Media Servers

Jellyfin55.6k★

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.

Navidrome22.8k★

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.

owncast11.4k★

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.

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.

server2.9k★

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.