Media Server 47

Media Server 47 is a media center solution that focuses on a clean user experience to provide a pure media consumption experience. Sigh, I sound like a sales person...

I've been working on this for years now, rewriting it completely when I learn about some new exciting technology. Sometimes I even started completely from scratch as my own experience grew.

As of February 2023 it's been 5 months since the last clean slate ^^

Goals

I want to create a media center solution that is both tailored to my own tastes and desires and only requires very little configuration while providing a rich suite of features.

It should automatically detect any media I have stored and enrich it with metadata so it can be grouped in collections and presented to the user in a neat way.

For now I'm concentrating my efforts on creating a zero-config way to provide streaming media and only doing detection of movies.

Why?

Existing solutions have a few issues that make me dislike them or at least only tolerate them.

Plex

Just no. I won't create an account with them and agree to be tracked by them (even when installed on my own servers) just so I can use hardware accelerated media transcoding. It requires a monthly subscription and that for a feature I consider essential for homelabs, because its simpler to plonk a 3 year old graphics card in a server than upgrade the CPU. I'd rather they sold me the software upfront and charged for the updates.

Jellyfin

Not even that bad of a solution, but it still requires me to do more manual configuration in their user interface than I personally want to do. If the application can detect the GPU it should configure it automatically and detect which codecs are supported on it. And it's written in C# and uses ASP.NET, a programming language and platform I intensely dislike, so I don't want to hack on it and patch in a few things myself. Microsoft is the enemy!

I'm currently running a Jellyfin instance on my servers and it works fine, but that's it.

How's it currently going?

It's going well, thanks for asking ^^

Technologies

Currently I'm using these technologies to create my media server:

  • Quarkus
  • Kotlin
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • Redis
  • Minio
  • Rust
  • FFmpeg
  • Docker

In the past I've also used other technologies like Spring Boot, Micronaut, and Go.

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