Your media. Your server.
Credenza is a self-hosted media server for your films, shows, anime and games. Point it at the folders you already have. It works out what is in them, fetches the artwork, and plays it on every screen in the house.
- Status
- In private beta, and free to run
- Runs on
- One Docker image, on hardware you already own
- Your library
- Stays on your machine. Nothing phones home
Films, shows, anime and games
Four kinds of library. You say which folders hold what, and which console a shelf of ROMs belongs to. The scanners do the rest, on a schedule you set per library.
Films
Name the files however you already name them. Credenza reads the path, asks TMDB, and comes back with the poster, the backdrop, the synopsis and the cast. Anything it cannot place goes on a list you can correct by hand — and your correction is written beside the media, so it survives the library being deleted and added back.
Shows
Series, seasons and episodes, worked out from the folder they sit in. Finish an episode and the next is already counting down in the corner, which you can switch off. An airing show is asked about again when a new episode turns up rather than titled from an answer that predates it.
Anime
A release group in square brackets no longer swallows the episode number. Absolute numbering is resolved against the show’s real seasons without moving a single file. Openings, endings, previews and menus are declined instead of being filed as episode 1.
Games
NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 and the three Game Boys, running in the browser. Box art and descriptions from ScreenScraper and IGDB. ROMs inside a zip work as they are. Saves and save states belong to the account rather than to whichever machine somebody played on.
The best transcode is the one that never runs
Before it starts anything, Credenza asks your browser what it can open and what it can decode inside it. Most of the time the honest answer is that the file is already fine.
A box sized for four transcodes will serve twenty files it does not have to touch. That is not a benchmark; it is the same box doing nothing.
Can this browser play this file as it lies?
Nothing starts. Seeking is a range request. The server is a file server for the length of the film, and the session takes no slot against your transcoding limit.
On your GPU where there is one — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Quick Sync or VideoToolbox — and on the processor where there is not. You choose the size; it holds the bitrate.
Subtitles that usually cost nothing
A text track is converted to WebVTT and drawn by the browser, so turning it on never touches the video. Only a picture track — PGS, VobSub — has to be burned in. Files sitting beside the media are found too.
Audio tracks, in the player
Every track the container carries, named in its own language, switchable mid-film. The commentary and the original-language track are one menu away rather than a second copy of the file.
It tells you what it is doing
A panel in the player: what is arriving and how fast, how long the server made each segment wait, what is being done to the picture and the sound, and the shape of the file underneath. Useful the one evening you need it.
Every screen in the house
One server, and whatever is nearest. Your watch position follows you between them, so the film you started on a laptop is waiting on the television at the minute you left it.
- A browser
- Any recent one, on any machine. There is nothing to install and nobody to sign up with — the server you run is the only account system involved.
- Your phone
- Add it to the home screen and it runs as an app: full screen, its own icon, a layout built for a thumb rather than the desktop one squeezed. Turn the phone sideways in the player and the film turns with it.
- Android
- A native app, in beta alongside the server. One install can hold several servers and move between them without signing out of either, which is the thing a browser’s address bar was quietly doing for you.
- A television
- The same app installs on Android TV. Sign in by scanning a code with a phone you are already signed in on, then drive the whole library with four arrows and OK — including the player, which has a transport of its own.
Let a model do the matching
Every media server keeps a list of files it could not identify, and working through it by hand is the tax on owning a large collection.
Credenza speaks the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant running anywhere can work through that list for you. It reads the real paths off the disk, and the runtime and container the scan already measured — which is what separates a theatrical cut from an extended one, and a film from the remake that took its name — and says what each one is. The correction is written beside the media like any other, so it is still yours after the library is deleted and added back.
Credenza is the server here and your assistant is the client. Nothing in it calls a language model, and no key for one is stored anywhere.
[SubsPlease] Kimetsu no Yaiba - 09 (1080p).mkv
Demon Slayer, season 1, episode 9
Akira.1988.1080p.BluRay.x264-GROUP.mkv
Akira (1988)
smb3.zip
Super Mario Bros. 3, NES
Get early access
Credenza is in private beta. It is finished enough to be somebody’s only media server and it is not something you can download yet. Leave your address and you will hear from us the day that changes.
- One Docker image on a NAS, a mini PC, or the laptop you stopped using.
- Your folders, wherever they already are. Nothing is copied, moved or renamed.
- A graphics card if you have one. It transcodes on the processor if you do not.
Write to hello@credenza.tv and you will go on the list.
One message, when there is something to install. The list is not sold, shared or used for anything else.