streama is a free, open source digital asset management (dam) project written in JavaScript and released under MIT. It has 9,820 GitHub stars, 978 forks and 352 open issues, and was last pushed 1 months ago. On this registry it ranks #3 of 25 tracked projects in Digital Asset Management (DAM), with 5 head-to-head comparisons available.

What is streama?

Streama is a self-hosted streaming media server, written in JavaScript and released under the MIT licence, that gives someone with a large personal collection of films and shows a private Netflix-style library they run and control themselves.

What it is

Streama is an open-source media server for video. It is a JavaScript application, listed in this registry under Content & Publishing / Digital Asset Management, and it carries the topics that describe its job precisely: media, media-server, media-player, streaming, video-streaming and video-player. The project publishes documentation at docs.streama-project.com and keeps a Discord server for support, with a project history of 9820 stars and 978 forks on GitHub.

The problem it solves is file organisation. The README opens with the scenario it was built for: a shelf full of shows and movies that someone wants to digitise, but no good way to organise the resulting files. Streama answers that by becoming a personal Netflix rather than a folder tree. It indexes the collection, tracks viewing progress, and presents everything through a dashboard and a player, so the library is browsed as a catalogue instead of as directories on disk.

Key capabilities

  • Settings page with validation: the upload directory is checked for read/write permission, and the theMovieDb.org API key is validated against theMovieDb.org before saving.
  • Configurable base URL in settings, intended for remote hosting setups.
  • Dashboard listing recently watched TV shows and movies with viewing progress, so playback continues where it left off.
  • "Continue Watching" works by periodically writing the currently watched video and position to the database while playback runs; titles with no video files do not appear on the dashboard.
  • Netflix-inspired player with a next-episode button, an episode and season browser, volume control, play/pause and fullscreen.
  • Admin panel and a separate users area, plus documented handling for accessing existing files already on disk.
  • Distribution through GitHub releases with both stable and beta versions, and an Android client published on Google Play as dularion.streama.

Who uses it and how

  • A household self-hoster digitising a large physical collection of films and series, running Streama on their own machine so the catalogue stays local.
  • A remote deployment, using the configurable base URL so viewers reach the instance from outside the local network.
  • A small multi-user setup, where an administrator creates and manages accounts through the admin panel and users section.
  • Prospective adopters evaluating the software through the live demo at streama.demo-version.net, with the credentials demoUser / demoUser and all data reset nightly.
  • Mobile viewers watching through the Google Play app while the server runs at home.

Getting started

Installation and first-time setup are documented at https://docs.streama-project.com/getting-started/installing/, with stable and beta builds available from the GitHub releases page.

How it compares

No comparable or paid products are named in the facts provided for this entry. On the evidence available, Streama stands alone in this registry, and any head-to-head comparison would be speculation rather than a description of the project.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster takes on real operational work: a database that the Continue Watching feature writes to during playback, a writable upload directory, and a valid theMovieDb.org API key, which makes an external service a hard dependency for metadata. The public tracker shows 352 open issues, and the README excerpt supplied here is truncated mid-sentence in the player section, so the documentation should be read before committing. Anyone who wants a managed hosting option, or who cannot depend on theMovieDb.org, should look elsewhere first.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Streama Banner

STREAMA

Build Status Downloads GitHub license Discord

Docs: https://docs.streama-project.com/

Ever had a huge bookshelf full of shows and movies? Ever wanted to digitalize them, but didn't have a good way of organizing the files? Worry no more! Streama is your own personal Netflix for just such a purpose!

Visit the Docs Live Demo Streama on Google Play store

Live-Demo

https://streama.demo-version.net/
credentials: username: demoUser | password: demoUser
Feel free to play around there as much as you like (everything is reset at night)
We will keep this demo updated with our newest releases as they come, so that you can check out new features there first before deciding to deploy them in your own environments.

Donate

Patreon donate button PayPal donate button

If you want to donate to the developer via bitcoin use 17rCUEX6KYQ8ZM4w39ttEUL7SUDnGCpcWq

Table of contents:

Getting Started

If you have any issues getting started, feel free to chat with us on Discord. We are more than happy to assist and then improve the docs accordingly.

Downloads

  • Stable and beta versions see the GitHub releases

The Application

Settings

Streama Settings Validation

When you first run the application, you will be redirected to the settings page. Here you enter your desired upload directory for the video files, your theMovieDb.org API key and a different base URL if so desired (useful for remote hosting).

Once you made adjustments to any of the settings, make sure to validate the value before saving.

  • For the API-Key, the validation checks against theMovieDb.org to see if you've entered a valid API-key.
  • For the upload directory, the application checks if it has read/write permissions for it.

The Dashboard

Streama Dashboard

On the dashboard, a user can see their recently watched TV-shows and Movies and their progress (they can continue where they left off) as well start new shows and movies that they haven't yet seen. The "Continue Watching" Feature works by periodically updating the database (only while watching, of course!) with info about the currently watched Video and how far it has been seen.

If a Movie or Episode does not contain any video-files, it won't show up in the dashboard.

The Player

Streama Player

The Streama-Player is (heavily) inspired by Netflix, so you get all the good stuff from there. For Shows, there is a "next episode" button and a handy episode/season browser. There are also the basics: volume-control, play/pause, and fullscreen. Later down the road I will add a feature to add subtitles and switch between video-files (for instance for different quality uploads). The player is HTML5-based and has only really been tested in Chrome so far.

The Episode Browser

I am especially proud of the Episode-Browser, which aims to function just like on Netflix. By default, the current video files season is selected. The user gets an overview of which other episodes there are in the season, how many seasons there are, and, as an added feature, the user sees all the added episodes, even if no video-files are added to them (thus greyed out).

Streama Episode Browser

The Admin-Panel

Streama Admin

One of the most important things to me was to make managing shows, movies, and episodes as easy and fun as possible. For this, I made heavy use of the API from theMovieDatabase.org, which auto-fills the episodes, shows and movies with useful information and great images. This eases the user's role in adding content.

For example, creating a new TV-show and the episodes for the first season looks something like this:

Streama Creating Show

Uploading video-files for each episode is as easy as drag-and-drop!

Streama Uploading Episode

Accessing existing files

If you want to avoid uploading every file, use our new and improved "Local File" Feature instead. You can define a local directory (I use one directly in which I created symlinks to all my mounted drives) and then you can either use the local file browser for individual movies / tv-Shows or you can use the bulk-create feature.

The local file browser

You can access the local file browser from any movie or TV-show (anywhere where you would otherwise upload a file). Note: You need to first define the local directory in the settings. Movie Detail Local File directory

Bulk-Create from File

This MR addresses the issue "Batch Add Files #241". Note: the TV-Show does not have to be present in order for this to work. Everything will be created by the backend.

Running matcher & previewing the result

sep-02-2017 01-24-34

adding single matched file

sep-02-2017 01-24-12

adding files in bulk

sep-02-2017 01-24-26

Customizing the Matcher

Just like in Emby or Kodi, the matcher-regex can be altered. The two defaults are Movie: /^(?.*)[_.]\(\d{4}\).*/
TvShow/Episode: /^(?.+)[._]S(?\d{2})E(?\d{2,3}).*/

In order to customize the regex, just add the regex in the bottom of the application.yml like so:

streama:
  regex:
    movies: ^(?<Name>.*)[_.]\(\d{4}\).*
    shows: ^(?<Name>.+)[._]S(?<Season>\d{2})E(?<Episode>\d{2,3}).*

The Users

Streama User Management Users can be invited and managed in the admin panel. By default, they are non-admins, meaning they can only view videos, not create them. You can make them admins with the press of a button. Since there is user-administration in place, I plan on expanding on this a lot! Another feature I want to add is the ability for users to add and administer some form of playlists. There is a lot of potentials to make this even better!

Technical Details

This application is web-based, the server-side is written on Grails 3 with SpringSecurity for login & user-handling. For all the front-end components, AngularJS is used and the player is completely HTML5-based. The application is essentially split into Grails for a REST-API, and AngularJS for the frontend.

Streama uses the [

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is streama free to use?

streama is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does streama do?

Self hosted streaming media server. https://docs.streama-project.com/

What is streama written in?

streama is primarily written in JavaScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/streamaserver/streama, and it has 9,820 GitHub stars.