alt Hacker NewsI'm building a self-hosted media server for video, like Plex or Jellyfin. I'll be opening the beta in about a month.
Features:
- No paywalls, bandwidth limiting, or crippled behavior. No login required.
- Single go binary, deployed via Docker.
- Reaches your home server from anywhere with no port forwarding, no VPN and no paywall, even behind carrier-grade NAT. No Tailscale required.
- Cast to another device. You can use any logged in device as a playback screen.
- Watch together, with voice support: Play synced video with friends, and also chat voice. You can also mix this with casting to another device.
- Dialogue boost and loudness levelling for every film.
- Real adaptive quality, tuned for a home's upload.
- Hardware transcoding, full quality in every supported browser.
- A library that explains itself: what the scanner saw, why each title matched, guesses marked for you to check, and a disk that's gone missing shown as missing instead of its titles silently vanishing.
- Your data stays yours: The database is a rebuildable index, metadata corrections can be written back as NFO files that Kodi and Jellyfin read, and an automatic backup keeps what can't be re-derived (watch state, preferences, shares).
Security is a primary concern:
With the ever increasing pace of hacks and CVEs and AI-assisted intrusion, you simply can't be too careful anymore.
- The core (which talks to the network, handles the API, users and the database) never opens a media file or runs FFmpeg.
- A separate media node does every file read and every transcode. It has no network access and talks to the core only over Unix sockets.
- FFmpeg runs under Landlock and seccomp with no path to the file and no socket. All it can do is read and write streams.
- Small dependency tree on an allowlist, pure Go with no cgo, secrets sealed at rest and never logged.
- The library can be mounted read-only, so even a full compromise can't encrypt or delete your media.
- Cryptographically signed chain for servers and releases.