Quven

Quven is a self-hosted media server with native apps for the desktop on Windows and macOS, for Android phones and televisions including Fire TV, and for iPhone and iPad; your films and series stay on your own hardware, and Quven turns the folders they sit in into a library you'd actually want to browse, with a separate profile for everyone in the house.

The scanner matches titles against TMDb and TVDB, with OMDb and AniDB alongside. It keeps several versions of the same film together, a 4K remux beside a 1080p encode for example, and treats a director's cut as a title of its own. And when a name is too ambiguous for the usual rules, managed AI matching can settle it on the paid plans.

Playback starts from the original file whenever the device can take it. When it can't, the server remuxes or transcodes to HLS and uses the GPU if there's one. The native apps open disc folders and ISO images directly. Subtitles get the same care, because image-based PGS and VobSub tracks can be converted to text, a subtitle can be written from the audio on your own machine, and text tracks can be translated into another language.

Music and ebooks have libraries of their own in the desktop app and the web app, with a reader that keeps your highlights and notes.

What does it cost to run at home? Nothing. Direct play and hardware transcoding are free, and so are the native apps with their subtitles, streams on several screens at once and the remote access you set up yourself, with no ads anywhere. The Pro and Max plans add the managed relay, the web app at app.quven.tv and the heavier tools. The server runs on the same desktop systems plus Linux, and it's also packaged for Docker, so it'll sit on a NAS running Unraid.

Quven is published by Quven Technologies S.R.L., a company based in Palermo, Italy.