from Hacker News

Streama – A self-hosted streaming application with your own media library

by GutenYe on 1/12/17, 12:21 PM with 158 comments

  • by Terretta on 1/12/17, 12:59 PM

    Hello world video hub could be the new hello world blog!

    But one has only to review the (very frequent) release notes for Plex to see the devil is in the edge cases, not the basics.

    In the meantime, Plex has a native server app for almost everything, including NAS boxes, and native players shipping with TVs and in game console app stores. It does a good job on both playback and admin UI across a fleet of media hosts for a household of users, and the latest release unlocks hardware encoding across an array of operating systems.

    There's even a portable HDD + WiFI hub from Western Digital, to take Plex Server and 4TB of media on the go w/ 10 hrs battery life, in the size of a Sony Discman.

  • by gdulli on 1/12/17, 2:55 PM

    What I want that Plex doesn't already to is to be able to define TV-like channels.

    I have 6 Resident Evil movies or 100 episodes of Futurama and I want them to play in a loop on their respective channels, and when I tune in whichever one happens to be "on" is what I watch, even though it's the middle of an episode/movie. DVR-like functionality where I could "rewind" back to the start of a 30-minute buffer would be good. Pandora-like skipping would be good. But those features wouldn't be essential, compared to creating the programming grid.

    I still want what Plex does and what Streama does, to navigate to a specific movie or episode and start it manually. Sometimes I watch media because I want to watch one specific thing. But often I just want my favorite media on in the background while I work or do other things. I don't want to navigate through a library of 200+ titles to pick just the right one or a pseudo-"random" one.

    Is there anything that would let me do this?

  • by planetjones on 1/12/17, 1:27 PM

    I recently installed Plex on my Synology NAS.

    + awesome web GUI

    + awesome iOS app

    + excellent app for PS4

    + streaming support for TVS e.g. Samsung via DLNA

    - synology does not seem to hibernate much now Plex is on (may not be Plex's fault)

    - needs premium pass to sync stuff to your mobile app (I paid for a lifetime subscription though, as it's a very good product)

    - Plex cannot use the hardware transcoder of my NAS, only the native Synology Apps can

    - Does not remember playback position of audio on mobile app (this is a big negative, as I listen to a lot of mixes which are a single audio file)

    Given a very good product already exists in the marketplace, which can stream to multiple channels, I am not sure what this project aims to achieve? I am all for people building new stuff, but I would like to see some gap analysis of existing products first so I know what the USP is.

  • by abhianet on 1/12/17, 1:11 PM

    It's like Netflix, but distributed! https://popcorntime.sh/en

    Snarkiness aside, this is beautiful!

  • by djvdorp on 1/12/17, 1:09 PM

    Good to have more alternatives for Plex and Emby, but without having native apps for almost all architectures in use, mobile apps and Chromecast support it has quite a long way to go. But I love FOSS alternatives so keep it up!

  • by sandGorgon on 1/12/17, 1:22 PM

    there is http://getvideostream.com which does playback of local videos on chromecast through a chrome plugin. works brilliantly.

  • by hising on 1/12/17, 3:56 PM

    My guess is that this software would have been highly praised if some of the wonder boys of software had came up with it. All this negativity is one of the reason I really have a hard time enjoying reading the comments at HN.

  • by the8472 on 1/12/17, 12:53 PM

    browser-based players are not really that great if your collection contains 10bit video, flac audio, ASS subtitles and other stuff that browsers can't handle without transcoding.

  • by Insanity on 1/12/17, 1:16 PM

    Looks interesting, but in the comments here I found out that it is similar to other software that already exists.

    I'm happy with my 90s like setup. Films and series in a folder, VLC to play them. I did give Netflix a try but did not like that it only has a browser player and on top of that annoying restrictions.

  • by freshyill on 1/12/17, 1:05 PM

    The beauty of Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Plex is that I can view my content just about anywhere and on any device.

    Free and I pen source is certainly preferable, but I want to watch movies on my Apple TV in my living room. That's the problem I need solved. I suspect it's similar for most people.

  • by amq on 1/12/17, 1:16 PM

    People praise Plex, but I constantly find myself trying it and going back to Serviio.

  • by tbirrell on 1/12/17, 3:42 PM

    This looks really cool, but honestly, if I have everything on a hard drive, why would I upload it and re-stream it?

  • by tn890 on 1/12/17, 12:41 PM

    How is this better than Plex?

  • by bhouston on 1/12/17, 2:19 PM

    We use Plex and while I used to love it, I get constant stalls when playing on Chromecast or Apple TV for months now. It requires me to disconnect and reconnect Plex.

    Tried different Plex versions, different network topologies in the house - but nothing seems to fix it. Netflix of course works perfectly.

    Wish I could figure this issue out.

  • by franciscop on 1/12/17, 1:42 PM

    This would be really useful 1-5 years back when HDD were big and cluncky; however nowadays I just sync everything on my 1TB Samsung T3, which is tiny and really resilient and I take that everywhere. So now for me the benefit of this would be marginal.

    I did use Popcorn Time for a while, and that has the benefit that it auto-downloads the shows and movies. Something that logically [1] Streama didn't seem to want to get their hands dirty with.

    [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-not-time-for-popcorn...

  • by ake1 on 1/12/17, 3:54 PM

    I've tried a lot of these and I really want to like them (plex/kodi) but the gui is way too hard to use, I feel like I'm in a straitjacket and always revert to the command line. Mount your content, be able to sort it through with ls/grep/find...queue up files...whatever. If I'm watching a series I'll just fire up ranger for one-button next functionality.

  • by ntrp on 1/12/17, 1:56 PM

    Off topic, but I'm curious why a lot of people on HN, of all places, has such a negative attitude towards any new product, especially such small & open source ones...

    Well, at least nobody posted XKCD 927 yet.

  • by Giorgi on 1/12/17, 8:52 PM

    Either I am blind or this has nothing to do with Plex.

    Godspeed. Looks really nice.

  • by mrmondo on 1/13/17, 12:18 PM

    Nice to see an open source approach to this, disappointed to see it relies on MySQL though. Plex is a fantastic application for a similar purpose.

  • by amelius on 1/12/17, 9:26 PM

    This is great.

    It would also be nice if you could share media files (over bittorrent perhaps) with a small group of people (e.g., family or friends).

  • by captn3m0 on 1/12/17, 1:18 PM

    I'd tried setting this up recently for a light weight streaming solution, but found it lacking.

  • by Demcox on 1/12/17, 12:45 PM

    So it's an alternative to Plex? Looks interesting.

  • by basdp on 1/12/17, 1:00 PM

    So you just rebuild Plex?