ether

The whole TMDB catalogue, inside the apps your family already uses.
Plex, Infuse, Swiftfin, Jellyfin, Emby, Silo, Stremio: one on-demand server, running alongside your local library.

Press Play on a title in Plex, Infuse, Swiftfin, Jellyfin, Emby, Silo, or Stremio. 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.

Things to know first · Why Ether exists · Every app, one server · Alongside your library · Under the hood · Owner console · Install in 5 minutes · FAQ

Why Ether exists

A typical automated media setup is built from several separate projects: Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, Overseerr, Kometa, Tautulli, and debrid mount tools. Wiring them together means download clients, path mappings, webhooks, and FUSE or WebDAV mounts that a media server has to scan. A new title still has to download, unpack, and be indexed before anyone can press Play.

Ether takes a different approach to the on-demand case. Instead of presenting virtual files for another media server to scan, Ether speaks your apps' own languages. It is a Plex server to Plex apps, a Jellyfin server to Infuse, Swiftfin, and Findroid, an Emby server to Emby apps, and a Silo server to Silo, backed by the live TMDB catalogue and an on-demand byte-range streaming engine.

When you open your app, 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 those bytes.

Every app, one server

Ether is a Plex server to one app and a Jellyfin server to another, at the same time. Turn on the protocols your household uses under Server › Apps.

• Viewers are protocol-neutral: Ether keeps its own viewer accounts, and Plex is optional. If you connect Plex, people you share your Plex server with appear automatically as Ether viewers and can approve Jellyfin Quick Connect or Silo device pairing in /ether/me using their Plex sign-in.
• Cross-app progress and preferences: Watch history, resume positions, ratings, and subtitle preferences (mode, language order, and styling) live on the Ether viewer account. Setting subtitle preferences in Silo or Jellyfin applies across every app. Silo Watch Party and Jellyfin SyncPlay clients also share a common room clock.
• One playback engine: Every protocol routes through one session broker (internal/sessions). Concurrent stream limits, bandwidth budgets, household safety rules, and owner Stop actions apply across all apps together, and concurrent plays of the same release share one upstream fetch.
• Verified protocol conformance: Jellyfin (target 12.4), Emby (target 4.10.2), and Silo responses are verified offline against recorded reference corpora (internal/conform, cmd/conformdiff) with zero blocking diffs. Plex responses are checked against recorded Plex Media Server fixtures (internal/conform/plex, cmd/conformdiff, cmd/plexparity) with a CI gate on load-bearing fields.
• No borrowed web clients: Ether ships no third-party web client code. Opening /web on a Jellyfin or Emby listener serves a translated Ether page naming the supported native apps and how to connect.

Alongside your local library

Keep Plex Media Server, Jellyfin, or Emby and the tools that curate the files you own. Ether runs alongside them for on-demand titles outside your local disk collection. Availability depends on your configured sources; an on-demand catalogue is not a durable local archive.

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

Under the hood

     Plex · Infuse · Swiftfin · Findroid · Jellyfin · Emby · Silo · Stremio · WebDAV · DLNA
                                    │  browse · search · Play · scrub
                                    ▼
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────── ETHER ────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  App Protocols           Plex · Jellyfin · Emby · Silo · Stremio · WebDAV · M3U/XMLTV · DLNA  │
  │  Shared Experience       Personalization · Taste models · Unified age ratings · 17-hub search │
  │  Session Broker          Capability registry · Stream grants · Shared limits · Watch Party    │
  │  Smart Resolver          Ranked quality ladder · TRaSH formats · Measured 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   │
  │  Subtitle & Cut Aligner  On-pick timing sync · Mojibake repair · Piecewise dialogue solver    │
  │  Media & GPU Transcode   Direct play · Copy remux · HW ABR HLS/DASH/HTTP · RTX Video VSR      │
  └──────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────┘
                                     │                                       │
                        Usenet Providers (Primary + Backfill)       Debrid Accounts (RD · TorBox · AD · PM · DL · OC)
                        + Newznab Indexers & Cardigann Sites        + Torznab, Stremio Addons & Cardigann

1. Native Usenet and debrid streaming without extraction

• Lazy store-mode archive indexing (including encrypted sets): To open a 60-part RAR4, RAR5, or 7z post on Usenet, Ether reads 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 and integrity oracle: Ordinary playback does not wait on full PAR2 repair (bounded repair of missing byte ranges is opt-in). Instead, Ether fetches 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 filenames and volume order, and verifies slice checksums on the spot. Repost message-IDs are kept as per-segment alternates.
• Truthful mid-file health checks and live hedging: Providers often answer 223 to STAT for DMCA-removed articles that fail with 451 on BODY. Ether combines spread STAT checks with mid-file BODY yEnc-header reads, bails out on the first confirmed miss across all providers, spills over to the next primary provider when connections are busy, and hedges stalled live article reads on spare capacity.
• Surgical Matroska damage concealment and live failover: Priority semaphores protect live reads over read-ahead and background prefetch (and yield debrid prefetch to mid-file range seeks). If an article is missing mid-stream inside an unlaced Matroska cluster, Ether skips unaffected clusters via container cues and conceals the gap while warming an alternate release in the background. If a release stalls or fails, Ether swaps to another release at the same scene with matched audio loudness.

2. Server-side NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution (nvenc-ngx-vsr) and GPU pipelines

90s sitcoms, classic anime, and DVD-era 480p/576p/720p shows look soft on a 4K TV, and client-side upscalers exist on only a few 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 inside the server's HLS/DASH transcode pipeline, cleaning compression artifacts and reconstructing edges before the stream reaches an Apple TV, Roku, iPad, or browser. It takes 8-bit SDR, progressive sources (H.264, HEVC, MPEG-2, VP9, AV1) and outputs H.264; interlaced sources, selected subtitles, and audio that needs converting use the ordinary transcoder.
• Self-protecting ABR and fallback: RTX VSR is opt-in (off by default) with owner-configurable source/target resolution caps (for example <=720p -> 1080p), quality tiers, and concurrency limits. Enhancement is reserved for the top ABR rendition; if client bandwidth dips or the GPU concurrency limit is reached, Ether drops to ordinary hardware or software ABR renditions without interrupting playback.
• Probed FFmpeg capabilities: At startup, Ether probes the installed ffmpeg for available filters and hardware encoders across NVIDIA NVENC, Intel QuickSync, VAAPI, and Apple VideoToolbox. Builds without libzimg (zscale) use built-in colorspace/scale filters for SDR conversions and libplacebo, OpenCL, or hardware tone mapping for HDR-to-SDR conversions.

3. Subtitle timing correction and piecewise dialogue alignment

• On-pick timing correction and mojibake repair: Subtitles are downloaded only when a viewer explicitly selects one. When a viewer picks an external text subtitle, Ether aligns its cue times against an embedded text subtitle track read via container byte ranges (or speech-energy cross-correlation across short audio windows), fitting both constant offset and frame-rate ratio (23.976 / 24 / 25 fps) within a bounded time budget. Mis-decoded Windows-1252/Latin-1 UTF-8 text (mojibake) is repaired automatically, and viewers can upload .srt, .vtt, .ass, or .ssa files directly from Plex Web.
• Cross-cut alignment: When a stream fails over from a Theatrical WEB-DL to an Extended Blu-ray rip, or when TheIntroDB skip markers were timed against a different cut, Ether aligns the subtitle dialogue timelines with a piecewise-linear solver without downloading video, accounting for studio logo offsets, PAL speedup, and inserted scenes, and stops Skip Credits right before mid- or post-credits stinger dialogue.

4. Personalization across your apps

Every person's Home experience is 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 and self-gated re-ranker: Row ordering uses a Beta-Bernoulli bandit that blends hand-tuned priors, server-wide evidence, and the viewer's own play rate, held stable during an active browsing visit. A background logistic-regression re-ranker activates only when it beats the baseline on held-out AUC.
• Server-driven Home and virtual libraries: Plex and Silo receive the full server-driven Home. For Jellyfin and Emby apps (including Infuse, Swiftfin, Findroid, and Streamyfin), Ether publishes each viewer's top personalized rows as virtual libraries in /UserViews (For You, Because you watched…, Trending), populates Jellyfin's Suggestions tab (/Movies/Recommendations), and seeds default home section ordering for new viewers while keeping Continue Watching, Next Up, and Latest per viewer.

The owner experience

Everything is managed through /ether/, a fast, keyboard-friendly web console with live previews, slide-over drawers, an Overview Next steps bar, and full translations in 19 languages alongside English.

The sidebar groups everything by what you are doing:

• Overview, Activity & Viewers at the top for live sessions, 30-day playback history, and household accounts.
• Library: Catalog (browser, three New releases modes, and ordered show/hide Rules), Collections, Home (Home Designer), Live TV, Calendar, and Metadata (Ratings, Artwork, Episode order).
• Streaming: Sources (Debrid, Usenet, Indexers, Stats on one level), Quality (Profiles, Rules, Check quality, Searching, Blocklist, Pinned, History), Cache, and Playback.
• Server: General (every app's port and address under How apps connect, plus an optional outbound HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy for source traffic), Apps, Integrations, Notifications, Cluster, and Maintenance (Backups & import, Updates, Health, Logs). Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K elsewhere) to search pages and individual settings; choosing a setting opens its page, expands More options if needed, and highlights the row.

Release profiles, sources, and new-release modes

In Quality › Profiles, each profile opens in a drawer organized in the order Ether evaluates candidates:

1. Never play: resolution and runtime-based size bounds for movies and episodes, Allow CAM, Allow HDR, Allow Dolby Vision, and Only play / Never play rules.
2. What matters most: a single numbered, drag-to-reorder ranking ladder (Prefer rules, Audio language, Connection fit, Resolution, Release type, HDR, Played fine recently, Video codec, Audio format, Larger file).

Check quality, a tab of its own, shows the quality a viewer gets in a given app, at home or away, and which rule decided. Below the profile list, Away from home sets the Away profile and a bitrate limit in Mbps. Which source goes first applies to every profile: Start fastest, Usenet first, Debrid first, Always Usenet, or Always cached debrid. The Version menu sets how many same-quality versions to offer.

In Catalog › Settings, New releases offers three modes: When they can play (recommended: new movies appear once Ether finds a playable release matching your quality profile), On digital release (a digital or physical release date has passed), or Right away. Upcoming content lists unreleased movies and episodes, and is off by default. Content ratings across Catalog › Settings › Rules and viewer content rating limits use a unified age-level model so equivalent ratings (PG, TV-PG, regional 6+/7+) match together.

Taste intelligence and viewer accounts

Inspect what the personalization engine has learned for each viewer alongside age-level rating limits, time windows, stream limits, cross-app subtitle preferences, and read-only From Plex defaults (language preferences, share filters, and download permissions synced from plex.tv). Add local viewers or share one-time invite links from the Add viewer drawer.

Per-viewer taste profile: learned affinities, top picks, confidence, and viewing habits

Viewers and household guardrails: activity totals, age presets, From Plex defaults, and stream limits

Home Designer and Collections Studio

Compose your server's Home screen with global rules and per-viewer overrides, previewing any viewer's live rows before saving. Build rule-based or Look Ahead (upcoming) collections visually in Collections, or let viewers type natural descriptions like "80s sci-fi under 2 hours" into search to generate an instant browsable collection (with zero AI required, and optional local or API language-model refinement when enabled under Integrations › Language model).

Home Designer: live per-viewer row composition, pinning, and scheduling

Smart Collections: rule builder, generated posters, and split preview workspace

Live poster studio and 24/7 Live TV guide

Design versioned poster overlays (Cinema, Spotlight, Essential) with IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, and TMDB scores, or connect self-hosted PostersPlus or XRDB, hosted BetterPosters or Rating Poster Database (RPDB), or a custom URL template, each set up under Integrations and picked as the Poster source under Metadata › Artwork. For claimed Plex servers, Apps › Plex › Account also offers an optional Use Plex's metadata for Plex apps toggle (off by default). In Live TV, combine M3U/XMLTV and Xtream feeds with 24/7 virtual channels built in a single drawer with a paintable weekly schedule grid in your timezone, playout modes (in order, shuffle, random, marathon, newest first), and repeat-avoidance windows.

Metadata and Poster Studio: pure-Go versioned badges from verified release facts

Live TV and Virtual Channels: paintable weekly schedule, M3U/XMLTV, and HLS/DASH playback

Adaptive media cache, guided recovery, and PostgreSQL clustering

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. Maintenance › Backups & import provides 1-click guided restore with automatic rollback, in-app service restart, and a startup status and recovery page. Start on standalone SQLite, and when you need multi-node scale, migrate to an active-active multi-node cluster on a PostgreSQL 14+ database you provide through the guided Cluster wizard (Ether does not make PostgreSQL itself highly available).

Adaptive media cache: rolling household shelves, warm windows, and Shared NAS support

Cluster Manager: guided migration from SQLite to an active-active cluster on PostgreSQL

Install in five minutes

services:
  ether:
    image: ghcr.io/braedonsaunders/ether:latest
    container_name: ether
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host            # Linux only: enables LAN GDM auto-discovery and UPnP
    environment:
      TZ: Etc/UTC
      # ETHER_PORT: "32450"       # already running Plex on 32400? pick another port
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache            # used automatically on a fresh install
    # devices: ["/dev/dri:/dev/dri"]   # optional: Intel QuickSync / VAAPI hardware transcoding
    # Docker Desktop (Windows and macOS) or Linux bridge mode:
    # Remove network_mode: host above and uncomment ports:
    # ports:
    #   - "32400:32400/tcp"       # owner console, Plex, and /jellyfin, /emby, /silo paths
    #   - "8096:8096/tcp"         # optional: dedicated Jellyfin port (not needed if using :32400/jellyfin)
    #   - "8097:8097/tcp"         # optional: dedicated Emby port (not needed if using :32400/emby)
    #   - "8090:8090/tcp"         # optional: dedicated Silo port (not needed if using :32400/silo)

Docker Desktop (Windows and macOS): Docker Desktop runs containers inside a Linux VM where network_mode: host does not publish ports to your computer or LAN. Comment out network_mode: host and uncomment ports: ["32400:32400/tcp"] (plus 8096:8096/tcp only if you want the dedicated Jellyfin port instead of http://HOST:32400/jellyfin).

Open http://localhost:32400/ether/ and complete the setup wizard. If Plex already uses 32400, Ether moves to 32450, and the log shows the address.

1. Choose your language for the console and default household audio and subtitle tracks.
2. Choose your apps (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, Stremio, Silo, DLNA, Files/WebDAV, M3U & XMLTV) and create your owner account: sign in with Plex and claim the server, or create a local Ether owner account (password at least 12 characters).
3. Add a streaming source and indexer: a debrid account (Real-Debrid, TorBox, AllDebrid, Premiumize, Debrid-Link, Offcloud), a Usenet provider, or both, plus a Stremio addon link, Torznab/Newznab URL, or Prowlarr import (tracker sites can be added later under Sources › Indexers).
4. Choose a cache preset (an SSD with 32–50 GiB is plenty to start).
5. Catalogue: official builds include a TMDB key; custom builds need a free TMDB API key. Add Trakt, Simkl, OpenSubtitles, or a local language model (Ollama/LM Studio) later under Integrations.

Documentation: Installation & Clustering Guide · Owner & User Guide · Multi-App Architecture & Watch Party · Performance Architecture · NAS & Homelab Templates

Things to know first

• What Ether is not: Ether is not a local-file media server. It does not scan folders of video files on your disk, and it does not replace Plex Media Server, Jellyfin, or Emby for your personal media collection. Ether also ships no media content, no Usenet providers, no debrid accounts, no indexers, and no tracker definitions.
• What accounts you need:
  1. Catalogue metadata and artwork come from TMDB. Official builds include a TMDB key; custom builds need a free TMDB API key.
  2. At least one streaming source: a Usenet provider, a debrid service (Real-Debrid, TorBox, AllDebrid, Premiumize, Debrid-Link, or Offcloud), or both.
  3. At least one indexer: a Newznab or Torznab indexer, a Prowlarr instance, or a Stremio stream addon.
  4. Optional: a Plex account if you want to use official Plex apps. Jellyfin, Emby, Silo, Stremio, WebDAV, M3U/XMLTV, and DLNA work with local Ether accounts alone.
• System requirements:
  • CPU and RAM: 2 CPU cores and 1 GiB of RAM are enough for direct play, container remuxing, and audio transcoding. Video transcoding requires a supported GPU (NVIDIA NVENC, Intel QuickSync, VAAPI, or Apple VideoToolbox) or 4+ CPU cores for software encoding.
  • Disk space: Configurable from 0 GiB (pass-through mode) to 32+ GiB on an SSD for the default segment cache, or multiple terabytes if you enable household preloading.
• Outbound network activity: Ether sends no analytics or usage telemetry. By default it checks GitHub's signed release feed once a day for updates and queries TheIntroDB (api.theintrodb.org) for intro and credits skip timestamps during playback; both can be turned off in the console. When Plex is claimed and enabled, it communicates with plex.tv; turning the Plex app off stops Plex sign-in, publishing, sharing, and metadata traffic. See What outbound connections does Ether make? for the full list.
• Legal responsibility: You supply your own accounts, providers, and indexers, and you are responsible for complying with applicable laws and service terms. Read LEGAL.md.

Questions you're about to ask

Where it stands today

Ether is backed by 5,700+ offline unit, fault-injection, and fuzz tests, a 540k-title CI performance gate (internal/perfharness), recorded protocol conformance suites against Plex Media Server (internal/conform/plex), Jellyfin 12.4, Emby 4.10.2, and Silo (internal/conform), 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 and concurrency bounds, and falls back to ordinary ABR renditions when bandwidth or concurrency requires it.
• No bundled third-party web clients (jellyfin-web or Emby Web); web-wrapper apps (Jellyfin for Android phones, Jellyfin Desktop, Emby for TV 2.x on Apple TV) are unsupported.
• No Plex Relay support: remote viewers connect directly via UPnP/NAT-PMP, a port forward, Tailscale, or your reverse proxy.
• No DVR recording.

Credits

Thank you to the community contributors and reporters who shaped 0.3.0:

• FarkasLabs for profiling and fixing the Plex settings-copy hotspot (#206) and designing the admission fence and atomic receipt commit for uncertain outbound Plex watch-state sends (#207).
• AlexBlomkvist (bmkhib) for the live CPU and allocation profile on the Plex Home watched-episode path (#203) and the Tracearr library-wide episode/season sync diagnosis (#209).
• TheIndieArmy for limiting Plex Web HDR remux promotion to affirmative 10-bit/PQ client profiles (#190).
• mvanbaak for reporting and verifying on FreeBSD the source-swap failure on FFmpeg builds compiled without libzimg/zscale (#201).
• XenoUniv3rse for diagnosing why plex.tv marked LAN connections as remote when Secure connections was set to Required (#192).
• evulhotdog for adding built-in TRaSH release group custom formats to quality profile imports (#172) and contributing configurable indexer User-Agent presets (#213, in 0.3.2).

Legal

Ether is an independent, clean-room implementation of the HTTP protocols used by compatible media client applications. It contains no proprietary Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, or Silo code, assets, binaries, or web clients. Ether ships no media content, no Usenet providers, no indexers, no Cardigann site definitions, no debrid accounts, and no third-party API keys other than the TMDB catalogue key built into official builds. 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. "Jellyfin" is a trademark of the Jellyfin project. "Emby" is a trademark of Emby LLC. "Silo" and "Stremio" are trademarks of their respective owners. Ether is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Plex, Inc., the Jellyfin project, Emby LLC, Silo, or Stremio. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

GPL-3.0 License · Legal · Third-Party Notices