NexusM: Free Self-Hosted Media Server

NexusM is a cross-platform media library manager built with C# and .NET 8. It indexes your videos, music, photos, PDFs and ePUBs in an SQLite database through Entity Framework Core, serves a web interface with ASP.NET Core (Kestrel), fetches film and series metadata from TMDB, transcodes video with FFmpeg including hardware acceleration, extracts album artwork, generates PDF thumbnails, reads ePUBs and includes an internet radio player with more than 70 stations.

NexusM runs on Windows x64 and Linux x64, and in Docker. It needs roughly 250 MB of disk space for the application itself, plus space for its database and cached artwork. For comfortable video transcoding, 8 GB of RAM and a GPU with NVENC, Quick Sync or AMF support are recommended, though direct play and REMUX work on far less.

NexusM ships with a single administrator account: the username is admin and the PIN is 000000. They are the same on Windows, Linux, Docker and in the Android TV app, and they are shown on the download page as well. Sign in with them the first time, then change the PIN in Settings, particularly if anyone else can reach your server.

Yes, NexusM is free for personal, non-commercial use, with no subscription and no paid tier. It is source-available rather than open source in the OSI sense: the code is published on GitHub under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, which permits use and study but not commercial use or redistribution of modified versions. Commercial licences are available on request.

All the common containers and codecs, including MP4, MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV, MOV, MPG, MPEG, VOB, TS and WebM. Anything a browser cannot play directly is transcoded by FFmpeg to H.264/AAC in real time, with hardware acceleration when your GPU supports it.

Yes. NexusM serves a web interface on port 8182 by default, so any phone, tablet, laptop or smart TV on the same network can open it in a browser. There is also a native Android TV app, and a built-in DLNA/UPnP server for clients such as VLC, Roku and smart TVs. For access from outside your home, use a VPN or a private tunnel rather than exposing the port directly.

Films and series are matched against The Movie Database (TMDB), which supplies posters, backdrops, ratings, genres, cast and summaries. Anime is matched separately against MyAnimeList through the Jikan API, which needs no API key. Metadata is fetched when you run a scan and then cached locally, so browsing your library makes no external requests.

It is a reasonable one if you want to stop paying and stop signing in. NexusM needs no account and no Plex Pass: hardware transcoding, metadata fetching and every other feature are included for free. It also adds things Plex does not offer, such as Go Big TV mode with a phone web remote, the Nightclub visualiser and a dedicated anime library. What you give up is Plex's very large catalogue of client apps and its polished remote-access setup.

Both are free and self-hosted. Jellyfin is genuinely open source under GPL and has a much larger plugin and client ecosystem. NexusM ships more features in the box without plugins: Go Big TV mode with an instant phone remote, Nightclub Mode, native scrobbling to Trakt.tv, Last.fm and ListenBrainz, an anime library with MyAnimeList metadata, eBook and audiobook libraries, franchise grouping, a DLNA server and seven interface themes. NexusM is source-available rather than open source, and it has no plugin API.

Emby keeps several features, including hardware transcoding and mobile streaming, behind an Emby Premiere subscription. In NexusM those are free for everyone. NexusM also adds Go Big TV mode, the Nightclub visualiser, native scrobbling and an anime section. Emby, in exchange, has a broader set of official client applications and a longer track record.

There is a native app for Google TV and Android TV, distributed as a sideloaded APK while the Google Play Store release is being prepared. On phones and tablets, NexusM runs in the browser rather than in a dedicated app, and it turns your phone into a touch remote when Go Big Mode is running on another screen. A Samsung Tizen app is in development.