Home Stream is a self-hosted media server for films, television and music. It reads the library you already have, fills in the artwork and details on its own, and streams it to every screen in the house — without sending your collection anywhere.
Currently in beta. The source will be published when the project opens up.
Everything below is running today, on a Raspberry Pi, against a library of several hundred films and a few thousand tracks.
Posters, cast, director, studio, genre and rating pulled from TMDb. Episodes get their own stills, summaries and air dates, and the server tracks where you stopped so anything half-watched is waiting on the home page.
Franchises assemble themselves. Home Stream recognises that four Superman films belong together and shows the whole run — including the ones you don't own yet, greyed out. You can also group films by hand, for the Christmas shelf.
Albums, songs, artists and playlists, with cover art from the Cover Art Archive, artist photography from TheAudioDB and biographies from Wikipedia. There's a play queue, and it remembers what you were listening to.
Films and shows carry their real certification — G, PG-13, 14A, TV-MA — normalised to a minimum age. A restricted account sees only what it should, right down to the stream itself, and anything unrated is hidden rather than assumed safe.
Separate history, favourites, watch lists and playlists per person, so nobody's half-finished series turns up in anyone else's Continue Watching.
Check for a new release, apply it and restart — all from the settings screen in the browser. No shell, no SSH, no remembering which directory the checkout lives in.
Home Stream does not reorganise your files, rename anything, or ask you to move a single folder. It reads what is already on the drive — including a library you have been building for Plex for years — and treats it as strictly read-only.
Media Root/
Movies/
The Matrix (1999).mp4
TV/
Series Name/
Season 1/
S01E01 - Episode Title.mp4
Music/
Artist Name/
Album Name/
01 - Track Title.mp3
A small, boring server that stays out of the way. It is written in Swift, stores everything in a single SQLite file, and is happy on hardware you already own.
Developed on and deployed to a Raspberry Pi 5 with a USB drive. Installs as a systemd service, so it comes back on its own after a reboot or a power cut.
The server is reachable on your home network and nowhere else. Nothing about your library is uploaded, and no account is needed to watch what you own.
The person who sets the server up becomes its admin, and invites family with a code. Child accounts are flagged on the invitation, and only the admin can clear that flag.
Native applications for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, talking to the same server your browser does. Sign in once with your Apple account and your library is there.