Introduction
De Rien is a self-hosted media server: it organizes your movie and series collection, makes it beautiful, and plays it on every device you own — with no subscription and no cloud account.
What De Rien is
You point De Rien at a folder of movies and series. It fetches posters, summaries, cast and seasons from TMDB, then serves everything through a fast, polished interface — on your TV, your phone or a browser. Multiple profiles, resume-where-you-left-off, subtitles, hardware transcoding: it's all there, and all optional.
It runs on your hardware, at your place. Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly connect it to something.
One container, one file
De Rien is designed to run as a single Docker container. There is no separate database to install and babysit: it uses an embedded SQLite database that lives in-process, and migrations run automatically on startup.
- No PostgreSQL, no MySQL, no Redis. One image, one container.
- One data volume. The database file and the cached artwork all live under a single directory, so a single Docker volume covers your whole instance.
- Read-only media. Your library is mounted read-only — De Rien reads your files, it never touches them.
That means it happily runs on almost anything: a mini-PC, a NAS, or the laptop that's been living in a drawer.
What you'll need
- Docker and Docker Compose on the host machine.
- A folder of media files on that machine (a NAS mount is fine).
- An outbound internet connection — for TMDB lookups, sign-in emails and the optional update check.
Optional, for later:
- An NVIDIA GPU if you want hardware-accelerated transcoding (De Rien falls back to your CPU otherwise — no GPU required).
- A public URL and a reverse proxy (for TLS) if you're exposing your server to the internet rather than just your home network.
Next step
Ready? Head to Installation — you'll be up and running in about five minutes.