Having fun with a Mediarium fork: cable-style TV, Stream, page-turn readers and more...

[TryToTilt]

Hi all! I've been tinkering with a personal fork of Mediarium on my home server and wanted to share what it has turned into. It's a hobby project I'm playing around with, not a polished product, and none of it would exist without the base app. Huge thanks to the developer for building something this solid and this easy to extend. Screenshots below.

Streaming with Stream***

"Stream now" from search results and release lists: pick a quality and watch in the browser.
"Play on TV" sends a stream to an Android TV box, and "Keep it" adds it to your permanent library.
Built-in player
Plays library files right in the app: directly when the browser can, converted through Jellyfin when it can't.

Calendar with artwork Each day shows backdrops and title logos instead of text chips. Click a day to see the posters for everything on it.

Readers
Page-flip for comics and page-turn for ebooks, with an adjustable turn speed. Works on desktop and phone.

Scheduler
Time windows for activities, for example a download speed cap during evening TV time and heavier jobs overnight.

Mediarium TV: a cable-box style guide
Scheduled TV channels built from the library. Shows play back to back, and tuning in drops you mid-episode like real TV.
Streamed channels: add shows from "various sources" (picked from TMDB) and their episodes play through Stream*** when they come on. No files on disk needed. Each episode is loaded about two minutes before it airs, and if nothing can be found the channel goes "off air" until the next show.
A guide modelled on other RetroTV EPG apps: live preview, title logos, episode info, rating, HD and runtime badges, a colour per show, and 24 hours to browse.
Works as a Jellyfin Live TV tuner (M3U, XMLTV and a live stream), so the channels and guide show up on the TV in the Jellyfin app.
Old-format streams (AVI, XviD) are converted on the fly so they play in the browser too.

NSFW / adult module

• Requests and acquisition for scenes, with performers and studios, filters, and automated searching for good releases.
• Admin-only, with app settings that keep it hidden from viewers who aren't approved. It has its own hidden library and never sends notifications.

Smaller things:
ntfy push notifications (imports, failures, health, requests) and a weekly digest.
Hardcover as a fallback when Open Library doesn't know a book.
Quality profile fallback: try 4K, fall back to 1080p.
Acquisition stages with progress and countdowns.
A PAR2 repair bug I reported here, fixed upstream in 2.1.5.
More features are coming. Thanks again for such a great base to build on!

[Hoopes80]

That's cool

[rdborg]

@TryToTilt this is great to see, thank you for sharing it, and for the kind words. The cable-style TV and the page-turn readers look like fun. I'm glad the code was easy to build on.

A small note, since you've made a fork: Mediarium is AGPL-3.0, so if you share your version or let other people use it over the network, the source of your changes needs to be available to them too. For your own home server there's nothing to do. The README also says how the name and logo may be used by forks: a changed version that's shared should say it's a fork. I'd love to hear if any of it is something that could come back as a pull request later. No rush, v3 comes out this Sunday and changes a lot of the code.

[TryToTilt]

I misspoke. I didn't mean plugin in the traditional sense. I meant that it has been added as part of the base code, but in a way that it can be easily removed, and then reconnected after every update from the developer. If the endpoints dont change significantly, then my mods just reconnect with a few lines of code. But it it all one app, and everything happens inside of the app. 1 app, that is the goal. At least for my use anyway. I cant wait to see what cool things you've done with Mediarium !

[PauloJf]

Sorry to intrude, but I tend to agree with the idea of keeping things as isolated as possible under the hood. Even if the goal is for users to experience Mediarium as a single application, having TV, Movies, Books, etc. structured as independent modules would make optional additions, such as 18+ content support or alternative readers, much easier to maintain and update separately from the core project. That seems like a good balance between flexibility and maintainability.

[TryToTilt]

No intrusion at all. While the fork I've built functions in an integrated manner in use, many things have "walls", that require double confirm to engage or interact with. It is meant to be a modular architecture that can be disconnected from the main app with a few keywords in the search bar. Its all for the fun. I love ideas and sharing them, and I also live suggestions from people that know more than I do. Keep it coming and we'll all work to make it an even more awesome app !

[PauloJf]

Thanks for the welcome! I completely relate to the "it's all for the fun" aspect. Some of the best ideas come from people experimenting with their own use cases and then sharing what works.

I also tend to build self-hosted tools when I can't find exactly what I'm looking for. One of my side projects is a music manager/player focused on accurate BPM tagging and playback at a locked cadence, which started for exactly that reason.

I'm a big Kobo user as well, so the book and reader side of Mediarium is especially interesting to me. I like the idea of keeping the user experience unified while keeping the implementation as modular and loosely coupled as possible behind the scenes.

I don't know enough about the internals of v3 yet to suggest anything specific, but I'm always happy to share ideas, test features, or contribute where it makes sense. Looking forward to seeing what lands in the release!

[rdborg]

@PauloJf thank you, you're not intruding at all. I agree with keeping it one app for the person using it while the inside stays separate. Mediarium is already built that way in a simple form: movies, shows, music, ebooks and audiobooks are each switched on or off under Settings > Media types, and the code for each sits in its own package. I'll keep going in that direction.

And thanks for the offer to test. Your Kobo write-up for #34 is coming with v3, and I'd really like to hear how it goes on your Kobo once it's out. Your music tool with the BPM tagging sounds like a fun one. @TryToTilt thanks too, "one app, everything inside" is a good way to say what most people want from this.