Point Emby at your movie, music, and photo libraries and it becomes a private streaming service: metadata and artwork arrive from TMDB and TVDB, everything lands in a polished browsable interface, and media transcodes on the fly whenever a client can't play the original format. The client reach is the selling point: native apps span Android TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Fire TV, Roku, LG and Samsung smart TVs, iOS, Android, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, plus web browsers and desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and DLNA devices are auto-detected for casting and remote control. Multi-user support gives each household member their own account, watch history, favorites, and recommendations, with genuinely capable parental controls: content restrictions, access schedules, time limits, and live monitoring with remote control of kids' sessions. Live TV works with hardware tuners like HDHomeRun or M3U playlists, with free guide data in the US, Canada, and UK. The server and core features are free; an optional Premiere key adds hardware-accelerated transcoding, DVR recording, offline sync, and Cinema Mode intros.

Add a series once, set a quality profile, and everything downstream is automated: Sonarr is the smart PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It monitors RSS feeds from your indexers, detects new episodes the moment they release, sends matching grabs to SABnzbd, NZBGet, qBittorrent, Deluge, or another download client, then renames files with fully configurable templates, sorts them into consistent folder structures, and notifies Plex, Kodi, or Jellyfin to update the library. Quality profiles define what's acceptable (HDTV, WEB-DL, Blu-ray, up to 4K) and an upgrade cutoff - when a better release appears, Sonarr replaces the existing file automatically, stepping from HDTV to WEB-DL to Blu-ray until the cutoff is met. Custom formats add weighted scoring for finer-grained release selection, with community-maintained TRaSH Guides presets as the widely accepted defaults. Failed downloads are handled without intervention: Sonarr retries with another release, and manual search shows every candidate with the reasons any was rejected. It scans existing libraries for missing episodes, fully supports specials, multi-episode files, and daily and anime series types, and a calendar view shows upcoming episodes across every tracked show. Runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Raspberry Pi, and pairs naturally with Prowlarr for centralized indexer management.

Browse trending titles, search anything, request it in two clicks: Jellyseerr gives Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex users a beautiful storefront for the media library. Born as the Overseerr fork that added Jellyfin and Emby support (the projects have since unified as Seerr), it handles the full request lifecycle - users authenticate with their existing media-server accounts, pick individual seasons or movies in a clean interface, and admins approve or decline from a simple queue, including on mobile. Approved requests flow straight to Sonarr and Radarr, which handle acquisition automatically, with support for separate 4K server instances. Regular library scans keep availability accurate, so users see instantly what already exists instead of requesting duplicates. A granular permission system controls who can request what - auto-approval for trusted users, quotas and limits elsewhere - and override rules adjust request routing by user, tag, or other conditions. Watchlist and blocklist functions curate discovery, notifications reach email, Discord, Telegram, Slack, Pushover, and Pushbullet, and both PostgreSQL and SQLite are supported. Localized into many languages, it turns "can you add this movie?" texts into a self-service system that runs itself.

Configure each indexer once, not five times: Prowlarr is the indexer hub of the *arr stack, removing the most tedious duplication in a media automation setup. Instead of configuring the same torrent trackers and Usenet indexers separately in Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Readarr, and Mylar3, you add each one once in Prowlarr and it syncs them to every connected app automatically, complete with category mappings; with Full Sync enabled, adding or removing an indexer propagates everywhere, and a tracker URL change is a one-place fix. Coverage is the deepest available: 500+ torrent trackers with definitions added constantly, 24 native Usenet indexers, generic Newznab and Torznab support for anything else, and custom Cardigann YML definitions with JSON and XML parsing for obscure sources. Built on the same .NET/React base as its siblings, it also earns a place as a search tool in its own right: unified manual search queries every indexer simultaneously at a category level, and you can push multiple releases straight to your download clients without touching Sonarr or Radarr. Health checks and status notifications flag failing indexers, per-indexer statistics track success rates and response times so you can cull unreliable sources, and per-indexer proxy support (SOCKS4/5, HTTP, FlareSolverr) handles trackers behind Cloudflare.

Point OBS or a hardware encoder at Restreamer's built-in RTMP or SRT ingest and it serves your website while rebroadcasting to YouTube Live, Twitch, Facebook, Vimeo, TikTok, LinkedIn, PeerTube, and anything else that accepts RTMP, SRT, or HLS - a complete self-hosted live-streaming server from datarhei. That multistreaming normally costs a monthly Restream.io subscription; here it's one FFmpeg process per destination on your own hardware. The web UI is genuinely approachable, with a wizard that walks beginners through camera setup, while professionals get the full surface: multiple audio/video inputs (USB, RTSP network cameras, virtual devices), codec and processing settings, separate audio muxing, and hardware acceleration via Nvidia CUDA, Intel VAAPI, or Raspberry Pi. Serving your own audience is first-class - a built-in Video.js player embeds in your site, a ready-made publication website streams without any embedding work, HLS chunk sizes are tunable, and automatic Let's Encrypt handles HTTPS. Viewer and bandwidth monitoring with limits keeps traffic costs predictable, and it's GDPR-friendly: no third-party provider, no audience data stored. A fully Swagger-documented REST API drives automation. SRT support keeps latency under a second.

AzuraCast is a solution for running internet radio stations, packaging the entire broadcast stack into a single Docker installation that gets you on air in minutes. Built on PHP with a Vue.js frontend, it uses Liquidsoap as the AutoDJ engine to compile media from playlists, live DJ inputs, and scheduled programming into composited output streams, then broadcasts via Icecast-KH, SHOUTcast 2 DNAS, or Rocket Streaming Audio Server to thousands of concurrent listeners. The media library supports drag-and-drop uploads with automatic metadata extraction, while playlist management handles sequential, random, weighted, and time-scheduled rotations. Live DJ accounts let remote broadcasters connect via BUTT, Mixxx, or any Icecast-compatible software, with automatic crossfade transitions between AutoDJ and live input. The built-in Web DJ tool enables broadcasting directly from the browser without additional software. Each station includes public-facing player pages with now-playing metadata, album art, song history, and embeddable widgets for external websites. The listener request system lets audiences queue songs through the public interface. Multi-station administration hosts unlimited stations on a single server with individual user accounts and granular role-based permissions. Comprehensive analytics track listener counts, geographic distribution, unique listeners, and listening duration with exportable reports. HLS streaming delivers adaptive bitrate broadcasts for mobile compatibility. LADSPA audio plugins enable professional equalization and processing in the stream pipeline. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

The fediverse's answer to YouTube comes from French non-profit Framasoft: PeerTube is a TypeScript/Angular video platform where hundreds of independently operated instances federate over ActivityPub into one network. Videos you publish are discoverable across the whole video fediverse, and viewers can follow your channels from Mastodon or any ActivityPub platform - or plain RSS - without needing an account on your instance. The namesake innovation attacks video hosting's core cost problem: alongside HLS delivery, an optional WebRTC-based P2P layer lets concurrent viewers' browsers share video segments with each other, so a video going viral distributes its own bandwidth demand instead of crushing your server; instance redundancy extends this by letting friendly instances cache each other's videos. Livestreaming is first-class - stream via OBS or any RTMP software, host permanent streams, enable replays, and interact through live chat. Creators get channels, playlists, analytics, built-in video editing (trim, watermark), and an embeddable player for any website. There are no ads, no data mining, and no recommendation algorithm engineered for watch-time - the project's explicit design stance. Admins control federation policy, P2P settings, and theming; a plugin system extends the rest. AGPL-licensed, 300+ contributors, in active development since 2015.

Twitch and YouTube Live, replaced by infrastructure you control: Owncast is a self-hosted live streaming and chat server. Point OBS, Streamlabs, or any RTMP-capable broadcaster at the server's ingest port, and Owncast transcodes the feed with FFmpeg into HLS with multiple quality variants, playing it in a built-in web page with a real-time chat beside it. Chat supports anonymous participation, custom emotes, and moderation tools - message removal, user bans and suspensions - with optional authentication via IndieAuth or a Fediverse account. ActivityPub integration puts the stream on the Fediverse: viewers on Mastodon and compatible services can follow a channel and get notified the moment it goes live. Video delivery can come straight off the server or offload HLS segments to S3-compatible object storage so a modest VPS handles thousands of concurrent viewers while only managing ingest and chat. The backend is a single Go binary with a React frontend - no accounts platform, no database server, no dependency stack - and the player embeds in any website. MIT-licensed, with roughly 9k GitHub stars, zero platform fees, and no algorithm or takedown policy between you and your audience.

Jellystat is a self-hosted media analytics and live session monitoring dashboard for Jellyfin and Emby servers that turns raw streaming activity into detailed user, library, and playback insights. Media server administrators use the live dashboard to watch active streams in real time, inspecting transcoding status, client devices, bitrates, and playback progress as sessions happen. Every completed or partial stream is logged automatically so you can browse chronological watch histories, filter by library or stream type, and analyze peak concurrent streaming hours across the week. Dedicated library and user views break down total watch duration, play counts, and most popular movies, episodes, or music albums per account. If you already use the official Jellyfin Playback Reporting or Statistics plugins, you can import existing historical records directly into your instance without losing past data. Built-in database backup and restore tools, automatic library synchronization tasks, IP geolocation via MaxMind GeoLite, and interactive Swagger API documentation at the /swagger endpoint round out the administrative toolkit. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Plex's own dashboard shows current streams and forgets everything else - which is why every Plex server admin eventually installs Tautulli, the analytics layer. This Python web application (descended from PlexWatch and Headphones) logs complete watch history - what was watched, who watched it, when, where, from which device and IP, and whether it played directly or transcoded - and turns it into clean Highcharts graphs of daily plays, concurrent streams, bandwidth, and platform breakdowns. The home page surfaces top statistics over configurable windows: most-watched content, most active users, stream type ratios. For running a server shared with family and friends, this is operational truth: spot the user forcing 4K transcodes on a phone, see which libraries earn their disk space, and track sync activity across users. The notification engine triggers on server events - playback starts, transcode decision changes, recently added media, server down - through dozens of agents (Discord, Telegram, Slack, email, webhooks) with fully customizable text and conditions, plus arbitrary script execution. Scheduled newsletters email your users a styled digest of recently added content. A comprehensive API exposes every statistic for dashboards like Homarr, and an official mobile app monitors activity on the go. Themed to match Plex/Web. GPL-licensed.