Remote Files
Your own devices, browsable and playable, without a server.
Walk another machine's folders, download a file, or scrub a 44 GB film — with no port opened anywhere. A device exports named folders, an authorized peer lists and range-reads inside them, and Copy Link produces a short-lived URL that VLC, IINA or Infuse can open and seek. The machine holding the file never runs a web server; the HTTP gateway runs on your own loopback.
- 9Working today
- 1Being built
- 5Planned
The mechanism, not the metaphor.
- 01 Name a share
The owning device pins an export. Nothing else on that disk is reachable, by construction.
- 02 Grant the peer
A typed files-read action class is granted per peer. A quick-paired device reads nothing.
- 03 Browse and stat
Typed intents cross the fabric. The remote machine never speaks HTTP at all.
- 04 Mint a lease
Copy Link issues a URL scoped to one entry, for a bounded time.
- 05 Serve locally
Your own loopback gateway turns the player's Range header into one offset read.
- 06 Revoke or expire
Unlink kills the URL; a replaced file fails its version token rather than splicing.
15 capabilities, and where each one stands.
Reaching into a device
- Working today Browse a peer's folders
List nested directories of a named export, with paging.
- Working today Share discovery
Ask a device which shares it exports. No local path ever leaks.
- Working today Stat without reading
Metadata answers a HEAD and opens no read at all.
- Working today Download
The same read call without a Range header, from the console or the CLI.
- Working today WebDAV mount, read-only
Mount a peer's share in Finder with stock tooling. PUT and LOCK are refused.
Playing media that lives elsewhere
- Working today Seekable lease URLs
A player jumps to 01:32:10 and streams only that slice of the file.
- Working today Copy Link, revocable
One entry, a bounded lifetime, shown once, listable, and killable.
- Working today Revision preconditions
A file replaced mid-playback fails the read instead of splicing two versions.
- Being built Read-ahead over a WAN
Smooth playback across the internet, not only across a LAN.
Writing back
- Planned Staged write and delete
Put files back on the remote device under the same grant.
- Planned Rename, mkdir, watch
Full folder management, and notification when something changes.
- Planned Folder Sync
Persistent one-way, two-way or multi-device convergence.
The wider personal cloud
- Working today safe-fs export pinning
Pinned roots. No path traversal, no dotfiles, and never the whole disk.
- Planned Cloud source aggregation
S3, Drive or Dropbox adapted as an optional backend, never a dependency.
- Planned Phone photo backup
New photos land on your own computer or NAS in the background.
Numbers from tests that ran.
- 5.68 %
Of a 1.81 GB film actually read when IINA opened it at the 19-minute mark and played. Seeking does not mean downloading.
- 0.08 %
Of a 6 GiB file read by curl asking for two explicit ranges — 5 MiB out of 6.4 GB.
- 206
What plain curl gets back, across two real daemons, byte-for-byte equal to the source. curl knows nothing about the fabric.
- Refused
What a lease request above the TTL ceiling gets. Not clamped down to the maximum — refused, with nothing issued.
And what it is not
- Not remote shell execution. It is a typed file service with fixed verbs; only list, stat, read and exports are routable at all.
- Not a port forward and not a public URL. The remote opens no listener, and the gateway is your own daemon on loopback.
- Not a Dropbox or Nextcloud reimplementation, and not a filesystem mount driver.
- Not a photo album product. No library, no cross-account sharing, no semantic search, no conflict-free two-way sync — yet.
Start with the devices you already own.
Make them work
as one.
The open core is ready to explore. Build your personal device fabric with Xross.
Open-source core · Direct by design · Your devices, your fabric