hidden_paths.json	Courses/folders curated out of the browser
next_up.json	The Next Up queue, in order
recent_views.json	Cross-course "Recently Viewed" history
outline_config.json	Outline API token/collection mapping

Per-course, written inside the course's own folder on the library volume:

File	Contents
.offlineu_progress.json	Per-lesson completed/progress/duration/notes
.offlineu_duration_cache.json	ffprobe duration cache, keyed by (path, size, mtime)
.offlineu_thumbnail.jpg	Auto-generated cover art (only if no manual cover exists)

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Folder structure example

MyCourse/
├── Section 1/
│   ├── 01 - Intro.mp4
│   ├── 02 - Setup Guide.pdf
│   └── 03 - Quiz.html
├── Section 2/
│   ├── 04 - Advanced Tips.mp4
│   └── resources/
│       └── extras.md
├── .offlineu_progress.json        ← created automatically
├── .offlineu_duration_cache.json  ← created automatically
└── .offlineu_thumbnail.jpg        ← created automatically, only if no manual cover exists

No metadata files needed — course/section/lesson names come straight from folder and file names.

Supported file types

Type	Extensions
Video	.mp4 .mkv .avi .mov .webm .m4v .flv .wmv
Audio	.mp3 .wav .m4a .aac .ogg .flac
Documents	.txt .md .html .htm .pdf .docx .doc .rtf
Subtitles	.srt .vtt .ass .sub .sbv
Quizzes	Any doc file whose name contains quiz, exam, test, assessment, exercise, assignment, or homework

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Tools

tools/generate_website_scheme_themes.py is the one-off script that produced the 42 "website scheme" theme entries in THEME_PALETTES (of 53 candidates - 11 were cut after visual review, 2 for a neon-bright accent and 9 for landing too close to another kept scheme once mapped into actual UI colors) - not part of the running app, kept for reference if those palettes ever need regenerating or extending. See its module docstring for how it turned Figma's color-scheme screenshots into actual UI palettes.