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.

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.