Guide
Films, music, audiobooks, podcasts and photographs from your own files. Match clients, storage and transcoding needs before choosing the server.
A client that supports the stored codec, container and subtitles can play a file without a costly real-time conversion. Test the actual televisions, phones and browsers you intend to use. Transcoding, concurrent streams and photo indexing have different CPU, memory and GPU needs; the recipe’s minimum is not a capacity promise.
Audiobookshelf’s full data volume includes books and podcast files as well as account state. Photo libraries need originals and their metadata; a recovered database that points to missing files is not a recovered collection. Check the scope of any external mounts and rehearse playback after restore.
The server does not supply a licensed film, music or audiobook catalog and does not remove DRM. Host media you are entitled to use. External podcast providers, metadata services and mobile clients have their own behavior; read the tested limitations on the application page.
Sets
The sum of the minimums the recipes below declare. It is a floor, not a recommendation: leave room for the operating system, backups and growth.
Why it is here: The centre of a media library: film and television for every screen, with no account and no relay service in the middle. Direct play costs almost nothing; a transcode is the entire hardware question below.
Why it is here: Music streaming from your existing files, with a declared 256 MB RAM minimum and Subsonic-compatible clients. Initial indexing and large collections can need more resources.
Why it is here: An audiobook and podcast library with per-account progress, bookmarks and library access. Initialize admin before public routing and back up actual media with config and metadata. Mobile clients and external podcast downloads were not tested.
Why it is here: Photographs and video from phones, with backup, deduplication and search that actually finds things. It expects real hardware and says so: 6 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk before your library arrives.
Why it is here: A photo library for a collection that already exists on a disk, with local machine learning for search and faces. Lighter than Immich, and less focused on continuous phone backup.