On April 29, 2025, Plex did the thing every self-hoster had been quietly bracing for: they paywalled remote streaming of your own media library. Photos you took. Movies you ripped from discs you bought. Music you've been collecting for two decades. To watch any of it on your phone outside your house, the server owner now needs a Plex Pass ($7/month, $70/year, or $250 for life) — and through 2026, enforcement is rolling out across Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and Android TV apps one at a time.
Plex is not the villain of this story — they're a company that needs to make money, and many people will gladly pay. But the moment is clarifying. A piece of software that lived for years on the soft promise of "free for personal use" suddenly required a recurring fee to do something the underlying hardware was always capable of doing for free. If you've ever wondered why "self-hosting your media" is a phrase that keeps coming up in privacy circles, here's your answer: ownership of the server is the only contract that can't be re-negotiated next quarter.
This article picks up where the Self-Hosting for Sovereignty guide left off, and goes deep on the media stack specifically — every category, every leading tool, the open-source options most people don't know exist, and an honest look at the trade-offs. By the end of this you should be able to walk into your closet, point at a box, and say "that one is my Spotify, my Audible, my iCloud Photos, my Netflix queue, and my Kindle library now." Because it can be.
First, the foundation
Every media server we're about to discuss runs on top of something — some operating system, on some hardware, with some way of organizing the underlying files. There are three reasonable starting points, and the right one depends on whether storage or compute is the bigger constraint.
OpenMediaVault (OMV) is the lightest, most beginner-friendly NAS OS. It's a Debian-based distribution with a clean web UI for managing drives, SMB/NFS shares, users, and Docker containers. OMV runs happily on a Raspberry Pi 5 with USB drives or on any old x86 machine. If your goal is "turn this old desktop into a NAS that hosts Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf," OMV is the most direct path there.
TrueNAS Community Edition is the move when storage integrity is paramount — multiple drives, ZFS snapshots, replication to off-site backups, the works. We covered it in detail in the previous article. It's the right foundation for "this is the family archive and we cannot lose it."
Unraid is the paid middle ground that lets you mix mismatched drives in one array, has a polished Docker app store, and runs full VMs alongside your media stack. Most "one box that does everything" home servers end up here.
You can also run any of the media servers below directly on a regular Linux box (Debian, Ubuntu, Proxmox LXC) or on Umbrel/CasaOS. None of this is mandatory architecture — pick the foundation that matches your storage needs, then layer the apps below on top.
Video servers — the main event
Jellyfin — the open-source champion
Jellyfin is the answer most of this article is built around. It's a free, fully open-source media server (MIT licensed), with no account required, no telemetry, no premium tier, and no company behind it that can decide tomorrow that your 4K HDR movie collection now lives behind a paywall. It's a fork of Emby that went open in 2018, and in the years since it has matured into a genuinely excellent piece of software.
The 10.10 release in 2024 closed most of the remaining feature gaps with Plex: hardware-accelerated transcoding on every modern Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Apple/Rockchip GPU, software tonemapping for HDR10/HLG/Dolby Vision content (so your HDR movies look right when the destination device only supports SDR), Dolby AC-4 audio support, and a base FFmpeg upgrade to 7.0 that brought a long list of codec improvements.
Hardware: A Raspberry Pi 5 will direct-play almost any 1080p content to one or two devices comfortably. A used Intel mini PC with an N100 or any 11th-gen-or-newer iGPU is the budget sweet spot for 4K HDR transcoding to multiple devices simultaneously. Anything with an Intel Arc or recent Nvidia GPU is overkill in the best way.
Pros: Truly free and open source. No account, no cloud round-trip, no telemetry. Excellent native apps for Android, iOS, Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, Samsung/LG smart TVs, and the web. Live TV and DVR built in. Plug-in ecosystem covers most of what you'd want. Active, well-funded community.
Cons: Some apps (especially the iOS and Apple TV apps) lag a step behind Plex's polish, though both have improved enormously in 2025. No first-party "discovery" feature like Plex's catalog of free ad-supported content (which most privacy-minded people consider a feature, not a bug). Your family will need to install a Jellyfin app instead of using one they may already have.
Best for: Almost everyone reading this article. If you're starting fresh, start here.
Plex — the polished incumbent (with caveats)
It would be unfair to dismiss Plex. For years it has had the best non-technical-user experience in the category — beautiful client apps on every platform, the smoothest setup wizard, the slickest mobile playback, the best metadata fetching, and a name your family probably already recognizes. If your spouse, parents, or kids will be using the server too, the UX gap matters.
That said, there are things you should know going in.
Mandatory cloud account. Plex requires every user — server owner and viewer — to have a Plex.tv account. The server registers itself with plex.tv on startup. You cannot run Plex purely locally without that handshake. For some users this is a minor annoyance; for a privacy-focused audience it's a hard sovereignty break.
The 2025 paywall. Remote streaming — watching your library when you're not on your home network — used to be a free feature. As of April 29, 2025, it requires the server owner to hold a Plex Pass ($7/mo, $70/yr, $250 lifetime), or for each remote user to buy a Remote Watch Pass ($1.99/mo, $19.99/yr). Mobile playback at all (even on the home network) was already paywalled per-device unless you have Plex Pass.
Telemetry and data sharing. Plex collects usage analytics by default. You can opt out, but the defaults are on. Their privacy policy permits sharing aggregate data with partners, and the company has progressively integrated free ad-supported streaming content into the same UI as your personal library — your Jellyfin server doesn't have ads next to your home videos.
Breach history. Plex disclosed a database breach in August 2022 that exposed account emails, usernames, and hashed passwords. They handled it reasonably (forced reset, hash algorithm was strong), but it's a real reminder that "your media library requires a third-party account" is itself a risk surface.
Pros (real ones): Best-in-class apps, especially on Apple TV, Roku, and smart TVs. Easiest setup of any media server. Best metadata. Plex Pass also unlocks DVR, mobile sync, hardware transcoding, and parental controls. If non-technical family is a constraint, Plex still wins on UX.
Cons: Account requirement. Recurring cost (functionally) for serious use. Telemetry by default. Vendor lock-in to Plex's roadmap. If you're reading a privacy podcast's blog, the trade-offs probably don't pencil out.
Best for: Households where someone other than you will be the primary user, who already know the Plex brand, and where the convenience genuinely outweighs the sovereignty cost. Be honest with yourself about whether that's actually true.
Emby — the proprietary middle
Emby is the project Jellyfin forked from in 2018. It's still actively developed, but as a source-available (not open source) product with a freemium model — a free tier and a paid Emby Premiere subscription. Functionally it sits between Jellyfin and Plex on most axes: better polish than Jellyfin in some places, no required cloud account, but with the same general "trust the vendor" trade-off that drove Jellyfin's fork in the first place.
Most people in 2026 either go open with Jellyfin or all-in with Plex. Emby's middle ground is real, but the audience for it has narrowed.
Kodi — the universal client (not a server)
Kodi is the elephant in the room for a different reason: it's a media player, not a server. It runs on basically anything (a Pi, an old Android box, a smart TV, your Linux desktop, a Steam Deck) and plays back files from local storage, network shares, or a Jellyfin/Plex/Emby server via add-on. It's not what you install on your server — it's what you might install on the cheap living-room device that talks to your server.
Worth knowing about for two reasons: first, it's a great low-spend client for any media server; second, the LibreELEC distribution (a tiny Linux that boots straight into Kodi) is a fantastic way to repurpose an old Pi as a dedicated TV box.
Stremio + add-ons — the gray-area mention
You'll see Stremio recommended in self-hosting communities. Worth being clear about what it actually is: Stremio is a slick streaming client with an add-on architecture, and many of the popular add-ons stream content from sources of questionable legality (Real-Debrid trackers and similar). It's not really a self-hosted media server — it's closer to a Kodi-with-modern-UX that happens to have a piracy ecosystem grown up around it. Mentioning it for completeness; this article is about hosting media you actually own.
The "arr" stack — automation for the obsessive
Once your video server is running, you'll quickly discover an entire ecosystem of automation tools that the community calls "the arr stack." They're optional, but they are the difference between manually downloading and renaming files and having a system that finds, sorts, renames, organizes, and grabs subtitles for new content automatically.
- Sonarr — TV show management. Watches for new episodes of shows you follow.
- Radarr — Movie management. Same idea, for films.
- Lidarr — Music discography management.
- Readarr — Books and audiobooks.
- Prowlarr — Indexer manager that connects all the above to your search sources in one place.
- Bazarr — Subtitle automation, pulls subs in your preferred languages.
- Tautulli — Beautiful viewing-stats and notification dashboard for Plex (and increasingly Jellyfin).
None of these are required to run a media server, and the typical advice is: don't install them on day one. Get Jellyfin running with content you've already organized. Once you're comfortable, the arr stack adds back the "set it and forget it" magic that you used to get from a streaming service.
Music — escape Spotify
Navidrome — the obvious answer
Navidrome is what a self-hosted music server should be. It's a single Go binary with a beautiful web UI, indexes your music library in minutes (a 50,000-track library will index in under five), uses under 50MB of RAM, and crucially speaks the Subsonic API. That last bit is the magic: dozens of polished mobile clients have been built for the Subsonic protocol over the years, and they all work seamlessly with Navidrome.
The recommended client stack: Navidrome on your server, Symfonium (paid, Android, gorgeous) or Tempo (free, Android, clean) on your phone, play:Sub or Sonix on iOS, and the built-in web UI on desktop. Pull the music down via Lidarr if you're feeling automated, or just rip your CDs and copy MP3s/FLACs into a folder.
Navidrome runs on a Raspberry Pi without breaking a sweat. It is, no exaggeration, one of the best self-hosted apps in existence.
Funkwhale — the federated alternative
Funkwhale takes a different angle: it's a federated music platform built on ActivityPub (the same protocol Mastodon uses), so you can follow other Funkwhale instances, share libraries with friends, and discover music across the network. Heavier than Navidrome, slower to set up, but interesting if community discovery matters to you.
Other options worth knowing
Airsonic-Advanced is the modern fork of Airsonic, also Subsonic-compatible. Sonixd and Feishin are excellent desktop clients if you'd rather not use a browser. Owncast is for live broadcasting (more on that below). For most people: Navidrome and a good mobile client is the entire answer.
Photos — escape Google Photos and iCloud
This is the category where self-hosting has matured the most in the last two years. The killer feature most people want — automatic background photo backup from your phone — is now genuinely solved, and the AI features (face recognition, object search, "things you took photos of in Italy") are competitive with the cloud giants for the first time.
Immich — the Google Photos replacement
Immich is the headline. It has native iOS and Android apps with reliable background upload, a beautiful web UI, fast on-device-style face recognition that works well across diverse skin tones, object detection that tags photos in seconds, sharing with non-Immich users via links, time-lapse "memories" features, and excellent video support. If you've been waiting for "the open-source Google Photos," it has arrived.
Hardware: Immich is the heaviest media app in this article. The recommended setup is at least 4GB of RAM dedicated to it, more if you have a large library. The AI features benefit hugely from a GPU (Nvidia, Intel iGPU via OpenVINO, or Apple Silicon all work). It will run on a Raspberry Pi 5 for a small library, but a mini PC is more comfortable.
Pros: Native mobile apps that feel like first-party software. Auto-backup that just works. AI features that are genuinely impressive. Active development with frequent releases. 100% free and open source, no paid tier.
Cons: Resource-hungry. The "instant" mobile experience does sometimes hit the limits of your home network and server speed. The project has been clear that it's still pre-1.0 — they recommend keeping a separate backup of your originals, which you should be doing anyway.
Best for: Anyone whose phone is currently feeding photos into Google or iCloud. This is the answer.
PhotoPrism — the photographer's choice
PhotoPrism takes a different approach: it's primarily designed to index an existing library rather than receive uploads. Point it at a folder full of photos on your NAS — including the Lightroom catalog you've been curating for fifteen years — and it'll catalog everything, parse EXIF data, recognize faces, transcribe locations, and give you a beautiful searchable interface over the lot.
It's lighter than Immich on resources, has the best RAW support of any open-source option (30+ RAW formats, with proper preview generation), and excels at the "I have 200,000 photos and I want to actually find things in them" use case. The catch: no native mobile apps yet. You access PhotoPrism through a Progressive Web App in your phone's browser, which works but doesn't auto-backup.
Best for: Serious photographers with existing organized libraries who care more about indexing and searching than about replacing the iOS/Android camera roll experience.
Many people end up running both: Immich for the phone backup, PhotoPrism pointed at the resulting library for deeper search and management. Storage is shared, both are happy.
Honorable mention: Lychee is a lighter, prettier photo gallery if you mainly want a beautiful way to display a curated collection rather than back up your entire camera roll.
Audiobooks — escape Audible
Audiobookshelf
Audiobookshelf is the definitive answer here, and there is no real second-place. It's a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with native iOS and Android apps, syncs your listening progress across devices, handles series and collections beautifully, scrapes metadata and chapters from Audible and other sources, supports multiple users with separate progress, and runs on basically anything (~150MB of RAM).
If you've spent years buying Audible audiobooks, the workflow is roughly: download your purchases, run them through OpenAudible or libation to strip DRM, drop them in your audiobook folder, point Audiobookshelf at it, install the mobile app, log in, done. You now own your audiobook library again — and Audiobookshelf will track which chapter you're on across your phone, your tablet, and the browser.
Best for: Anyone with more than ten audiobooks. Run it. You won't regret it.
Podcasts — yes, including this one
Self-hosting your podcast subscriptions sounds odd until you realize what you're actually escaping: the centralized "podcast index" of whoever made your podcast app, the analytics that get sent back to Spotify or Apple about what you listen to, and the ever-creeping ads that get injected into supposedly-free shows.
PinePods
PinePods is a Rust-based, multi-user podcast manager with a central database that syncs your subscriptions, listen progress, and themes across every device you connect. Browser-based UI, mobile clients, the works. Active development and a small but dedicated community.
AntennaPod + Nextcloud sync
The lighter option: keep using AntennaPod on Android (it's an excellent open-source podcast app), but configure it to sync subscriptions and progress with your Nextcloud server using the GPodder Sync protocol. No dedicated server software needed beyond Nextcloud, which you probably already have.
For hosting your own podcast
If you produce a podcast — and Closed Network listeners, you might — Castopod is a self-hosted, federated podcast publishing platform built on the IndieWeb stack. ActivityPub support means your podcast can be followed from Mastodon. Owncast covers live audio. For just RSS hosting, a static site with a podcast plugin (e.g., Hugo + Plenti, or any WordPress install) works fine.
Books, comics, and manga
Calibre + Calibre-Web
Calibre is the tank of e-book management — the desktop app has been the standard for fifteen years, handles every format on the planet, and does conversion, metadata fetching, and library organization brilliantly. Calibre-Web wraps a Calibre library in a clean web interface with reading-in-browser, OPDS feeds (so iOS apps like KyBook can connect), Kindle send-to-device, and user accounts.
This is the path to escape Kindle. Strip DRM from your purchases (the legal landscape varies — Calibre's DeDRM plugin is the standard tool for personal use), import into Calibre, expose via Calibre-Web, read on any device.
Komga and Kavita — for comics and manga
Calibre handles e-books well but is awkward with comics and manga. The two leaders in that category:
Komga is a beautiful, fast comic and manga server built around CBZ/CBR/EPUB files. Native readers, deep series support, web reader, mobile apps via OPDS or the official Komga app.
Kavita takes a slightly different approach with first-class manga support, a built-in reader optimized for long-strip webcomics, and excellent metadata scrapers.
They overlap heavily; both are great. Pick by which UI you prefer.
Live broadcasting and personal video
Two more open-source projects worth knowing about, even though they don't fit "media server" in the traditional sense:
Owncast is a self-hosted live streaming server — your own private Twitch. Push an RTMP stream from OBS to your Owncast instance, viewers watch in their browser. Built-in chat. Federated activity via ActivityPub if you want Mastodon followers to see when you go live. Wonderful for podcasters who occasionally want to stream live, community organizers, or anyone who wants a "live" surface they fully own.
PeerTube is the federated YouTube alternative. You run an instance, you upload videos, viewers watch them; instances federate so a video on your server can be discovered from any other PeerTube instance. The peer-to-peer playback layer (using WebTorrent) means popular videos cost you less bandwidth as viewers help redistribute. If you're a creator who has been thinking about leaving YouTube, PeerTube is the most credible self-hosted option.
Live TV and DVR
One last category: actual broadcast television. If you have an HDHomeRun (or similar network tuner) hooked up to an antenna or cable feed, you can record and stream live TV across your house from any of these:
Jellyfin Live TV + DVR is built into Jellyfin and works well for over-the-air broadcast. TVHeadend is the dedicated, more powerful option — a full-featured PVR backend that pairs with Jellyfin or Kodi as the front-end. NextPVR is a Windows-friendly alternative.
The sovereignty payoff here is concrete: free over-the-air broadcast TV, recorded to your own server, played back on any device in your house, with no Hulu Live or YouTube TV subscription paying $80/month for content that the FCC requires broadcasters to put in the air for free.
Where to start: a 2026 decision matrix
If you read all of that and feel slightly overwhelmed, the practical answer is much simpler than the catalog suggests. Here's the honest order:
- Month one: Stand up Jellyfin on a mini PC or Pi. Move one TV show season into it. Get the app on your phone and your TV. Confirm playback works. Stop there.
- Month two: Add Immich. Start backing up your phone's camera roll. Stop paying for iCloud or Google One storage tiers when you confirm it's working.
- Month three: Add Audiobookshelf and Navidrome. Move your audiobook and music libraries over.
- Month four: Add Calibre-Web for books, Komga or Kavita if you read comics. Add a podcast manager (PinePods or AntennaPod + Nextcloud sync).
- Month five+: The arr stack for automation. Live TV via Jellyfin if you care about broadcast.
One Pi or mini PC running Umbrel or CasaOS can host the entire month-one-through-three list comfortably. Once your library grows past a few terabytes, that's the cue to graduate to a TrueNAS or Unraid box — but you'll know it when you get there, and the apps move with you trivially because they're all just Docker containers.
The shape of a sovereign media library
What you end up with, after a few months, is something quietly extraordinary: every photo your family has ever taken, every album you've ever loved, every audiobook you've ever bought, every show you've ever wanted to keep — all sitting on a small box that answers only to you. No account that can be locked. No subscription that can be raised. No catalog that can be silently edited. No algorithm deciding what plays next.
The trade-off is real. You become the IT department. Updates are your job. Backups are your job. When something breaks, nobody is on call but you. For most readers of a privacy podcast, that trade looks like a deal — and the tools in 2026 have crossed the threshold where it's no longer a hobbyist's deal. It's just a good one.
Your media isn't supposed to live on someone else's server. It's supposed to live on yours.
Have a media server build you're proud of, or a workflow we missed? Reply to this post — we love hearing what readers are running, and the best ones get featured on the show.