Media Servers

Jellyfin57.5k★

Jellyfin organizes your movies, TV shows, music, and books into a Netflix-like interface you host yourself. It's your own personal Netflix: it organizes your media, fetches artwork and metadata, transcodes video for different devices, and serves it through apps on every platform. GPL v2, C#. This is the fully free fork of Emby, which went closed-source in 2018. Jellyfin has no paid tier, no premium features, no "unlock" purchases. Apps exist for Android, iOS, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, web, and more. Fully free. Everything. No paid tier. No "Jellyfin Premium." The community maintains everything including the apps. Self-hosting is required; there's no cloud option. Install on a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a VM. Docker makes setup easy. Hardware transcoding (converting video formats on the fly) works with Intel QuickSync, NVIDIA NVENC, and VAAPI. Solo: perfect for a personal media library. Family/household: the primary use case. The ops burden depends on your library size; a small collection runs itself, a large one needs storage planning and occasional transcoding troubleshooting. The catch: the mobile apps aren't as polished as Plex's. Transcoding quality and compatibility can be finicky; some client/codec combinations require manual configuration. And you need the media in the first place; Jellyfin doesn't help you acquire content, just serve what you have.

Navidrome23.8k★

Navidrome turns your personal music collection into a streaming service you control. It runs a lightweight server (Go, single binary) that serves your library through a clean web player or any Subsonic-compatible app on iOS and Android. The whole thing is free, GPLv3, no paid tier. Self-hosting is about as easy as it gets. The binary runs on a Raspberry Pi, handles libraries north of 900,000 tracks without breaking a sweat, and does real-time transcoding to save bandwidth on mobile. Docker or bare metal, your call. Resource usage stays low enough that you can forget it's running. Solo users and families get the most out of this. Multi-user support with per-user libraries makes it work for a household. There's no team or enterprise tier because there doesn't need to be. You own the server, you own the music, done. The catch: you need the music files. Navidrome streams what you already have, it doesn't replace a discovery catalog like Spotify. If your library is thin, the experience will be too.

owncast11.6k★

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.

foundation-sunshine7.0k★

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.

fastpotify4.6k★

Fastpotify is a Spotify client written in Rust that starts in well under a second and sits at 100 to 250 MB of RAM, against the 600 MB to over 1 GB the official desktop app routinely uses. There is no browser engine inside it. It plays through librespot, shows up on your network as a Spotify Connect device, and covers the full library: playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, search, artist and album pages, queue management, and playlist editing. MIT licensed, runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. Nothing to run beyond the app itself. It finds librespot, spotifyd and hardware receivers on your network over mDNS and lists them as devices, so you can push playback to a speaker or another machine and keep controlling it. Gapless playback up to 320 kbps with optional volume normalization and an on-disk cache. Free, no tiers, no account of its own. This is the desktop client for anyone on Linux who has given up on the official app, or on an older Mac where the Electron build drags. Anyone happy with the official client is not missing much. For a self-hosted library with no Spotify involved at all, look at Navidrome (navidrome/navidrome). The catch is that the software being free does not make the music free. Playback requires Spotify Premium. Free accounts can browse and search and that is where it stops, so this saves you memory, not the $12.99 per month.

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.

alist-tvbox3.1k★

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.

server3.1k★

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.

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.

NuvioDesktop1.5k★

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.

debrid-media-manager1.4k★

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.