HACKER Q&A
📣 cdolan

Open-source content library for an alt. to streaming subscriptions?


I grow tired of 4+ subscriptions running concurrently and I am considering moving back to purchasing original content and (re)building my content library.

Is there an open source content library management system that I can run on a SmartTV or RaspberryPi?

It’s important to me that my kids have the ability to safely find content that my wife and I find suitable for the children, and that is growing harder to do with modern subscription services.

It would be ideal if I can index my own DVD rips and VHS->MP4 files, and store this all locally for personal use.

Any help is appreciated!


  👤 vivegi Accepted Answer ✓
FFMPEG is a phenomenal tool. If you are open to building your own, I would recommend a workflow using FFMPEG for transcoding your raw MP4 files to HLS or MPEG-DASH. You can then maintain simple movie metadata (pull info from open movie data sources) in either files or a simple database. A shell script can generate your static pages and you can serve them from a simple web server.

HLS and MPEG-DASH can be played in HTML pages using a video player library such as shaka-player.

The key to making this useful is searchable metadata.


👤 fabrixxm
Kodi with profiles[0] ?

O: https://kodi.wiki/view/Profiles