Colosseum 1.1.5

Release overview

Colosseum 1.1.5

Colosseum 1.1.5 is the cumulative release after 1.1.3, covering 173 commits across the app.

Reading and downloads

Read and Download now behave consistently across Tankoban, comics, and Biblio.

• Read downloads what is needed and opens it when ready.
• Download acquires the content and stops at Ready.

Older requests are also prevented from unexpectedly opening over newer sessions.

Tankoban and comics

Tankoban's volume matching and download pipeline has been substantially reworked, improving source selection, volume identification, archive handling, recovery, and local indexing.

Manga volume progress now appears in Continue, and the One Piece Color shelf has been added.

The comics side also received better catalogue data, download handling, and empty/loading states.

Vault

Vault is now a much more complete local-library surface.

It gains search, sorting, filters, Continue progress, watched/unwatched controls, richer details, better keyboard navigation, improved shows/seasons, and stronger handling of library changes on disk.

Roots can also be rescanned or removed, ignore rules edited, and Downloads entries deleted.

Theatre and playback

Theatre series pages now scroll more naturally, and anime catalogue rows can use live Jikan/Kitsu data for current titles.

Direct HTTP streams now preserve provider headers correctly through downloads and playback handoff.

Player 1 recovery and session handling were hardened, including playback from partially downloaded files.

If the bundled Stremio streaming engine is missing or broken, Colosseum now shows a clear repair/reinstall error instead of getting stuck retrying.

Reader, history, and search

Reader 2 received progress and rapid-switching fixes to prevent one book's state leaking into another.

Continue and history tracking are more reliable across movies, books, manga, and comics, with stronger privacy controls over what history is retained or synchronized.

Search also received cancellation, duplicate-request, provider-failure, and search-history fixes.

Performance

A large amount of background work has been moved away from the main UI thread.

Startup, world switching, Vault, Downloads, manga processing, archive handling, local-media scanning, and catalogue work should compete less with navigation and interaction.

Security and reliability

The project now runs substantially stronger automated checks, including:

• CodeQL
• clang-tidy
• AddressSanitizer
• coverage-guided fuzzing
• dependency scanning

Fuzzing also found and fixed a malicious-CBZ memory exhaustion path.

Windows release

The Windows installer now carries the complete streaming runtime with correct Colosseum branding and version metadata.

The release process also performs automated install, launch, runtime-file, and uninstall checks before shipping.

Contributor documentation, security policy, issue templates, pull-request templates, and Windows build documentation have also been added.

Download

Colosseum-1.1.5-setup.exe

Colosseum v1.1.3

Colosseum 1.1.3

Restores the 1.1.2 release

1.1.2 was pulled shortly after release: a QML type registration was trapped inside a compile
guard, so every release build exited before a window ever appeared. 1.1.3 carries everything
1.1.2 was meant to ship — Vault hardening and a home portal, Watch Party on by default, Tankoban's
Library tab, the Biblio catalogue overhaul, ScrollGlide, and the Living Guide's removal (see the
sections below) — on top of the fixes that made 1.1.2 unusable.

The app opens again

Colosseum.Activity is now registered unconditionally instead of living inside the Player2
compile guard. That guard is what silently dropped the registration from release builds, so the
window never painted and the process exited immediately. This is the fix that makes 1.1.3
launchable at all.

No more console window

colosseum.exe now builds as a GUI-subsystem application. A bare console window flashing behind
the app on every launch was a defect since 0.1; it's gone.

Post-update relaunch works

The NSIS updater relaunches the installed app with flags like --update-result=success after
swapping in a new version. Those flags were being read as a literal QML file path to load,
so the relaunched app failed to load anything and exited instantly — every in-app update looked
like it silently killed the app. The launch path now only treats a bare, non-flag argument as a
QML-path override, so update flags reach the code that actually consumes them instead of tanking
startup.

A much smaller installer

1.1.2's installer shipped at 647MB, most of it build intermediates, test harnesses, and source
trees the installed app never reads. The release packager now strips those from the stage and
refuses to produce an installer over 300MB, so a bloated release build can never ship unnoticed
again.

Vault hardening and a home portal

Vault's data lifecycle is hardened against the ways a library actually changes on disk. Deleting
or replacing a file while Colosseum is running now reconciles the library entry live instead of
leaving a stale record behind, and a same-path replacement is recognized as a genuine swap rather
than ignored. Enrichment records carry a revision guard so a slow background cover fetch can no
longer overwrite newer data with stale results. CBR archives that the reader cannot open now fail
closed with an honest error instead of creating a session with nothing to show. Vault also gets a
home portal — an entry point into the local library from Colosseum's home screen.

Watch Party ships on by default

Watch Party now points at a hosted relay out of the box; creating or joining a room no longer
requires any configuration. Joining a room now fetches that room's exact torrent source
automatically instead of expecting the joiner to already have it — the join sheet states this
plainly before you join.

Tankoban gets a Library tab

Tankoban's world adds a fourth tab, Library, next to Discover — a dedicated home for the volumes
already in your collection, alongside the volume-flow browsing view carried forward from 1.1.1's
catalogue-independence work.

Biblio catalogue overhaul

Biblio's book catalogue is substantially reworked underneath Discover and Explore: new Open
Library providers (most-read, classics, subject browsing), expanded ranking, and a reworked
catalogue store.

Reader and updater polish

The reader and other grid surfaces (Tankoban, Biblio, Theatre) gained ScrollGlide — physics-based
wheel and keyboard scrolling that carries momentum instead of snapping between rows. The Update
page's chronicle view moved into the top bar and renders full-bleed, with a bundled,
signature-verified chronicle for the release you already have installed.

Living Guide removed

The Living Guide — Colosseum's in-app help overlay — is removed, including its taskbar entry
point and every content page. Its work is preserved outside the app rather than shipped.

Fixes

• AZW3 books, previously misclassified as unsupported, now open correctly; DJVU is not supported
  by the reading engine and now fails closed with a clear message instead of creating a broken
  session.
• A repeating layout warning on the Tankoban volume-flow caption (a height binding loop while text
  elides) is fixed.

Known issues

• After dismissing the volume sources picker, Tankoban cards can be unresponsive for a few seconds
  before recovering (fix targeted for 1.1.4).

Colosseum v1.1.2

This release has been withdrawn. The 1.1.2 installer shipped a defect that prevents the app from opening at all (a required QML module was compiled out of release builds). The installer asset has been removed. v1.1.3 with the fix is imminent; until then, v1.1.1 remains the current release.

Colosseum 1.1.1

Colosseum 1.1.1

Tankoban catalogue independence

Series pages now render instantly from a baked 10,000-series catalogue — poster, synopsis,
score, and volume shelf all come from local data, with no live scraping on the browse path.
Volume shelves carry real BookWalker cover art (28,856 covers baked in), and volumes without
art show an honest NO COVER tile rather than a placeholder pretending to be artwork.

Tankoban is volume-only now. Chapter browsing and downloading, and the WeebCentral-driven
catalogue behind them, are removed. On first launch, a one-time migration permanently
deletes previously downloaded chapter files. Downloaded volumes are untouched — this only
clears the chapter tree that no longer has a reader to open it.

Nyaa is now an extension, disabled by default — the same policy as every other acquisition
source. Enable it from Extensions when you want it; the source picker explains this when no
source is enabled yet.

Fixes

• Series pages can no longer be emptied by a source outage.
• The masthead's title and ready state now update atomically, so a late series switch can no
  longer leave a stale title on screen.
• Chapter-progress purge now reaches the post-onboarding store, not just the placeholder store
  present before sign-in/continue-local resolves.

Known notes

• Library rows keyed to the old WeebCentral catalogue no longer surface. The files backing them
  are untouched on disk.
• Auto-update from 1.1.0 requires this release's manifest assets — 1.1.0 shipped without them,
  so 1.1.0 installs will need one more manual install from
  Releases before the Update page can
  take over.

Colosseum 1.1.0

Colosseum 1.1.0

Automatic updates

Colosseum 1.1.0 introduces the Update page and the signed release update path.

• Colosseum checks the stable GitHub Releases channel after launch and then every six hours.
• A quiet Update icon appears in the taskbar when a verified release is available. Opening it
  shows the release chronicle, feature highlights, download progress, and the next action.
• Downloads are explicit, streamed into the update cache, resumable after interruption, and
  checked for the expected size, SHA-256 digest, and Ed25519 signature before installation.
• Restart and update hands off to a silent side-by-side installer. The previous payload remains
  recoverable until the new shell reports a healthy boot; failed swaps roll back automatically.
• After installation, the same page becomes the latest-release chronicle and reports No updates
  available until another stable release is verified.

Remote presentation is inert: release copy is rendered by local QML templates and artwork is
accepted only after its manifest hash is verified. Drafts, prereleases, malformed releases, and
unsigned assets are ignored.

Bootstrap for 1.0 users

Users on Colosseum 1.0 must perform one final manual install from the
GitHub Releases page. Install it over the
existing per-user installation; libraries, downloads, progress, settings, and caches stay outside
the replaceable program payload. Once 1.1.0 is installed, later stable releases arrive through the
Update page.

The manual Releases download remains available as a fallback if an update is postponed or the
network is unavailable.

Colosseum 1.0

Colosseum 1.0

The first full release of Colosseum — a native Windows desktop media environment for manga and
comics, books and audiobooks, movies, shows, and anime. This is what changed since the
0.1 release (tag v0.1).

1.0 ships as a per-user Windows 10/11 installer (Colosseum-1.0-setup.exe, no administrator
required) downloadable from Releases.
Building from source remains documented in the README.

Headline features

• Custom comic reader, built from scratch. Manga chapters, Tankoban volumes, and western
  comic editions now share a single reader that owns vsync-aware strip scrolling, single and
  double page, MangaPlus-style pairing, LTR and RTL direction, fit and zoom, wide-page splitting,
  neighboring-page prefetch, page and chapter grids, spread knowledge, scrub navigation, and
  exact resume. The old shared reader it replaced is retired.
• Tankoban Discover. Tankoban opens to an offline-first, series-only Discover tab ahead of
  Manga and Comics. Local catalogue rows render immediately and refresh from Jikan in the
  background without blocking first paint. See-all doors on existing shelves pin into Discover.
  Theatre ships the same shared Discover shell; Tankoban is the second implementation.
• Offline IMDb catalogue spine for Theatre. A locally built, read-only imdb_catalog.db
  lets Theatre's Movies and Shows present deep quality shelves — Top Rated, Hidden Gems, Cult
  Classics — ranked with real IMDb ratings and vote counts, plus language, era, runtime,
  documentary, animation, limited-series, and long-running lanes. Live rows (Top 10, Currently
  Airing, recent releases) still come from Cinemeta and are filtered with local facts when
  available. If the index is absent, the shelves disappear honestly rather than being fabricated.
• NoTorrent — HTTP streaming that ships by default. A Theatre source extension that plays
  movies and episodes over HTTP and ships enabled by default in the Sources sheet. It is
  removable like any extension. NoTorrent replaces hosted playback (see Removed / changed).
• World-aware extension Sources. The Extensions page gains a real per-world Sources picker:
  Theatre, Tankoban, and Biblio source chains appear on one page, alongside Browse and Installed.
  Tankorent now has its own name and visual identity in that system.
• Wallpaper system. Each world can persist its own wallpaper. The picker ships original
  Colosseum shaders — Noir Flow (animated, monochrome) and Low Poly (slow-morphing
  silver) — plus Aurora Flow (adapted from an LGPL KDE Plasma wallpaper) and native
  mesh-gradient stills (Twilight, Ember, Mint). A curated KDE Plasma still shelf and Wallhaven
  search are available. Animated scenes freeze while immersive media owns the screen.
• Reader2 maturation. The ebook reader gains a redesigned audiobook HUD — a three-tier pill
  (chapter line, premium scrubber, three-zone transport) matching video-HUD craft — a clearer
  Reset, custom-CSS re-sync on Reset and book-switch, and Follow my reading read-along.
• Player 2, integrated and opt-in. A from-scratch D3D11 / FFmpeg video engine with its own
  demux, decode, presentation, seek, buffered-range reporting, playback stats, subtitles, and
  QML controls. It lands on master behind a build gate (COLOSSEUM_PLAYER2_IN_APP) and a boot
  gate (COLOSSEUM_PLAYER2=1); mpv remains the default player.

By world / surface

Tankoban (manga and comics)

• Offline-first Discover tab; Manga lanes use the bundled MAL catalogue plus a non-blocking
  Jikan refresh, Comics lanes use a house ranking.
• Custom comic reader replaces the old shared reader across manga, Tankoban volumes, and comics.
• CBZ-in-place storage with repair-before-prune and a two-boot legacy migration.
• Multi-volume pack demux — shared torrents can fill several requested volumes.
• Explicit Content is a single global preference meaning sexually explicit, not mature-rated;
  Berserk, Game of Thrones, Ecchi, horror, and ordinary adult fiction stay visible.
• Cover provider and decode-size limits stop long-tail Discover art from drowning in request
  bursts or manufacturing missing URLs.

Biblio (ebooks and audiobooks)

• Discover / Explore split with daily-cached catalogue service and persisted Explore-shelf
  customization.
• Healed Apple RSS artwork URLs (the real cause of blank covers) and an honest author byline.
• Audiobook HUD overhaul and Read-along polish inside Reader2.
• Library-tab parity with Theatre and a durable manual Collection across worlds.

Theatre (movies, shows, anime)

• Offline IMDb-backed deep catalogue plus live Cinemeta rows, filtered with local facts.
• NoTorrent ships by default as an HTTP streaming source; the Sources picker is world-aware.
• Absolute anime ordering via a provider-ID join (not title guesses); progressive enhancement
  that retains provider order when the mapping is incomplete.
• Full-season checkout with per-episode fallback; exact-source downloads.
• Warm torrent engine at launch; series-aware Continue that collapses one show into one tile.

Shell and shared

• Collection — a durable manual library across all three worlds, separate from progress and
  local ownership, now reachable as the Library tab.
• Sessions — open books, comic / manga readers, and video surfaces, switchable from the
  taskbar; audiobook playback stays inside the book session.
• Downloads — unified vault across manga, Tankoban volumes, comics, LibGen ebooks, and
  Theatre video, with grouping for manga batches and multi-part comics.
• Window-mode authority, persistent frameless developer mode, shell-wide F11, and protected
  fullscreen transitions.

Foundations

• A repo-built Qt Quick Test runner and the first real native Qt Tests (window-state policy,
  reader-state seams).
• A generated code encyclopedia (subsystem guides) and a verification-tooling map.
• QT_FORCE_STDERR_LOGGING discipline so GUI-subsystem debug output is no longer invisible.

Removed / changed

• Hosted playback (VidKing) is removed. The keyless hosted-player extension that previously
  appeared as the first Sources row has been removed from the app entirely. Its replacement is
  NoTorrent — an HTTP streaming source extension that ships enabled by default and is
  removable like any extension. Continue Watching routes to the Theatre detail page when a source
  is unavailable.
• The legacy BookBridge EPUB bridge is deleted; Reader2 is the sole ebook path.
• The standalone audiobook player (already removed in 0.1's Reader2 work) stays retired.
• Wallpaper retirements: Arena Night, Gilded Rain, and Facet were retired in favor of the
  Colosseum Animated and Colosseum Native shelves.
• The bespoke universe collection remains archived and absent from Home.

Note

Colosseum is a client and does not host media. External APIs, sites, extensions, indexers,
datasets, and scrapers are independent services and can change or disappear. Use sources and
content only where you have the right to access them.

Colosseum 0.1

First packaged Windows build (x64).

Install: download Colosseum-0.1-setup.exe and run it — no administrator needed. It installs per-user, puts Colosseum on your desktop and Start menu, and offers to launch when done. Uninstall any time from Windows' installed-apps list.

What's inside: colosseum.exe (Qt 6.11.1 MSVC, Release) with the full Qt/WebEngine/mpv runtime, plus the app tree at tag v0.1.

Catalog data: the baked comics/MAL catalog databases ship separately via the data vault (scripts/data_vault/pull_data.py). The app runs without them; local catalog lanes light up when they're deployed.

Self-update: installed copies boot as-is. Running from a git clone, the app fast-forward pulls before boot.