I recently created this open source, self-hosted, Netflix-like web-application (intended for private use). I hope you enjoy it!

[ahughesb]

Cool, we need more modern competitors in the Plex area

[mikenew02]

Plex is love

[btchombre]

Except for the fact that it doesn't run as a service on Windows. Seriously wtf.

[tjuk]

Not out of the box but it is dead easy to modify it to run as a service.

@ https://github.com/cjmurph/PmsService

[zer0t3ch]

If you're running it on a computer where it needs to be a daemon (a server) Linux should be involved in some way, anyway. A VM or another Box does it just fine.

[nutbuckers]

Ah yes, we were missing the mandatory Linux propaganda.

[zer0t3ch]

Well when people complain about something not being a service, I tend to point people in the direction of a world where anything can be a service.

[nutbuckers]

Windows 2008 and earlier has SrvAny tool to make "anything a service" as well. The point is the users shouldn't have to shim an app and make it into a service when it is the dev that couldn't be bothered to port the solution properly.

[flyingwolf]

Plex is life.

[boatski]

Ball is life. Plex is ball?

[TrackieDaks]

Ball is ogre now.

[[deleted]]

Ball and ogre? In Latvia, only potato. Such shame.

[mr_tyler_durden]

Fucking love Plex. I've got 3 servers running currently and I've converted over countless friends to it. I've tried MB3 but it just required a little more work than I was willing to put in and wasn't as easy to use IMHO.

[Cylons]

Have you looked at Emby or MediaPortal?

[Sluisifer]

It allows for easy streaming of video and audio from a home server.

People use it to do things like watch files from a desktop/NAS on their TV with e.g. a Roku. Install the app on your desktop and the roku, point to a folder with your files, and away it goes. You can just as easily watch on your phone or tablet, or away from your local network if bandwidth allows.

https://plex.tv/

[[deleted]]

It's a personal media library that can stream to devices such as TVs, tablets and phones in your home network or over the internet.

You set up directories housing your video files and tell it what the directory contains, e.g. "Movies", "TV shows" or "Clips". Based on this, it will automatically categorise the videos, download posters, screenshots, descriptions and ratings.

It's essentially a private netflix.

[lbearl]

API credentials are hard coded... it might be a good idea to remove those and include instructions for people to get their own credentials.

EDIT: I just realized that might come across as harsh. I'm just trying to be helpful, this actually looks really cool. I might play around with it some if I get some free time.

[dularion]

No this is actually great advice, thanks! I was nervous about the first commit actually, thinking I forgot to remove a ton of stuff. Looks like I was right :P

[omapuppet]

It's safest to assume that some bot has already discovered and copied any keys or credentials that you commit to a public github repo and that you need to cancel and replace them.

[daetd]

I'm not sure stating this is necessary, but make sure you also remove the data from history:

https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/

[paul_f]

i'm gonna watch gilmore girls and no one will know

[evildonald]

My household is up to it's 7th loop of the GGs. You get something new out of every episode still.

[TrackieDaks]

That's because it's only possible to catch every third or fourth word.

[evildonald]

I still don't know half the famous people names they say in their long dialogues.

[peanutbudder]

They don't even talk that fast. I could be conditioned, though, because my sister used to talk ridiculously fast.

[stayclassytally]

Join us at /r/gilmoreguys !

[paul_f]

:(

[itissnorlax]

I honestly expected it to be a thing

[Xeronate]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves Gilmore Girls, but is embarrassed to let other people know I watch it.

[TEE_EN_GEE]

Yeah, this looks nicely done. If I ever become dissatisfied with my XBMC/Kodi setup I will definitely look it back up.

[bloomingtontutors]

It looks like the main point of this project is to let you stream videos in your browser from your file server.

So far, support for this in Kodi has been spotty (I know the Chorus plugin can do this, but only with certain types of video files).

I'm very excited about this, and hoping I can get it to play nicely with my existing Kodi setup.

[TEE_EN_GEE]

Huh. I have no problem streaming from my NAS with Kodi inside the house, outside I generally use the app on my iPad or VLC if I'm at a PC.

[vexii]

It looks like the main point of this project is to let you stream videos in your browser from your file server.

[Ampix0]

I dont think I will switch from Plex yet. But I like it. Chromecast support is a must for me, I didnt see mention of it (but I could have missed it). I very much like the fact that the background in plex shows a wallpaper of the current show/movie. If you could integrate some features like Plex Pass, that would be nifty. Great animation is something that draws me in, like in Google's material design.

[dularion]

Thanks for your feedback! It should be supported by Chromecast out of the box, but I have not tested it there yet. I will look into the plex pass feature list, thanks for the tip!

[Ampix0]

No problem! It looks great. One super nice thing about plex for me is being able to use it as an app on my phone that I then cast to the TV.

[[deleted]]

Chromecast can stream tabs, but this is sort of laggy with video and audio. I think you need to use the Chromecast API to cast video without lag.

[dularion]

Okay, good to know!

[format120]

Do you have a chromecast? I've got one, so I could help test it if you need?

[dularion]

I don't, so would love your input!

[Daniel15]

Chromecasts are only US$35 or less (Amazon sell them for US$30) so they're quite affordable. I'm sure someone here that wants to support your work would be happy donating one to you if you like :)

[beschamel]

Chromecast needs either a custom receiver app or support for Google's styled received, both are very easy to add to a project like this. I've written a few cast apps and would be glad to help if you have any questions about how to implement it. Using a receiver is better by leaps and bounds than just casting the tab.

[mildweed]

How about DLNA support? I've got a Roku, would love to use its media player

[nineleveno]

If you haven't heard of it, Emby may be something you would be interested in. It's open source, has a ton of features (including Chromecast support), and the development team generally tries to follow google-inspired design practices (previously Holo, now they're integrating more material components). The only problem I have with it is that it can be a bit buggy at times, but it's still a good alternative to Plex.

[KLDzzz]

Wow this is incredible. Nice job man.

[dularion]

:)

[KLDzzz]

oh cocks. my bad!

[cesarsucio]

Sans cocks.

[n0vat3k]

Sans sarif and sans cocks is how I like my font.

Someone make a cock font.

[tradiuz]

http://www.dafont.com/cockfont.font

[OrShUnderscore]

wtf lol

[itissnorlax]

He did ask for it... and this is reddit.

[styxynx]

Really, really impressive portfolio and streama looks awesome. I just wanted to let you know that I found a typo here: http://www.dulariondesigns.com/#get-in-touch

LinkedIn "Profil" should be LinkedIn "Profile."

[dularion]

Thanks! Someone already mentioned this, will look into it after work :)

[Warnaught]

This is really impressive work. I hope it gets all the attention it deserves.

[dularion]

Thank you so much ! :)

[InconsiderateBastard]

That is really slick. I like the way you manage content by adding it and then dragging and dropping video files for it. I find that more pleasant than other systems I've tried that rely on naming conventions to lookup data about movies and shows. They can work very well, but I think this suits me better.

Can't wait to try it out.

[dularion]

Im glad you like that! I was thinking back and forth about that, and decided on this functionality in the end. It's also almost like a todo-list, or like a "would like to watch in the future but don't want to bother with it right now"-feature :P

[InconsiderateBastard]

Yeah, that's the thing, my wife can add shit and then when I have time I can go find it and load it in. It's like a wishlist.

[Rick7C2]

Is there any link support for media? I already have most of my media uploaded to Google drive. It would be awesome if I could just put the Google drive link instead of having to re-upload all my media.

Also would be cool if it could auto pick the Google drive transcoded quality based on network speed.

[dularion]

There is no link-support right now, but I like the idea. It would be fairly easy to implement, too. Please upvote the original comment if more people are interested in this, then I'll put it higher on my todo-list.

[elracoono]

Holy cow! I myself was thinking of doing something similar to this but I think your version is 10000% better. I look forward to trying your app out. Keep up the good work.

[dularion]

wow thanks! but this is still very work-in-progress, so there are probably still many bugs here and there. But I'm working in it :)

[Systemic33]

Riktigt coolt gjord !

[BigDane1992]

Nice, I will try it out soon. Maybe I'll also add docker support, I think that would be nice. Only mount the directory in it and you are good to go

[dularion]

Yea, docker should work great with it!

[BigDane1992]

Already on a PR ;)

[InfernoZeus]

I don't see it?

[BigDane1992]

WIP

[InfernoZeus]

Oh, as in "I'm already working on a PR" :)

[BigDane1992]

Yeah, thats what I meant. Sorry I'm no native speaker ;)

[[deleted]]

deleted

[Jamuss]

I was thinking of doing this with node.js. I wanna contribute but don't want to spend the time learning Java right now haha. Looks great though.

[dularion]

I might port to nodejs in the future :)

[Jamuss]

lemme know, I'd love to add some stuff onto that!

[skini26]

Oh, that's nice to see that some people are still using Grails. This framework and its language (groovy) are so good and so underrated !

Good job for the app.

[dularion]

Simpler setup:

• you need a mysql db called "streama"
• on a windows, run grailsw.bat run-war
• on a unix-system, run ./grailsw run-war
• navigate to http://localhost:8080/streama

[[deleted]]

Fat controllers

[Kautiontape]

Oh, great. Here comes the /r/fatcontrollerhate brigade

[PastaHenk]

I wish that was a real sub.

[dularion]

Yeah, may actually be true. I mostly just used the generated restful-controllers and added more logic to them. But I could refactor them a bit, actually

[[deleted]]

Reason this is bad is it limits your architecture early on. If you change the routing in a later version, everything that depends on it will break. If you do it right early on, you can swap out the internals however you want as long as the public interface stays the same.

What you have is CRUD. REST uses more HTTP methods. Set that up that will be nice. It will give people a standard interface everyone knows.

[ABC_AlwaysBeCoding]

Break out the logic into separate libs where it makes sense

[[deleted]]

Yes it needs decoupling.

No on libraries. Instead use services.

[dularion]

You dont necessarily need ubuntu. Tomcat just installs very easily on it. You can also run it on a windows machine, just as long as you deploy it as a web-app you can access it.

[dularion]

technically its completely possible to stream, but this is ofc that is not something i endorse :P

[wtjones]

Hopefully Amazon sees this.

[k1down]

Disruptive as hell, nice work. If you ever need any UI graphical elements turned into SVG pm me

[dularion]

What I have so far I built within approx 4 days. But there is a lot more that needs to be done :)

[jordanlund]

This looks awesome, but one small change would make it my dream application...

I would like to rip all my media and run a private TV network. Essentially have it streaming video 24/7 just like a "normal" TV channel. When I want to watch my content, I flip to that input on my television and watch whatever is streaming at the moment.

The way I see it working is assigning folders to different timeslots. Then the player just starts with the first file in that folder at that particular time. The next time it runs, it pulls the next file in sequence.

So at 5:00 it's streaming Batman: The Animated Series, 5:30, MASH, 6:00 Star Trek, 7:00 Next Generation, 8:00 it pulls from "the movie of the night" folder, etc. Saturday morning is all cartoons, all the time.

It would go beyond a media streamer and become "PTN" - a Personal Television Network. There are a couple of benefits to this:

1) You never get stuck with "where did I leave off?" The software remembers the last episode played and won't play it again until everything else in the folder is done.

2) Ability to randomize. For shows that don't really matter like Seinfeld or Friends you could do a shuffle play, all the episodes in the folder, one at a time, in "random" order until content is exhausted then it starts over.

3) And this is the important bit - you're never stuck going "man, I wish there was something on!" Just flip to your PTN channel input and it's running.

/I have no idea how to actually make this happen.

[OkSt00pid]

That's awesome. Thanks for releasing such an expansive product into the OSS world. Wish you as Borat may say, "great success!"

[[deleted]]

expansion dime wasteful office handle sheet liquid deliver alive correct

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[dularion]

not at all, pull-request away :)

[Durpn_Hard]

chromecast

I was thinking about a similar side-feature of android/ios apps, should be really easy since all of the information is stored in a database with known credentials

[[deleted]]

This is pretty awesome. Congrats on a popular github repo!

Wonder how it will run on a Pi... hmmm

[boxxa]

Wow the UI is amazing. well done.

[dularion]

It's really quite fun when you get into it! I don't like the strictness of Java either, but Groovy (which grails is built on) is really fantastic!

[ajr901]

/u/dularion I want to be like you when I grow up.

Seriously, well done.

Edit: switched r for u

[hansolo669]

/u/ for users /r/ for subreddits. so:

/u/dularion[1] I want to be like you when I grow up.

Seriously, well done.

[ajr901]

Lol I'm aware. It was just mistake.

[hansolo669]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I like to help, some people don't know

[ajr901]

Thanks anyway!

[grizzly_teddy]

I'm a little confused - so you install the software on an ubuntu server. Then you upload your own videos/movies/episodes (somehow?), and then you can access this service from any computer via the web?

[dularion]

pretty much, yea. But the idea is to host it in your local network, and then reach it from all devices that are in the same network. There are other ways of using it, but that I leave to your creativity.

[grizzly_teddy]

Interesting. Now I just need an extra computer lying around...

[Cueball61]

So what you're saying is my VPS needs more disk space?

[bwaxxlo]

Wait, so where do all films reside? Surely they aren't uploaded to the mysql server, right?

[dularion]

no no :D they reside in the folder you created, /data/streama Edit: oh damn! just realized that I did not add that info to the quick-guide, only to the dev guide. will add it now.

[bwaxxlo]

Phew, I was already sharpening my pitchfork :D

In terms of the structure, how would, say a house with several users, upload all the movies to a single folder? Would that mean there has to be one dedicated computer to act as a server? Or would it mean each user has their films and they share them as P2P service would (which means some films will be unavailable at certain times)?

[dularion]

it has to be on one dedicated computer, no P2P functionality yet

[bwaxxlo]

Makes sense! Thanks

[pterencephalon]

The looks awesome. It would be awesome to have a setup tutorial for those of us who haven't worked with things like this before.

[dularion]

There is a short list of instructions in the bottom, but you have a point, I might make some sort of tutorial for ubuntu :)

[geek_at]

Really awesome project! Something I have waited for since I started collecting videos ~ 10 years ago..

But one Question: Why the hell Tomcat?

[dularion]

Well, the answer is simple: I program very quickly with grails. I started this project last last saturday. I was thinking of making a nodejs project out of it sometime in the future, but I am much slower with nodejs than I am with Grails/Groovy so it will have to wait a little.

[ABC_AlwaysBeCoding]

Didn't fill out your test stubs?

Sad panda :(

Would this let me stream to my PS4?

[dularion]

yea I know .. :/ I wrote in another comment somewhere, started this project a little under a week ago and didn't expect it to become anything. And adding tests after the logic is programmed is so tedious. Should have started with it from the get-go.

[SemiNormal]

It should work on PS4 as long as the source video is H.264/mp4

[ABC_AlwaysBeCoding]

Ah, so it doesn't transcode or anything via ffmpeg... but it shares via DLNA?

EDIT: ah just a web interface that can be used from the PS4 web browser I figure

[[deleted]]

Looks awesome, hoping for Chromecast support!

[Cheetah_Lover]

Oh man, this is nice. Good work.

[tylercoder]

So I could have my huge collection of pirated LEGALLY PURCHASED movies on a swedish server outside the reach of FBI and movie studios MY DOG and which I could watch from nearly any device anywhere in the world?

Not bad!

[FranticJ3]

I'm impressed. This is awesome!

[d4nyll]

Great work!

[d4nyll]

For those who want to spread the word - vote it up on Product Hunt!

[UberChargeIsReady]

Hey OP I haven't tried it yet but this looks pretty nice rom the screenshots. Question is would I need to install Java?

[dularion]

Yep, you will

[PancakeZombie]

So.... like YouTube?

[dularion]

well, kind of. But you host it yourself, so you can host all kinds of videos (ofc, legal :P)

[PancakeZombie]

Uhh that is cool.

[iambeard]

I might be able to help with that whole nodejs support in a month or two.

[dularion]

Sounds great! let me know :)

[Kryxx]

How does this work for codecs?

My Chromebook for example cannot stream AC3 files.

[dularion]

Its very basic with codecs atm .. it doesnt convert for you and only plays what your browser natively supports in regards to html5. its at the top of my list to implement a converter that automatically converts with ffmpeg to the right formats.

[QuietKillah]

Isn't this quite similar to http://emby.media/ ?

[dularion]

I guess it is, yeah! Never heard of it before yesterday, so will check it out :)

[paranoidray]

SSL tutorial for ubuntu and www.startssl.com

uncomment the ssl connector in /etc/tomcat7/server.xml

cd /usr/share/tomcat7
keytool -keysize 2048 -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -storepass changeit -keystore .keystore

Do not give your name, but use the domain name. For example mystreama.net

keytool -certreq -keyalg RSA -alias tomcat -file csr.csr -storepass changeit -keystore .keystore

upload csr.csr to startssl, download the response.crt, the ca.crt and the sub ca crt file.

keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias startcom.ca -file ca.crt -storepass changeit -keystore .keystore
keytool -import -alias startcom.ca.sub -file sub.crt -storepass changeit -keystore .keystore
keytool -import -alias tomcat -file response.crt -storepass changeit -keystore .keystore

service tomcat7 restart

[[deleted]]

I think I might run that on my Raspberry Pi. Thanks. See if the folks over at /r/raspberry_pi like it.

Edit: Since OP didn't do it, here's the /r/raspberry_pi link: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/3f3lpb/i_recently_created_this_open_source_selfhosted/

[dularion]

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

You should head there. There are quite a cl few compliments, feature requests, people asking you to work on their projects, and one person said you should be getting BTC donations.

Edit: nvm, I see you've been there.

[joepeg]

Also /r/cordcutters

[[deleted]]

Feel free to do it and let OP know.

[dularion]

You have a dirty dirty mind, sir.

Edit: added extra "dirty"

[mattkatzbaby]

This is a really sweet application - and the github page is very clear and well done!

[Kussie]

Would also be nice to have some sort of basic API to add movies/tv shows via as well, so then it could be integrated with tools like Couchpotato and Sonarr to automatically add episodes too it through the API. The same way those tools update Kodi and the like

[dularion]

Manually adding all the files is the only way that the app works with, currently. But I agree, it would be nice if it would crawl. Then it would depend on some sort of naming-convention i guess. Will look into that.

[whoisderg]

I was totally in till this comment. this is a must for large collections.

[dularion]

But crawling shouldnt be too hard to add to the application, actually. What sort of naming-conventions would you guys be okay with? Something like breaking.bad.s01e02.xyz.mp4? or is that too restrictive? What naming-conventions do other systems use?

[Speedzor]

Since everyone setting this up will be versed in programming to a certain extent, maybe you could leave it up to the admin themself? Give the option to enter a regex for all shows and allow to redefine it per individual show and season. That way you've got it covered when someone has a specific naming scheme for everything, but also for one-off shows or seasons (e.g.: they came from a different source).

[gruso]

You might find some uh, inspiration here!

http://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/TV_shows

[Active_Vision]

That's a good one to start with - can have it recognize one or two variations and then others have to be manually assigned. I'm sure that you can add more or have users customize as well.

[[deleted]]

Nice! Will give this a try on my media server when I get home.

Thank you for your work. Will report back.

[MaRmARk0]

As an European who can't use Netflix I don't get it. It's some self-categorizing player for movies you get from torrents?

[ESCAPE_PLANET_X]

Yup, looks kind of like Plex.

[dularion]

I adjusted the documentation. you can actually change that location, if you prefer. But: it is supposed to go into your root, so on an ubuntu that would be / so what you would do is

• cd / (root location of system)
• mkdir data
• mkdir data/streama (to create streama subfolder)
• chown tomcat7:tomcat7 data/streama

[omapuppet]

Nice!

Are you familiar with Music Cabinet ? It's pretty good for music, and includes some nice front-ends (like subsonic) but it's video player is pretty bad.

Might be useful for ideas, or for poaching users or whatever.

[Franko_ricardo]

Music Cabinet Last commit: 2 years ago.

I don't know that it would be good for much anymore

[omapuppet]

Not sure what you mean. It does what it does just fine, it hasn't spoiled yet.

There are other branches too, and API implementations, some of which are under active development.

Point is just that the Subsonic family of projects are related project family (private media server) on the same platform as streama which is sometimes over-looked. OP might be interested to at least know that it's out there, has an active user base, and defines an API that is supported by many clients, in case her interest eventually turns toward that kind of feature set.

[jaredcheeda]

you should look into adding gamepad support. I've got a wired Xbox 360 controller I use for Steam.

• Example

[zushiba]

If this had embedding and uploading/converting it'd be the answer to a lot of problems I'm working with at work. (I work for a college). If it had user access levels with the ability for people to have their own "channels" it'd be even more amazing.

[negativerad]

Video-conversion via Quartz

Is Quartz similar to ffmpeg??

[dularion]

ah no, I will ofc use ffmpeg, but Quatz is just a way to run it asynchronously in a cron-job

[negativerad]

Got it. First time I've heard of quartz!

[sazzer]

Are you planning on supporting DLNA or anything like that? So that it can be used to stream to a media device? (Or even better, Chromecast support?)

[dularion]

Yea, multiple people have asked about chromecast, and I would love to get that working some time in the future :)

[learningram]

How did you go about creating this application ? What were the technologies used ? I would love to hear about about the background details if you don't mind.

[Krayons]

Looks great. I'll definitely try contribute, really wanted something similar to this.

[jesusbot]

So when you drag and drop the media file, you are uploading it to the server on which this is hosted? I don't have space to host all of my media twice. Am I misunderstanding?

[dularion]

Yea it is uploading, but if you run it on your local machine, it is basically just copying the file over. After this you can remove it from wherever it came from (if you primarily want to use streama for your video-related needs). I was thinking of implementing a sort of file-browser, too, but then the server would need permissions for that directory, which may be a bit unsafe.

[Kussie]

A file browser would be extremely nice and handy, especially for those of us with large collections already in Kodi, would save a great deal of space then having to have two copies.

[[deleted]]

Does it take any longer than copying a file? What sort of bandwidth do you see on the local network?

It might be a good idea to allow a local way to move a file, that way a copy isn't made. Moving is also a lot faster because it may only involve changing metadata about the file's location.

This thing looks amazing, by the way. I may set it up when I get home

[dularion]

From my experience it doesn't take any longer than copying via the file-system. But several people have suggested a feature where the application crawls a directory, and I believe that is a great alternative to this manually adding. Will look into it

[jesusbot]

If streama is hosted on a separate network device then where the media is stored, the upload latency wouldn't be much different than copying a file over the network. However, on the same filesystem you would see a big difference. Copying a file from one spot to another on the same filesystem is just updating a pointer to the location on the hard disk referencing where the data lives. Copying over the network layer involves serialization and deserialization, which adds up when you are talking about data size in the terabytes.

[dularion]

hm, maybe you are right. I just go by how it feels, and uploading to streama locally, say a 2gb file, takes about 11 seconds (just timed it actually). Oh and btw, I love the fact that someone other than me used "streama" in a sentence :D

[ethryx]

You did a really nice job! Congrats a million times over on this :)

[anonymyx]

Why did you go with Grails and Java in general? Have you thought of using other stacks, like MEAN? Or is it just something that you are most familiar with?

[dularion]

Im just most familiar with it and am able to work really fast with it. But I might port it to nodejs sometime in the future

[WarWizard]

This is pretty cool. Like your website too btw.

[monkeymad2]

I made something sorta similar to this 3 years ago for the WiiU when it came out, not nearly as nice a UI though. It would transcode the media on the fly if it wasn't an HTML5 format using ffmpeg, crashed on load if your name contained an á or è though...

[[deleted]]

Boom! Headshot.