Self-Hosted Media Servers
A media server turns the films, shows and music on your disks into a library with artwork and metadata, then streams it to web, TV and mobile clients — your own private Netflix or Spotify.
How to choose
- Client coverage: are there official or mature clients for your TVs (Apple TV, Android TV), phones and the browser?
- Hardware transcoding support (Intel QSV, NVIDIA NVENC) and which features sit behind a paid tier
- Whether it specialises in what you collect: films and TV, music, audiobooks or live streams
Recommended software
66 in total, ranked by community recommendations, ratings and likes
Plex
Centralized home media playback system with a powerful central server.
Home media server supporting both DLNA and DIAL (Chromecast) devices out-of-the-box.
Audiobook and podcast server. It streams all audio formats, keeps and syncs progress across devices. Comes with open-source apps for Android and iOS.
MediaCMS
Modern, fully featured open source video and media CMS, written in Python/Django/React, featuring a REST API.
Innovative media browser designed for seamless streaming of anime, series and movies, offering advanced features like dynamic transcoding, auto watch history and intelligent metadata retrieval.
Daemon to remotely play music, stream music, handle and organize playlists. Many clients available.
Youtube-like (_without censorship and features you don't need!_) video sharing app written in Go which also supports automatic transcoding to MP4 H.265 AAC, multiple collections and RSS feed.
Rygel is a UPnP AV MediaServer that allows you to easily share audio, video, and pictures. Media player software may use Rygel to become a MediaRenderer that may be controlled remotely by a UPnP or DLNA Controller.
A web-based library organizer and player for your adult media stash, with auto-tagging and metadata scraping support.
Extensible music server. Offers a superset of the mpd API, as well as integration with 3rd party services like Spotify, SoundCloud etc.
UPnP Media Server, which allows you to stream your digital media throughout your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.
Decentralized single-user live video streaming and chat server for running your own live streams similar in style to the large mainstream options.
Music browsing and streaming application optimized for large music collections, ease of use and high performance.
Music player with Youtube/Soundcloud import and iTunes/Spotify discovery.
Music streaming server with GUI management tools. Runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Open-source multistream studio and screen recorder for Mac: go live on 6+ platforms free, record in 4K, publish with AI.
Other use cases
- Self-Hosted Photo Backup and Galleries
- Open-Source Note-Taking Apps
- Self-Hosted Password Managers
- Self-Hosted Cloud Storage and File Sync
- Open-Source Project Management and Kanban Boards
- Self-Hosted Wikis and Knowledge Bases
- Self-Hosted Web and Product Analytics
- Self-Hosted CMS and Blogging Platforms
- Self-Hosted RSS Readers
- Self-Hosted Bookmark Managers and Read-It-Later
- Self-Hosted Start Pages and Homelab Dashboards
- Self-Hosted Recipe Managers and Meal Planners
- Open-Source E-commerce Platforms
- Self-Hosted Pastebins and Secret Sharing