Media Servers

Jellyfin59.2k★

Jellyfin organizes your movies, TV shows, music and books into a Netflix-style library you host yourself. It fetches artwork and metadata, transcodes video for whatever device is watching, and serves it to apps on Android, iOS, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, smart TVs and the web. It's the fully free fork of Emby, under GPL v2, with no premium tier and no unlock purchases. Self-hosting is the only option. Docker makes setup easy, but hardware matters: Jellyfin's own guide says most single-board computers, Raspberry Pi included, are too slow for a good experience, and points low-power builds at recent Intel N-series mini PCs or an Apple Silicon Mac mini. Hardware transcoding works with Intel Quick Sync, NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, VA-API on Linux, Apple VideoToolbox and Rockchip. Solo and household use is the sweet spot, and it's free at every size. A small library runs itself; a big one needs storage planning and occasional transcoding troubleshooting. Plex is the polished commercial comparison. The catch: big upgrades bite. Jellyfin 12.0 (September 2026) changed the database so you can't roll back without a full restore, dropped the old Emby-era API routes some third-party clients relied on, and asked you to remove repository plugins before migrating. Back up first. The mobile apps are also less polished than Plex's.

Navidrome24.6k★

Navidrome turns the music files you already own into your own Spotify-style streaming service. It's a small Go server with a web player, and it speaks the Subsonic API, so a long list of third-party apps on iOS, Android, desktop, CarPlay and Android Auto can play from it. An experimental Jellyfin API, new in September, adds clients like Finamp. Free, GPLv3, no paid tier. Setup is easy. One binary or Docker image, read-only access to your music folder, and it runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It watches the library for changes, transcodes on the fly for mobile, and gives each user their own playlists and play counts, with separate libraries per user if you want them. Anonymous usage stats are on by default (opt-out). Solo and families: free. Don't want to run a server? Official partners like PikaPods host it from $3.3/month and send a share back to the project. The catch: September brought nearly twenty security advisories, including SQL injection, unthrottled password guessing over the Subsonic API, and shares exposing other users' music. All fixed by 0.64.1, so nothing older should face the internet. Put it behind a reverse proxy, and remember it only streams what you own.

owncast11.7k★

Owncast is your own Twitch. Self-hosted, MIT licensed, single-user live video plus chat. Point OBS or Streamlabs at your server (it speaks RTMP, same protocol the big platforms use), and you stream. The viewer page is built in. The chat is built in. Donations, moderation, custom branding, all yours. Ops burden is moderate. You need a server with decent bandwidth (live video chews through it), ffmpeg installed, and a Go runtime if you build from source. Most people deploy via Docker or a one-line install script. Bandwidth is the variable cost no one mentions: a 1080p stream at a modest bitrate runs hundreds of GB per month if you have viewers. A $20 VPS works for small audiences. Anything bigger and you want a CDN in front of it. Solo creators who want to own their audience: this is it. Small teams running internal demos or training streams, same. Anyone trying to build a Twitch-scale platform: you'll outgrow it on the infra side before the features, and you'll still need to solve discovery yourself. Single-user only. One account streams, viewers don't sign up. For a multi-streamer platform, PeerTube or a custom build is the next step.

Spotifast10.2k★

Spotifast, renamed from Fastpotify, is a native Rust Spotify app for Linux, macOS and Windows. It opens in well under a second and typically uses 100 to 250 MB of RAM, where Spotify's own desktop app often uses 600 MB to over 1 GB. MIT licensed and free. Install via Homebrew, the AUR, Flatpak or AppImage and sign in on Spotify's site. It covers playlists, podcasts, search, lyrics and radio, acts as a Spotify Connect device, and controls Google Cast and Sonos speakers. Extras: a Winamp-style mini player and MilkDrop visuals. The project charges nothing. The cost is Spotify Premium at $12.99 per month for an individual US plan, because free accounts can browse and search but can't play anything. Solo: worth it if you already pay Spotify and hate the official app. Teams: not applicable. The catch: it's unofficial and runs on borrowed access. By default it uses a public Spotify app ID shared with spotify-player and ncspot, reads private Spotify endpoints for several features, and Spotify's developer policy bans products that replicate a core Spotify experience without permission. Spotify can break it anytime. Update to 0.13.3: it fixed a medium-severity advisory, including access tokens written to trace logs.

foundation-sunshine7.9k★

Foundation Sunshine turns a Windows gaming PC into a streaming host. Install it, point a Moonlight client at it (phone, tablet, TV, Steam Deck, an old laptop), and you are playing your own game library remotely at low latency. This is a fork of LizardByte's Sunshine that pushes harder on picture quality: HDR10 and HLG encoded in parallel, per-frame GPU brightness analysis feeding HDR10+ and HDR Vivid metadata, 7.1.4 surround, remote microphone passthrough, and a built-in virtual display so you can stream at the client's resolution without touching your real monitor. GPL-3.0, free, no account. The host is Windows only and that is not a soft requirement. You need a GPU with a modern hardware encoder (NVENC, AMF, or Quick Sync), and the virtual display feature installs a driver, so budget a reboot and a Windows security prompt. Streaming from outside your own network means port forwarding or putting a mesh VPN like Tailscale in front of it. Setup is an evening, not a weekend, but it is fiddlier than upstream Sunshine because there are more knobs to get wrong. Solo and household use is the whole point. There is no paid tier and no cloud. Against Parsec Warp at $9.99/mo or GeForce Now, you are trading a monthly bill and someone else's hardware for your own GPU and your own network. If you already own a gaming PC that sits idle while you are on the couch, the math is not close. The catch is documentation. The main README, the docs site, and the support channels are Chinese-first, and the English translations lag the feature set. Hit an obscure HDR or virtual-display bug and you will be reading machine-translated docs to solve it. Upstream LizardByte/Sunshine is the calmer choice if you can live without the HDR pipeline.

ampache3.8k★

Ampache turns a folder of music and video files into your own private streaming service. Point it at your library and you get web playback, user accounts for family and friends, and an API that a long list of mobile apps can talk to. It has been doing this since before streaming was an industry, and every feature is free under AGPL. It's a classic PHP application: PHP 8.2 or newer, MySQL or MariaDB, and a web server, with Node required for the frontend build in recent versions. If you have ever hosted WordPress, nothing here will scare you. Metadata comes from your file tags, so a messy library means a messy Ampache. For music-only streaming, Navidrome is the more modern pick: lighter, faster to set up, nicer interface. Jellyfin handles video better. Ampache's edge is covering both in one app with two decades of API compatibility behind it. It's a personal server, so there's no team pricing math to do. The catch: the age shows. The interface feels dated next to the newer servers, and you'll spend your first weekend on metadata cleanup instead of listening.

server3.3k★

Music Assistant pulls your streaming subscriptions and your local files into one library, then plays it on whatever speakers you already own. It is the bridge between where your music lives (a streaming service, a NAS full of FLAC files) and where you want it playing (Chromecast, Sonos, AirPlay, and similar targets). Free and Apache 2.0 licensed, running as an always-on service. It expects a machine that stays on: a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, or an Intel NUC. Two install paths, and both bundle every system dependency the server needs. The Home Assistant add-on is the recommended route, and a Docker container is the other. Home Assistant itself is not required. The server runs standalone, it is just built to sit beside Home Assistant so your automations can control playback. Free, with no tier to buy and nothing gated. This is for anyone whose music is scattered across services and hardware and who wants a single queue driving every speaker in the house. The Home Assistant crowd is the obvious audience, but you do not have to be in it. The catch is that it inherits every streaming provider's restrictions. Services change APIs, break integrations, and some do not permit third-party playback at all, so support varies by provider and can regress without warning through no fault of the project. Confirm your specific service works before you rebuild your whole listening setup around it.

alist-tvbox3.2k★

AList-TvBox sits between AList and TvBox and turns cloud drives into a TV channel list. AList mounts a dozen cloud storage accounts behind one interface. TvBox is an Android app for set-top boxes that plays whatever a subscription URL points at. This bridges them, aggregating AList, Emby, Jellyfin, Bilibili, YouTube, and live streams into one TvBox config with search across all of it and a web UI to manage it. Deployment is a single Docker command on port 4567. Default credentials are admin and admin, so change them before the container touches anything routable. It is Java, so the image is heavier than a Go equivalent, but there is no database to provision. The storage backends it targets are Aliyun, Baidu, Quark, 115, and PikPak, which tells you the audience: the Chinese cloud drive ecosystem first. Free, with no paid tier and no hosted version to buy. The catch is bigger than the software. The repository ships no license file, which means you have no grant to use, modify, or redistribute it. Absent a license, all rights stay reserved by default. Documentation is Chinese-first, and the ecosystem this plugs into is largely used to stream media nobody paid for. What you point it at is on you.

NuvioDesktop2.0k★

NuvioDesktop is the front end of a self-hosted media setup, not the server behind it. It browses metadata, tracks watch progress, manages collections, handles downloads, and plays streams that come from extensions you install or sources you point it at yourself. Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform under the hood, so Windows, macOS, and Linux run the same codebase. GPL-3.0, free, no account. Installing it is a download, not a deployment. Grab the MSI, DMG, or DEB from Releases and you are done, which is the opposite of the Jellyfin or Plex story where you stand up a server, point it at a library, and tune transcoding. Nothing to index here, because the app is the front end and the sources do the work. Building from source is a single Gradle command if you would rather compile it yourself. Here is the part the maintainers put in bold at the top of their own README: this is alpha, testers only, expect breaking changes with every update, not suitable for daily use. Take them at their word. Settings, stored data, and compatibility can change without notice. For something you can hand to your household today, jellyfin/jellyfin is the mature answer and it is also completely free. The catch is what NuvioDesktop deliberately does not ship. It hosts nothing and indexes nothing, so the experience is entirely a function of which extensions you install, and the project explicitly disclaims affiliation with any of them. That puts both the quality question and the legal question on you. Thin clients are portable by design; they are also only as good as whatever is feeding them.

slimserver1.8k★

Lyrion Music Server, formerly Logitech Media Server and SlimServer, has been streaming local and internet music to Squeezebox and compatible players for the better part of two decades. Logitech walked away from the ecosystem years ago; the community picked it up and kept it not just alive but genuinely maintained, with an enormous commit history to show for it. It runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi or in Docker, handles local libraries and streaming sources, and drives multi-room audio setups that most commercial systems charge real money for. Written in Perl, which dates it, but it's stable and battle-tested. For anyone already invested in Squeezebox hardware, or running software players like squeezelite, this is the heart of the setup and it costs nothing. Solo listeners and whole households get the same free, capable server. The catch is the ecosystem itself. The original hardware is discontinued, so you're leaning on secondhand players or software clients, and the Perl codebase and audiophile-niche focus mean this is a labor of love, not a mainstream product. If you're in the Squeezebox world, it's essential. If you're not, this isn't your entry point.

debrid-media-manager1.5k★

Debrid Media Manager is a library manager for people who use debrid services. A debrid service takes a torrent, downloads it on their own infrastructure, and hands back a plain HTTPS link, which turns torrenting into ordinary downloading. This searches for content, sends it to Real-Debrid, AllDebrid, or TorBox, tracks what is in your library, syncs with Trakt, and hands playback to Stremio. Self-hosting needs a MySQL database and a set of environment variables, plus optional TMDB, OMDB, MDBList, and Trakt keys for metadata. Docker deployment is supported. There is also a free hosted instance at debridmediamanager.com if you would rather not run anything. The software is AGPL-3.0 and free. The service underneath is not. A debrid subscription runs a few dollars a month and nothing here functions without one, so budget for the provider rather than the tool. The catch is that license, and it matters more here than usual. AGPL-3.0 means modifying this and offering it to other people over a network obligates you to hand them your source. Fine for a private setup. A real constraint if you were planning to run a tweaked copy for a group of friends.