Press Play on a title in any official Plex app. Ether resolves the best release across your Usenet providers and your debrid accounts, health-checks it, and streams the exact byte ranges the player asks for.

Why Ether Exists · Under the Hood · Product Tour · Alongside Your Library · Install in 5 Minutes · FAQ

A typical automated Plex setup is built from several excellent projects—Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, Overseerr, Kometa, Tautulli and more—each of them very good at its job. Wiring them together still means download clients, path mappings, webhooks and, for debrid users, FUSE/WebDAV mounts that Plex Media Server has to scan. A new title still has to download, unpack and be scanned before anyone can press Play.

Ether takes a different approach to the on-demand case. Instead of presenting files for Plex Media Server to scan, Ether speaks the PMS protocol itself. It talks directly to official Plex clients (Apple TV, iOS, Android TV, Shield, Fire TV, Roku, Smart TVs, Web) and backs the library with the live TMDB catalogue and an on-demand byte-range streaming engine.

When you open Plex, the catalogue is already there. When you press Play, Ether resolves, health-checks, and streams the bytes on the fly. When you scrub to 01:14:22, Ether seeks to the matching keyframe offset inside a remote Usenet RAR5 set or debrid HTTPS stream and serves just those bytes.

Keep Plex Media Server and the tools that curate the files you own. Ether adds a second server in the same Plex apps for titles outside that collection. Its availability depends on your configured sources; an on-demand catalogue is not a durable local library.

The table maps familiar workflows to Ether’s on-demand features. It does not claim feature parity with these mature projects. Clustering, virtual Live TV, hardware enhancement and poster customization are optional integrations; ordinary playback needs none of them.

                       Official Plex Apps (Apple TV · iOS · Android TV · Web · Roku)
                                     │  browse · search · Play · scrub
                                     ▼
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────── ETHER ────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  PMS Protocol Layer      Native hubs, metadata, PlayQueues, HLS/DASH, GDM, plex.direct TLS   │
  │  Personalization Engine  Per-viewer taste model · Beta-bandit row ranker · Learned re-ranker  │
  │  Smart Resolver          Quality profiles · Custom formats · Measured-latency source racing   │
  │  PAR2 & Health Oracle    16 KiB MD5 de-obfuscation · Mid-file BODY probes · Slice checksums   │
  │  Zero-Copy Streamer      Seekable RAR4/RAR5/7z (plain & AES) · HTTPS ranges · Disk/NAS tier   │
  │  Dialogue Aligner        Piecewise subtitle-cue solver for cross-cut failover & skip markers  │
  │  Media & GPU Transcode   Direct play · Copy remux · HW ABR HLS/DASH · NVIDIA RTX Video VSR    │
  └──────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────┘
                                     │                                       │
                        Usenet Providers (Primary + Backfill)       Debrid Accounts (RD · TorBox · AD · PM)
                        + Newznab Indexers & Cardigann Sites        + Torznab Indexers & Cardigann Sites

• Lazy store-mode archive indexing (including encrypted sets): To open a 60-part RAR4, RAR5, or 7z post on Usenet, Ether touches only the first, second, and last volume headers to infer the uniform layout and expose a seekable io.ReaderAt immediately—verifying volume boundaries lazily before serving bytes and supporting bounded native AES decryption on password-protected stored RAR4/RAR5/7z sets when the password is supplied in the NZB metadata.
• PAR2 as a zero-cost de-obfuscation & integrity oracle: Ordinary playback never waits on PAR2 repair (bounded repair of just the missing byte ranges is opt-in). Instead, it fetches only the <1 MiB .par2 index packet in parallel with the first article, matches the MD5 of the first 16 KiB of obfuscated posts against PAR2 file descriptions to recover true filenames and volume order, and verifies slice checksums on the spot. If one dominant video file is identified, decoy files aren't even probed.
• Truthful mid-file health checks: Providers routinely answer 223 to STAT for DMCA-pulled articles that fail with 451 on BODY. Ether combines spread STAT checks with real mid-file BODY yEnc-header reads and bails out on the first confirmed missing article across all providers.
• Surgical Matroska damage concealment & live failover: Priority semaphores strictly protect PriorityLive reads over read-ahead and background prefetch. If an article is genuinely missing mid-stream inside an unlaced Matroska frame payload, Ether conceals the gap while warming an alternate release in the background—and if a release stalls or breaks, fails over to another release at the exact same scene, with the volume matched and baked-in black bars cropped.

90s sitcoms, classic anime, and DVD-era 480p/576p/720p shows tend to look soft on a 4K TV, and client-side upscalers only exist on a handful of devices.

• Tensor-Core neural upscaling on the server: On Windows hosts with an NVIDIA RTX GPU and NVEncC64 (with NVIDIA NGX VSR runtime DLLs), Ether can run NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution directly inside the server's HLS/DASH transcode pipeline—cleaning compression artifacts and reconstructing crisp edges on SDR H.264 streams before they ever reach an Apple TV, Roku, iPad, or browser.
• Self-protecting ABR & fallback: RTX VSR is opt-in (off by default) with owner-configurable source/target resolution caps (e.g. ≤720p → 1080p), quality tiers, and concurrency limits. Enhancement is reserved for the top ABR rendition; if measured client bandwidth dips or the GPU concurrency limit is reached, Ether seamlessly drops to ordinary hardware/software ABR renditions without interrupting playback or mislabeling an ordinary scaler as RTX VSR.
• Zero-copy GPU surface transcoding: For standard transcodes across NVIDIA NVENC, Intel QuickSync, VAAPI, and Apple VideoToolbox, Ether keeps decode, scaling, and encode on GPU hardware surfaces end-to-end and bounds software fallback worker threads.

What happens when a stream fails over at 00:52:18 from a Theatrical WEB-DL to an Extended Blu-ray rip—or when TheIntroDB skip markers were timed against a different release? Duration math lands you in the wrong scene.

• Ether aligns the subtitle dialogue timelines of the two releases using a piecewise-linear solver—without downloading a single byte of video—accounting for studio logo offsets, PAL 25fps speedup, and inserted/removed scenes.
• That same dialogue engine inspects subtitle cues inside closing credits to detect mid- and post-credits stinger scenes, automatically ending the Skip Credits marker right before the stinger begins.

Viewers never leave the official Plex client, yet every person's Home screen is dynamically assembled for them, their device, and the current hour:

• Per-viewer taste models: Tracks affinities across genres, keywords, directors, actors, decades, and languages with exponential time decay—separating completions and comfort rewatches from early abandons and unplayed impressions.
• Hierarchical Thompson-sampling bandits: Row ordering uses a Beta-Bernoulli bandit that blends hand-tuned priors → server-wide evidence → the viewer's own play rate, held stable during an active browsing visit, with fresh exploration when a new client session starts or after an idle break.
• Self-gated learned re-ranker: A pooled logistic-regression model trains in the background during quiet hours on 48-hour impression-to-play attribution (debiasing row and item position at inference). It refuses to activate until it beats the hand-tuned baseline by a strict held-out AUC margin.
• Session-intent & Micro-Reason headers: Clicking through 90s thrillers without pressing Play subtly lifts related rows for the next hour. Detail pages greet the viewer with a calibrated decision header:

  96% Match · Directed by Denis Villeneuve · Ends at 10:45 PM (resume-aware, local time, never faked for new users).

Everything is managed through /ether/—a fast, keyboard-friendly web UI built around live previews and slide-over drawers. Zero YAML files required.

Global TMDB trending charts refresh hourly and survive restarts. Continue Watching leads the default discovery layout, followed by Trending Now. Browseable collections and discovery rows have independent placement controls, with movie-genre and TV-network/studio defaults. Catalog → Library visibility adds optional, previewable country, language, genre and numeric exclusion rules without replacing the catalogue browser or launching provider searches.

Inspect what the personalization engine has learned for each viewer—their top picks, taste confidence, peak viewing hours, typical session length, and genre/person affinities—alongside granular per-person content ratings, time windows, and stream caps.

Per-Viewer Taste Profile — learned affinities, top picks, confidence & viewing habits

Viewers & Household Guardrails — activity totals, age presets & stream limits

Compose your server's Home screen with global rules and per-viewer overrides, previewing any viewer's exact live rows before saving. Build smart collections visually—or let viewers type natural descriptions like "80s sci-fi under 2 hours" straight into the Plex search bar to generate an instant browsable collection (with zero AI required, and optional local/API LLM refinement when enabled).

Home Designer — live per-viewer row composition, pinning & scheduling

Smart Collections — rule builder, generated posters & split preview workspace

Design versioned poster overlays (Cinema, Spotlight, Essential) with IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, and TMDB scores. Quality badges (4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Atmos) are strictly truthful—rendered only when backed by observed media facts. In Live TV, combine M3U/XMLTV and Xtream feeds with 24/7 virtual channels generated from your own collections.

Metadata & Poster Studio — pure-Go versioned badges from verified release facts

Live TV & Virtual Channels — 24/7 collection channels, M3U/XMLTV & multi-source failover

Dial your storage footprint from Pass-through (0 GiB) to Everyday (32 GiB) up to Edge Library (20 TiB) with household-aware movie preloading and rolling TV episode windows on local disk or a Shared NAS pool. Start on standalone SQLite, and when you're ready, migrate to an active-active PostgreSQL cluster through a guided wizard—complete with automatic connection-budget partitioning, leader election, and zero-downtime rolling updates.

Adaptive Media Cache — rolling household shelves, warm windows & Shared NAS support

Cluster Manager — 1-click guided migration from SQLite to active-active PostgreSQL HA

services:
  ether:
    image: ghcr.io/braedonsaunders/ether:latest
    container_name: ether
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host            # enables LAN GDM auto-discovery in Plex apps
    environment:
      TZ: Etc/UTC
      # ETHER_PORT: "32450"       # already running Plex on 32400 with host networking? pick another port
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache            # select /cache during the setup wizard
    # devices: ["/dev/dri:/dev/dri"]   # optional: Intel QuickSync / VAAPI hardware transcoding

Open http://localhost:32400/ether/ and finish the 4-step wizard:

1. Sign in with Plex and claim the server. It appears in every Plex app on your account immediately.
2. Add a source: a Usenet provider + Newznab indexer, or a debrid account (Real-Debrid, TorBox, AllDebrid, Premiumize, Debrid-Link, Offcloud) + torrent indexer, Cardigann site or Stremio addon, or both.
3. Choose a cache preset (an SSD with 32–50 GiB is plenty to start).
4. Paste a free TMDB API key and optional integrations (Trakt, OpenSubtitles, local Ollama/LM Studio).

Full documentation: Installation & Clustering Guide · Owner & User Guide · NAS & Homelab Templates

Ether is backed by 2,600+ offline unit, fault-injection and fuzz tests, recorded protocol conformance checks against real Plex Media Server fixtures (internal/pmsconform), and hardware transcoding verification across Apple VideoToolbox, NVIDIA NVENC (plus optional Windows RTX Video Super Resolution), Intel QuickSync, and VAAPI.

Current boundaries:

• Usenet archives must be store-mode (m0, plain or password-encrypted RAR4/RAR5/7z); compressed archives and RAR-wrapped torrents are skipped during resolution.
• NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution (nvenc-ngx-vsr) requires native Windows, an NVIDIA RTX GPU, and NVEncC64 9.38 with NGX DLLs (installed automatically when enabled unless a custom path is configured), is off by default, targets SDR H.264 HLS/DASH streams within configured height/concurrency bounds, and falls back to ordinary ABR renditions when bandwidth or concurrency requires it.
• No Plex Relay support—remote viewers connect directly via UPnP/NAT-PMP, a port forward, or your reverse proxy.
• No DVR recording.

Ether is an independent, clean-room implementation of the HTTP protocol used by compatible media client applications. It contains no proprietary Plex code, assets, or binaries. Ether ships no media content, no Usenet providers, no indexers, no Cardigann site definitions, no debrid accounts, and no third-party API keys. Owners supply their own accounts and are solely responsible for their configuration and compliance with applicable laws and service terms. See LEGAL.md.

"Plex" is a trademark of Plex, Inc. Ether is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Plex, Inc. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

GPL-3.0 License · Legal · Third-Party Notices