Every screen in the house (browser, TV, game console, or phone) can open the same library of videos, music, and photos once Universal Media Server shares it, with transcoding handled automatically for whichever device asks. A file the device can already play passes through untouched. Anything else is converted on the fly to suit the network, the device, and the preferred language. Folders open at once, with no wait for library scans, and disc drives and disc images play directly. In the web interface, every title gets a page with cover art, cast, and genre details from TMDB, Discogs, and MusicBrainz, and filters narrow the library by actor, director, genre, year, or artist. YouTube channels, online radio, podcasts, and RSS feeds appear beside local files on every connected device. Users and groups, with optional avatars and four-digit PINs, decide which shared folders each person sees; content for children stays apart from the library for adults. A list of detected renderers shows every connected device, and the configuration file of each device can be edited to fix browsing, playback, or transcoding on an unsupported TV. Builds exist for Windows, Linux, and macOS, with AppImage and Docker options for servers. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-2.0 licensed.

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.

Meridian puts all of your Emby reverse proxy sites, playback routes, and day to day operations into one clean management panel instead of a pile of hand-written proxy configs. Each Emby site gets its own entry through a path, a dedicated port, or a subdomain, with primary and backup routes that switch automatically when one goes down. Three playback modes let video stream directly to clients while logins, posters, and API calls continue through the proxy, so bandwidth lands where it should. Accounts for each site are stored with passwords and expiry dates, renewal reminders arrive ahead of time, and account details can be imported or exported as JSON and CSV. Traffic trends, per-site quotas, rate limits, and static resource caching keep busy sites under control, while log filtering and connection diagnostics show exactly where a request went wrong. Certificates are handled through Cloudflare wildcard issuance and renewal, or by uploading your own, and encrypted backups protect the whole configuration. Routine administration can even happen from Telegram, checking daily reports, adding or pausing sites, and renewing accounts from chat. The whole panel runs as one small program with a built-in database and works comfortably from a phone. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

One Ether install puts the TMDB catalogue inside your TV apps and streams titles on demand from your own accounts, holding no media files at all. It appears as a normal server inside the Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, Infuse and Stremio apps your household uses, with the whole catalogue browsable as if it were local. Press Play and Ether resolves the best release across your sources, health checks it, and streams only the byte ranges the player asks for, so scrubbing lands at the right keyframe instead of restarting a download. Pull titles from Real-Debrid, TorBox, AllDebrid and Premiumize accounts, Usenet providers through a built-in Newznab and Torznab manager, Cardigann definitions, or Stremio stream addons pasted in as sources. Released titles need no request queue: each viewer's Plex and Trakt watchlists sync in, and newly playable titles surface in a Now Available row on their home screen. A poster studio renders 4K, Dolby Vision, Atmos and rating badges onto artwork in the browser, and rule-based collections can run as 24/7 virtual channels in the Live TV guide. Subtitles arrive matched and retimed to the cut playing, with skip markers. A self-evicting cache keeps replays instant and preloads the next episode as you watch. Local playback needs no Plex Pass, and Docker runs Ether on port 32400 beside your library rather than replacing it. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Peach is a self-hosted video library manager that scrapes rich metadata for your own collection and serves it through a polished web player you can open on any device. Point it at local drives, SMB shares, mounted cloud storage, or a PikPak library and it scans everything into one browsable catalog without moving or modifying your files. The scraper recognizes video codes, reads existing NFO files, and fills in titles, performers, studios, and cover art from multiple sources while always preserving corrections you make by hand. Playback happens right in the browser with subtitle support, variable speed, rotation, resume points, and timeline previews you can scrub through before committing to a scene. A follow system tracks performers and creators so new releases surface automatically, and the discovery views plus a want list help you decide what to add next. When something is missing, search by video code or drop in a magnet link and completed downloads are filed into the library on their own. Tagging, duplicate detection, and multi-version grouping keep large collections tidy, while the task center lets you pause, resume, or cancel scans and downloads and watch their resource use as they run. 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-or-later licensed.

Lunarr turns the movie and TV folders you already store into a private streaming service with posters, progress tracking, and play-anywhere convenience. Point it at local disks or at libraries living on SFTP and WebDAV servers, and it scans, identifies, and decorates everything with TMDb artwork, cast pages, similar titles, and because-you-watched recommendations. Press play and the file either streams directly or is transcoded on the fly into seekable HLS, generating only the segments around the moment you are watching instead of converting whole films up front. Continue watching follows you between sessions, sidecar subtitles are picked up automatically, and known intros and credits can be skipped. Send the picture to the big screen with Chromecast or AirPlay, pair new devices without typing passwords, and hand a guest a share link instead of your account. Underneath, an admin console manages users, roles, and which libraries each person may see, watches background jobs, and holds API keys and registration settings. Rescans run on schedules you set from minutes to a month, local folders can be watched live for new arrivals, and metadata refreshes itself on a timer. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.

Nowen Video turns the hard drive of films and series sitting on your NAS into a streaming service your family actually wants to open, posters, seasons, and all. Point it at your media folders and it scans the usual formats, reads streams with FFprobe, and scrapes rich metadata from TMDb, Douban, TheTVDB, Bangumi, and Fanart.tv, recognizing movie, season, and episode naming as it goes. NFO files and external subtitles are honored, filesystem watching keeps the library current, and collections plus episode navigation make a big archive feel curated rather than dumped. Pressing play is where the engineering shows: a server-side planner decides per client whether to direct play, remux, or transcode to HLS on demand, with automatic fallback when the first choice fails. Hardware acceleration through the GPU keeps transcoding cheap, subtitle and speed controls ride along in the player, and a local analysis pass can surface highlight clips from your own footage. Every family member gets favorites, watch history, and continue-watching progress under their own account, while library permissions decide who sees what. An Emby-compatible API even lets clients like Infuse connect as if it were an Emby server. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

MediaMTX sits between cameras and viewers as a self-hosted live media server, taking in video and audio streams over one protocol and handing them back out over another, so one IP camera feed can end up playing in a browser, a phone app, and a recording archive simultaneously. Publish with FFmpeg, GStreamer, OBS Studio, a browser, or a Raspberry Pi camera over RTSP, RTMP, SRT, WebRTC, Media-over-QUIC, HLS, MPEG-TS, or RTP, and read it back on any other protocol without a transcoding pipeline. Run dozens of camera feeds side by side, each on its own path, and keep every path available even while its publisher is offline. Record everything to disk in fMP4 or MPEG-TS as it streams, then play recordings back later through the same server instead of shipping files around. Authenticate publishers and viewers with built-in users, an external HTTP check, or JWT, and use the control API plus Prometheus metrics to wire the server into the rest of your monitoring stack. Forward streams to other servers, proxy cameras behind NAT, and fire hook commands whenever a client connects, publishes, or disconnects, so a doorbell camera can trigger a snapshot or an alert as it starts streaming. Reload the configuration while clients stay connected, and tune everything from the same mediamtx.yml file or environment variables, with no database or runtime dependencies to babysit. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Point a browser at your server's folders and skip the FTP clients, the SSH tunnels, and the heavyweight cloud clones: Mikochi turns any directory on your machine into a clean web file browser you can open from anywhere. You browse nested folders in a fast list view, jump to files with fuzzy search, upload new material, create folders, rename items, and delete what is no longer needed. Whole directories come down as a single tar.gz archive, which makes backups and bulk transfers painless. Media files get a smarter treatment: Mikochi generates streaming links that open directly in VLC or mpv, so a film or album stored on the server plays on your screen without downloading gigabytes first. Access stays protected behind a username and password login with JWT sessions, and you can serve everything over TLS with your own certificates or disable authentication entirely on a trusted private network. Deployment takes one Docker command with a mounted data directory, and Kubernetes users get an official Helm chart. Homelab owners point it at a NAS share, developers drop it on a build box, and anyone tired of scp commands gets a permanent window into their files. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Kaloscope manages your media library the way a flowchart thinks: search, download, scrape, rename, shelve, and play, each step a node you can see and rearrange. Drag HTTP requests, Python scripts, conditions, and loops onto the canvas to build the exact pipeline your sources need, then import community templates from GitHub when someone has already solved your problem. Global search aggregates multiple indexers at once, and finished finds flow straight into aria2, qBittorrent, Transmission, or OpenList for cloud downloading, with keyword rules and schedules automating the recurring hunts. Libraries for movies, series, and other media watch folders in real time, scrape rich metadata with custom naming rules, and read or write NFO files alongside the media. Press play in the same interface: FLV, HLS, and MP4 stream with on-demand transcoding, hardware acceleration, danmaku comments, and resume points that follow you between sessions. An AI assistant can draft workflows from plain language, inspect logs, and manage downloads, and external AI clients connect over MCP with token permissions you control. Per-library permissions, themes, and an installable PWA round out a server the whole household can use. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Friday night, 1994: you are standing in the Action aisle deciding what the weekend looks like, except the shelves are stocked with your own library and the store lives in your browser. Halcyon Video rebuilds that ritual in 3D around your Jellyfin, Plex, or Emby server, turning libraries into aisles and genres into signed sections you can walk. Pick a case off the shelf and it comes up in your hand at true rental proportions; flip it over for the synopsis, cast, runtime, ratings, and a technical table read from the actual file. Seasons arrive as box sets, popular titles sit deeper on the shelf, and the clerk behind the counter searches by title, director, or genre and recommends from your catalog and watch history. Carry an armful to the checkout and she bags them in plastic that folds around the cases, receipt and all. A RomM connection opens a games department with platform-correct cartons and clamshells, while Jellyseerr requests appear as discovery cases you can order in-store. Drive it from the couch with a TV remote, gamepad, keyboard, or phone, or let attract mode tour the floor past the ceiling CRTs. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.