Install on Raspberry Pi

Appliance image (recommended for fresh installs)

The appliance image is Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) with kino pre-installed and configured to start on boot. Flash it to an SD card with Raspberry Pi Imager; it appears under Other specific-purpose OS → Media servers → kino.

Or download kino-rpi-arm64.img.xz from the latest GitHub release and flash with dd / Etcher / Raspberry Pi Imager.

After first boot:

1. Find the Pi’s IP address (your router’s admin page, or ping raspberrypi.local)
2. Open http://<pi-ip>:8080 in a browser on another device
3. Run through the setup wizard

Default SSH credentials are pi / raspberry — change them immediately via passwd or by adding an userconf.txt to /boot/firmware/ per the Raspberry Pi docs.

Existing Raspberry Pi OS install

If you already run Raspberry Pi OS:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/kinostack-app/kino/releases/latest/download/kino_<version>_arm64.deb -o kino.deb
sudo apt install ./kino.deb

Same systemd service registration as the standard Linux .deb install.

Hardware recommendations

• Pi 5 (4 GB or 8 GB) — smooth for 1080p library, software transcode for 1-2 concurrent streams. The recommended target
• Pi 4 (4 GB or 8 GB) — works, but software transcode is borderline for 1080p; direct-play (no transcode) is fine
• Pi Zero 2 W / Pi 3 — not supported. kino’s dependency footprint (sqlx, librqbit, FFmpeg) doesn’t fit comfortably on these

Storage

Don’t run kino’s library off the SD card. Mount an external SSD or HDD via USB 3 and point kino’s media path at it during the setup wizard. SD-card writes wear out fast under continuous database + download activity.

Hardware transcode

Pi 4 / 5 expose a V4L2 stateless H.264 / HEVC encoder. kino picks this automatically when ffmpeg is built with V4L2 support — the appliance image’s bundled FFmpeg is. Direct-play (matching codec in the playback device) is always preferred over transcode.