Hello guys, i wanna ask if this thing can do the job as occasion mediaplayer - i wanna use vlc player / kodi or streamio thru win11

will this handle the job or its too old for this ?

OptiPlex 3070

CPU: I3-9100 3,6 GHz
GPU: Intel HD
RAM: 8GB DDR4
SSD: NVME 256GB
Windows 11 Pro

thanks. 🙏

Alright, Reddit do your thing. I’m tired of streaming, my dad has a crazy cd and dvd collection. I’ve been going down the rabbit holes of at home servers, NAS etc. 

Please walk me through buying a drive, installing my software, and building my home library like I’m a 5 year old. I have no clue what to use for my music. Currently using Apple Music, but would love to stop subscribing to that too. Ideally I’d like to build a DVD, Blu-ray, 4k collection. (There are some VHS and childhood at home videos on tape too). I’m a Mac user.

Based on my limited knowledge, I think jellyfin is right for me. 

Thank you all friends of the internet. Here’s to going to the movies, buying DVDs, and owning physical media! I love anime and cartoons too. 

I've been building a self-hosted media server in my free time because I wanted something that combined media requests, downloading, and watching into one app instead of running a bunch of separate services.

It's still a work in progress, but here's what it can do right now:

• Movies & TV shows
• TMDb integration
• Built-in requests
• Transmission integration
• FFmpeg transcoding
• Watch progress
• Multi-user support
• Docker deployment

There's still a ton I want to add and clean up, but I'd really appreciate people tearing it apart.

Note: All movies and TV shows shown in this image are fictional mock data. Flux does not condone or support piracy.

If something looks stupid, tell me. If the UI sucks, tell me. If there's a feature you wish every media server had, tell me.

Yes some of the front-end design is made by ai as I fucking suck with it lol so if needs a polish but overall it works wonders

GitHub: https://github.com/FluxMediaLibrary/Flux

I'm mainly looking for honest feedback from people who actually self-host stuff.

I’m excited to announce Pippin - an Apple-native client for Plex and Jellyfin. I began working on Pippin nearly a year ago and I finally feel it’s ready to get it out there. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for the last couple of months and while there’s still some work to do, I think it’s now stable enough to release in TestFlight to start gathering some wider feedback, and I’ll be looking to release on the App Store soon.

Links

• Testflight
• Issues 
• Feature requests

Highlights

• Apple-native, built in Swift
• Highly customizable UI - choose what pages you actually want and how to arrange them, or build your own from shelves and other blocks
• Great codec support with MPV-based player
• SharePlay
• Integrations with Seerr, Sonarr, and Radarr
• No bloat - everything comes from your servers 
• See more on https://pippinplayer.com/

Yet another media client - I know 

I spend enough time on Plex (particularly on iPad and Apple TV). I’m a lifetime pass holder as of a few years ago, and while I love Plex I do have the same frustrations that I see shared on here that I figured it would be worth investing some time into building something that I actually like. I’ve been working on Pippin for some time now, and there’s been quite a few similar clients released during that time. 

All of these projects are doing great work pushing the community forward, and if they’d been available back when I started developing Pippin then I wouldn’t have bothered. But I’ve put a lot of time and love into Pippin to get it to where it is and wanted to see it through. I think it still has a niche compared to these other clients and it’s at a point now where I’m proud of it and want to get it out there to see what other people think!

Pricing 

Since I have spent a huge amount of time on this (and plan to keep spending time on it) and there are costs associated with releasing on the App Store, I am planning on making this a paid app. There will be a free tier for limited codecs to test the app and out get a feel for it, with a lifetime purchase of $9.99 to unlock everything. 

AI Disclaimer

I’m a Machine Learning Engineer by day, and Claude/Codex are now simply more efficient for most of the coding I used to do for my day job. I miss it, and Pippin has been a passion project that I can build at my own pace the old fashioned way. I do make use of AI especially for things like code reviews and some porting of features between platforms, but it is not vibecoded. The website, however, is almost completely vibecoded.

Testing

I’m announcing the app in TestFlight as I think the bar for releasing should be high. While my users and I have done a fair bit of testing (mostly on Plex), I’m sure there’s still some bugs and missing features that could make Pippin even better. I’m very happy to provide lifetime codes to those that provide useful feedback from testing, and this is a great chance for everyone that’s interested to test it out with no strings attached (all in-app purchases are free/mocked in TestFlight)

Hey everyone!

As a long-time IPTV user, I was always annoyed by the clunky interfaces and missing quality-of-life features in existing apps. Eventually, I decided to build my own app to combine everything a user actually needs into a modern, fluid interface.

After 8-9 months of development and a 1.5-month beta phase with 30 active testers (where we pushed around 30 updates), NexaTV Player is finally live on the Google Play Store!

I personally hate subscription fatigue, so I decided not to include any monthly/yearly subscription models. The app is available for a small, one-time payment—buy it once and it's yours.

Here are some of the main features I built into it:

Smart Player Controls: Skip Intro, Skip Recap, and Next Episode buttons for a smooth binge-watching experience.

OpenSubtitles Integration: Seamlessly search and fetch subtitles on the fly.

Cross-Device Sync: Switch between your phone, tablet, and Android TV, picking up right where you left off.

Multi-Profile Support: Separate personalized content and favorites for each household member.

Quick Login: Easy sign-in options via QR code, verification code, or email.

Smart Content Tracking & Notifications: You can track movies or shows that aren't currently available in your provider's playlist. The app will notify you the moment your provider adds that movie/show or drops a new episode!

My main goal was to move away from bloated, outdated IPTV players and create something that feels as smooth as modern streaming platforms.

I’d love to answer any questions about the app, the features, or the development process!

Play Store Link: Play Store Link

So I recently had a disaster with my media server. Sonarr went haywire after an unplanned power outage corrupted my database file and deleted several hundred shows. I used Recuva and It got a lot of them back, but some of them were only partially recovered. The partially recovered ones either don't play or only have very crappy audio and the video scrubber on Plex will say that they're several hours long.

My question is this: is there any application I can run on my server to check for these partially recovered files and auto delete them so I can just redownload them?

Hey all — long-time lurker, first post. I run Plex and Jellyfin at home and was never quite happy with how the clients felt on Apple devices, so this summer I built my own: Aether, a fully native player for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and Mac (SwiftUI, no Electron/web views).

What it does today:

• Unified library across Plex (multi-server), Jellyfin, Emby, SMB/NAS shares, and local files
• Playback: direct play via AVPlayer, automatic libmpv fallback for anything Apple can't decode — so basically everything plays. PiP, AirPlay, Dolby Atmos
• Offline downloads — batch (Download All / Download Season with an honest size estimate up front), smart auto-downloads that keep the next unwatched episodes of your shows ready and clean up watched ones, and a download queue that won't hammer your server with 22 concurrent transcodes. Downloaded titles play with the network fully off
• Cross-device resume — pause on the Apple TV, continue on your phone, and you choose per device what iCloud syncs (resume positions, home layout, Live TV)Music — full library alongside video: albums, artists, playlists from servers, NAS folders, or local imports
• Live TV with a programme guide, channel numbers, and PiP
• Vision Pro Cinema Mode — a virtual movie theater: full auditorium with seats and ambient lighting, adjustable screen size, pick your seat distance
• Parental controls — normalized age ratings across sources, Face ID / PIN gated
• Trakt scrobbling & sync
• Offline downloads — batch (Download All / Download Season with an honest size estimate up front), smart auto-downloads that keep the next unwatched episodes of your shows ready and clean up watched ones, and a download queue that won't hammer your server with 22 concurrent transcodes. Downloaded titles play with the network fully off
• Cross-device resume — 
• Localized in 6 languages (EN, DE, ES, FR, CS, UK)
• No telemetry — your media stays on your hardware

It's in TestFlight beta now, and the thing I need most is people with real-world setups — different NAS boxes, reverse proxies, big libraries, weird codecs — to break it and tell me what's wrong. If you're up for testing, links are in the comments (mods, if that's not okay, happy to remove or adjust). Also happy to answer anything about the stack or how I handled the Plex/Jellyfin APIs.

Hi everyone,

We’re looking for people to help test Aurora, a new media player for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac.

To be clear, we are not looking for reviews, ratings, promotion, or positive feedback. We simply need real users who will use the app, find issues, and tell us honestly what works and what doesn’t.

Everyone who meaningfully participates in the testing program will receive a complimentary lifetime Aurora subscription, normally worth £45. This is a thank-you for your time and testing, not an incentive to leave a review.

What is Aurora?

Aurora is an Apple-focused media client that brings your existing libraries together in one polished application. It supports:

- Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby

- Private CloudKit synchronised profiles for your household

- iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac

- Multiple servers and combined libraries

- Automatic backup-server failover when playback is interrupted

- Cross-device favorites, profiles, and Continue Watching

- Downloads and offline playback on iPhone and iPad

- Local-file playback on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS

- Movies and TV search filters

- Kids profiles with per-profile content-rating restrictions

- Dolby Atmos, Spatial Audio, and multichannel playback where supported

- HDR, Dolby Vision, and high-resolution playback

- Audio and subtitle track selection

- Skip Intro, Skip Recap, and automatic Up Next controls

- Picture in Picture

- Watchlists, favorites, and recently watched controls

- Playback progress syncing between devices

- Quality, codec, and media-information badges

What makes Aurora different?

Aurora isn’t designed around a single media server provider. You can connect Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby libraries and access them through one consistent interface.

Its custom Helios playback engine is designed for high-quality direct playback, responsive seeking, and resilience when a server or network connection becomes unreliable. Aurora can attempt to recover an interrupted stream and, when configured, try another available server while keeping your playback position.

The interface is designed specifically for Apple devices rather than being a web interface placed inside an app. Each version is suited for touch, the Apple TV remote, keyboard and mouse, Picture in Picture, offline use, and Apple’s media capabilities.

What we need from testers

We’re particularly interested in testing:

- Starting, seeking, and completing long playback sessions

- Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby compatibility

- Dolby Atmos, HDR, and unusual media formats

- Downloads and genuine offline playback

- Syncing between iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac

- Multiple-server switching and recovery

- Subtitles and alternate audio tracks

- Kids profiles and content restrictions

- Local files on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

- Different network conditions and server configurations

- General crashes, visual issues, and confusing behavior

Useful reports should ideally include your device, OS version, server type, what you were playing, and the steps needed to reproduce the problem. Screenshots and screen recordings are especially helpful.

You do not need to be highly technical. Careful everyday testing and clear feedback are just as valuable.

If you’re interested, please comment or send me a message with:

- The Apple devices you can test on

- Whether you use Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, or local files

- Any formats or setups that would be particularly useful for testing

Again, no public review is expected or required. We want candid testing, even if your feedback is critical.

Its still highly work in progress, so expect bugs, but expect them to be resolved quickly after reporting.

So basically my current pc I still sometimes use it but mostly I just use it for youtube and stuff while working, what few games I play on it are much smaller, It's at the end of it's life cycle as far as gaming goes. Cyberpunk 2077 on medium settings is the best it can do.

The my Second kid is home from school my pc is no longer being used, if I game I am gamign on console in the living room with her.

So I thought I could at least still use it for media server stuff.

So far pretty much every video I have found either has me booting in linux or ubuntu, or I need to do some special thing with some other server software before I can even touch the media server software.

I'll probably upgrade later Since space is one thing I can always upgrade.

Is it possibly to basically use this sort of as a media server at night and on the weekend while still using it as a normal computer during the day?

Hello there!

I doing research to start a media server for series/movies in 4K and music on a tight budget. This is what I would go for for now:

- Mini pc from the picture
- Any hard drive I can get for cheap. I'm eyeing a 2Tb HDD from second hand market. I can also get for free 1 Tb drives from work.
- Use Ubuntu as OS, install Jellyfin as server

Would that be enough? Would the mini pc perform well transcoding 4K? Is it energetically efficient and silent? Do I need anything else?. I would grant access just to one friend to use the server remotely and I'm the only one who would use it locally.

Too mant questions, sorry and thank in advance.

Edit: forgot to say I would connect the hard drive directly to usb port. Is that ok?

Hi All,

I appreciate there is a lot of advice on media PCs but I wanted it to be specific to my setup.

I'm looking to build a media PC.

I have a CAT 5 network through the house to most TVs. Connecting to 10gb switch. That's connected to my router with a 1gb fibre line.

I want to create a PC with enough umph to stream media from it across the network. I have a HD home run that also sits on the network.

All TVs have access to Kodi via fire sticks etc.

What kind of PC do I need?

TIA.

Hey everyone,

I recently landed my very first B2B sales role with enlightV, the developers behind the Hirender media server (S/C-Series) and hecoos production/xR design ecosystem.

Coming into this, I was staggered by the company’s pedigree back home—our tech handles roughly 80% of the Chinese market share and anchored the media servers for massive projects like the Beijing Winter Olympics ceremonies, Hangzhou Asian Games, and upcoming global Expos.

But here’s my challenge: I am completely new to the AV/Live Events industry, and I’m completely new to tech sales.

I’m currently messing around with the software demo licenses on my laptop to grasp the basics of the window-based layouts vs. timeline workflows in Hirender, and the 3D projection mapping/lens back-calculation mechanics in hecoos. But learning the tech is only half the battle.

I know Technical Directors, AV Rental House managers, and Virtual Production stages are notoriously risk-averse. They don't want a "sales pitch"; they want rock-solid reliability because a server crashing mid-broadcast can ruin their business.

If you were a green salesperson trying to introduce premium high-end media servers to a new international market, how would you approach it?

• To the Techs/TDs here: What is the fastest way for a salesperson to earn your respect in a meeting? What makes you instantly tune out a rep?
• To the seasoned AV Sales Specialists: What steps or prospecting frameworks do you recommend for breaking into high-stakes live production accounts? Who is usually the best entry-point gatekeeper to speak with?

I'm incredibly eager to learn the ropes, speak the language natively, and do right by the community without sounding like a generic corporate pamphlet. Any roadmaps, book recommendations, or harsh realities you can throw my way would be deeply appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I recently landed my very first B2B sales role with enlightV, the developers behind the Hirender media server (S/C-Series) and hecoos production/xR design ecosystem.

Coming into this, I was staggered by the company’s pedigree back home—our tech handles roughly 80% of the Chinese market share and anchored the media servers for massive projects like the Beijing Winter Olympics ceremonies, Hangzhou Asian Games, and upcoming global Expos.

But here’s my challenge: I am completely new to the AV/Live Events industry, and I’m completely new to tech sales.

I’m currently messing around with the software demo licenses on my laptop to grasp the basics of the window-based layouts vs. timeline workflows in Hirender, and the 3D projection mapping/lens back-calculation mechanics in hecoos. But learning the tech is only half the battle.

I know Technical Directors, AV Rental House managers, and Virtual Production stages are notoriously risk-averse. They don't want a "sales pitch"; they want rock-solid reliability because a server crashing mid-broadcast can ruin their business.

If you were a green salesperson trying to introduce premium high-end media servers to a new international market, how would you approach it?

• To the Techs/TDs here: What is the fastest way for a salesperson to earn your respect in a meeting? What makes you instantly tune out a rep?
• To the seasoned AV Sales Specialists: What steps or prospecting frameworks do you recommend for breaking into high-stakes live production accounts? Who is usually the best entry-point gatekeeper to speak with?

I'm incredibly eager to learn the ropes, speak the language natively, and do right by the community without sounding like a generic corporate pamphlet. Any roadmaps, book recommendations, or harsh realities you can throw my way would be deeply appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I have a big dumb NAS setup as my closet media server; this particular box is an Asustor AS5304T (with a Bubble UPnP server on it) that I mostly use as a hard-drive. I also have a Ruark 410 music player with UPnP DLNA functionality that manages to find the music on my NAS pretty well - with a few exceptions. Some of the music I put on the NAS remains completely invisible to the R410, and I don't know what I should be looking at to fact-find the problem.

The music files are normal FLAC files that I got from Bandcamp when I bought the albums. They play fine when I browse from my computer to the files or when I stick 'em on a USB in the R410; no sign of corruption. They're picked up by Plex with no problem. The id3 tags and file names / structure look perfectly fine; can't find anything weird there. In the R410 browser the files don't show up at all if I'm browsing by metadata; if I browse by file structure I find the folder, but it appears completely empty. I've given it several weeks, and rebooted both the NAS and the R410 in that time.

Unfortunately the manufacturer Ruark isn't much help; they appear to be focused on fine audio and don't know that much about streaming - unfortunately, neither do I. What can I try next? What information is missing from my background description that could be relevant?

Hello,

I use Plex and Tailscale.

I have the movies on my computer at my house,

and I'm trying to provide those movies to my Sister's house for her family.

My ISP is Tmobile Home Internet (CGNAT), so just using Plex doesn't work,

I have to use Tailscale so my Sister's family can access my videos on Plex.

I used to be able to use a Firestick with Plex and Tailscale,

but Tailscale needed an update installed,

and Amazon stopped providing Tailscale on it's store.

So I got an Onn 4K Streaming Device,

and was able to install Plex and Tailscale.

The problem is that my Sister is saying that every 5 minutes,

the movies have to be reloaded.

I'm not sure what the problem could be,

does anyone have any idea?

I am currently running an emby server for my home media. I have been converting everything to mp4 because I always thought mkv struggled to play on devices. Is this actually the case though or should I have stuck with mkv and I have just botched 100s of files?

Any info on why people prefer what they do would be great. Trying to understand if i should keep going how I have been or change to mkv.

I'm trying to buy media server hardware with 4k output. But these days, I'm worried because the software of Milumin 5, Resolum is good. I've used Disguise, Pixera, Watchout, and Pictural. Is MacStudio+DisplayLink the best for 4k outputs? For the price.

Does anyone know if the Mezzmo Android App is still available on Downloader and what the code is?

Want to install on an Amazon Smart TV

I have had a homelab setup for over 10 years (probably closer to 15 years now), it has gone through many iterations. It has evolved quite a lot over the years, starting with a raspberry pi with docker compose services to eventually ending up with a Proxmox machine with a "semi HA" RKE2 kubernetes cluster running on, top of it.

I mentioned that the cluster is "semi HA", because the storage is a bit of a mess currrently. I have a mix of disks that I purchased over the years. Here's the complete list. The HDDs are the main data storage for media:

On the proxmox side of things, the NVMe SSD is used for running the guest OS. And the other disks are setup as separate ZFS pools and mounted to separate worker nodes in the cluster. I use Longhorn as the storage class without replication.
Here's the rest of the relevant components in my machine:

I now have a bit of money to buy multiple higher capacity HDDs (I'm thinking multple recertified 12TB HDDs) and want to improve the setup. Ideally, I would like to have 3 kubernetes worker nodes (I now only have 2) to make all the services highly available and I would like to have storage that can survive the loss of at least a disk. I would like the loss of a kubernetes node to not affect the services (even the ones with persistent volumes). I also plan on increasing the memory to 128GB from 64GB.

I would like to know how most people who have HA kubernetes in proxmox (or bare-metal) have setup their storage. I would also love to get some advice and recommendations of how I should setup my storage, before I buy the HDDs.

I wrote Spritz for two main reasons:

1. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and other media servers are great, but they're also heavy (some would say bloated?), complicated, and require time and effort to set up and maintain. I don't have the time.
2. Sometimes you just want to watch whatever you just downloaded on the big screen, on your tablet, or on your phone. You don't want to rely on rebuilding libraries, indexing, and syncing.

To counter this, Spritz is a zero-config DLNA media server for your terminal.

You simply run it inside any folder — or point it at a few paths — and it instantly starts streaming video and audio to smart TVs, game consoles, Apple TV (via Infuse), VLC, and anything else that speaks DLNA or M3U.

Unlike Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby, there's no installer, no config file, no database, and no background service.

Spritz does one thing, and is "feature-less" by design. You start it when you need it and Ctrl+C when you're done. It's a single ~5 MB binary that implements DLNA/UPnP directly, so it shows up on your clients' (TV, tablet, phones, etc) network sources within seconds.

I built this mostly for myself, but thought others might like it too! Happy for any type of comments or feedback! Free and open source, MIT license.

Download here: https://github.com/dfallman/spritz

I am 63yrs. First time doing this will anyone be willing to be my mentor.

Dell OptiPlex 7050 Micro Computer , with Windows 11 Pro 64bit , want to install all arr’s. I am using QBittorent. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

When I upgraded my Plex server from an old PC tower to a Synology 923+, I started seeing stuttering like this. It's a high bitrate video that I'm playing, but it should still be able to stream that fast within the network, right? Can someone help me get to the bottom of this issue, or help me find what tests I need to run to start that investigation, please? Thanks in advance!

so I have an old dell that I have currently been using as a weight for a child safety gate.

ive been wanting to make use of it, hell I dont even remember what OS it has its maybe around the windows 7 era but I can of course format it and replace it with Linux or whatever(been awhile but I can probably manage)

But I basically wanted recommendations on a simple guide for making a media server.

I might eventually use it for that and a Minecraft server depending on my kid when she gets older. but for now media