Description
This is the Google Group home for Byways Media Hub.
Here's a description of the app:
Byways Media Hub plays video, photos, and music straight off your SD card or USB drive. No internet connection required, no account, no cloud storage.
Point the app at a folder using Android's built-in file picker and it builds a library from what's already on your device: TV shows and movies sorted by folder, photo albums, and music organized by artist or album. Playback picks up right where you left off, episode by episode.
Three tabs, one library:
• Videos — folder-based library with resume-watching and episode tracking
• Photos — browse images with a fullscreen slideshow mode
• Audio — play music straight from local folders
Everything lives in a private database on your device. Nothing you watch, view, or listen to gets uploaded anywhere.
Optional cover art
If you're on Wi-Fi, Byways Media Hub can fetch cover art for what you import, using three free lookup services: TMDB and Fanart.tv for TV shows and movies, Apple's iTunes Search API for music albums. Only the folder or album name gets sent as a search query, never file contents, never anything tied to you personally, and it only happens over Wi-Fi, never mobile data. Turn Wi-Fi off and the app works the same, just without the artwork.
No ads. No subscriptions. No accounts. No tracking.
Byways Media Hub doesn't run ads, doesn't sell your data (there isn't any to sell), and doesn't need a login to work. It's built by Rekluz Labs, a small studio that makes offline-first Android apps without the usual tradeoffs.
Built for real storage — and real trips
Byways Media Hub is made for people with drives full of media that never touched a streaming service: a folder of downloaded shows, a photo dump from an old phone, an SD card of ripped albums. Plug it in, point the app at it, and it's there. Byways Media Hub travels well — on a flight, a cruise, or anywhere overland where the Wi-Fi is spotty, it's still playing whatever you loaded onto your device before you left.