Library management and playback for your personal movie and TV collection — the *ARR stack and a couch-ready player in one self-hosted Linux app.
Point it at your video directories. It identifies your movies and TV shows via TMDB, downloads artwork, tracks your progress, and plays everything locally through mpv — all from a real-time browser UI designed for a TV across the room.
Zero-config SQLite. No Docker. No transcoding server. No accounts. No cloud.
🌐 Visit the site · 📖 Read the docs
Warning
Alpha. Functional for daily use but under active development. Expect rough edges and occasional breaking changes between releases.
- Library management — watches your directories for new video files, identifies movies and TV shows via TMDB, and downloads artwork automatically. Low-confidence matches wait for manual review instead of polluting your library with wrong guesses.
- Playback — launches mpv on the local machine, tracks your progress, resumes where you left off, and auto-advances to the next episode.
- Release tracking — monitors TMDB daily for upcoming movies and new TV seasons tied to the shows in your library.
- Acquisition (optional) — search and queue downloads via Prowlarr. Entirely optional: Media Centarr is a full library manager without it.
- Couch-first UI — keyboard and gamepad navigation, large artwork, dark-first. Built to drive a TV from across the room.
- Real-time — every change (new file, metadata fetched, playback started) appears instantly via Phoenix LiveView. No polling, no refresh.
Media Centarr is deliberately not a streaming server or cross-platform media suite. It does not stream to remote devices, transcode, run in Docker, or support multiple users. If you need those, Jellyfin and Plex do them well.
See the FAQ for the full list and reasoning.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/media-centarr/media-centarr/main/installer/install.sh | shDownloads the latest release, verifies its checksum, installs atomically under ~/.local/lib/media-centarr/, generates a SECRET_KEY_BASE, and sets up a systemd user unit.
Full installation guide, manual install, update, and uninstall: Wiki → Installation.
- SQLite3, mpv, inotify-tools
- A free TMDB API key
Arch: sudo pacman -S sqlite mpv inotify-tools · Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install sqlite3 mpv inotify-tools
All end-user documentation lives in the Wiki:
- Getting Started — install, first run, add your library
- Using Media Centarr — browsing, playback, keyboard & gamepad, review queue
- Setup Guides — TMDB, Prowlarr, backup & restore, running as a service
- Reference — settings, FAQ, troubleshooting
git clone https://github.com/media-centarr/media-centarr.git
cd media-centarr
mix setup
mix phx.serverArchitecture, pipeline internals, input system, and other developer documentation live in docs/ and AGENTS.md. Decision records are in decisions/.
MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Shawn McCool
This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.