Snowman's streaming solution
Open Source all in one self-hosted media streaming solution.
There is a large swath of projects that work together to provide a media streaming setup. However, customizing them can be daunting since the tools are so fragmented. I initially started snowstream because I needed to customize Jellyfin and half a dozen other programs to acheive the feature set I was looking for. This included at least 6 different languages and project structures. I just wanted something simpler.
Check the progress tracker on the WIKI during the early days of this project. Eventually this will move to issues/projects.
Before I list these out, let me say that I have the upmost respect for each of the teams maintaining these projects. These pieces of software didn't fit my workflow, but are great on their own. If it isn't listed here then it was either abandonware or I just didn't know about it.
| Software | Functionality | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Threadfin | IPTV | UI is incredibly buggy. Lots of changes get lost. Obtuse behaviors leading to channels getting disabled. Unexpected CPU spikes |
| ErsatzTV | PseudoTV | Convulated workflow to eventually get streaming URLs. Project structure is difficult to develop on Linux. Another CPU spike source. |
| guide2go | Schedules Direct | Mostly worked great. However, the CLI just dumps a bunch of files and you need to map them to containers. I just wanted a simple API to get the EPG data. |
| Plex | Streaming | Closed Source |
| Emby | Streaming | Closed Source and fragile. It seemed like every stable release broke my library in new and exciting ways |
| Jellyfin | Streaming | Well supported by the community, but inherited a lot of Emby's technical debt. Also introduced strange bugs in my library over each release. I made around a dozen patches to various Jellyfin projects before deciding it was too messy to bother contributing. Eats RAM for breakfast. |
Create a script script/variables.sh with something like the following.
#! /bin/bash
source web-server/venv/bin/activate
export SNOWSTREAM_WEB_MEDIA_URL="http://<your-dev-machine-ip>:9064/media"
export SNOWSTREAM_WEB_API_URL="http://<your-dev-machine-ip>:8000"
source script/variables.sh at the start of any work session.
Use the script/dev-docker-services.sh bash script to launch a dockerized version of the app. This is used for postgres, rabbit, and any other services required to run snowstream.
Note that network shares do not mount properly inside docker. If you want media files to develop against, then put them in a path on your local machine under .web-media/shows or .web-media/movies from the repo root.
Run script/dev-run-all.sh to launch the dev/debug versions of the app.
To develop the mobile app, make sure you have an Android emulator or physical debug connected via adb.
Then cd expo and run npx expo start. This will run a local debug version of the app on the Android target. This is required due to the use of libmpv.
During first time setup, you may need to create a virtualenv under web-server and run npx yarn install under the expo dir.