nowen-video

What Nowen Video does

Nowen Video is built for NAS units, home servers, and self hosted users. It automatically scans common media files such as MKV, MP4, AVI, MOV, WebM, TS, and RMVB, then reads track, codec, and duration information through FFprobe. Metadata is pulled from TMDb, Douban, TheTVDB, Bangumi, and Fanart.tv, and the tool recognizes typical movie, episode, and season naming. The library supports collections, episode navigation, search, favorites, and viewing history.

Playback and transcoding

A server side playback planner chooses direct play, Remux, or on demand HLS transcoding based on the client and the media. The official Docker image bundles FFmpeg 8.1.2, and the project supports Intel and AMD hardware acceleration through /dev/dri while keeping software transcoding as a fallback. When playback fails the planner offers an automatic downgrade path, and transcoding tasks keep persistent state with cached output, verification, recovery, and cleanup.

Interface and clients

The Aurora and Neo Glass interface unifies the home page, library, search, favorites, history, detail pages, and player, with a collapsible desktop sidebar and a mobile bottom navigation that adapt to light and dark themes. The home page aggregates a Hero carousel, continue watching, recommendations, recently added, and genre sections. Nowen Video ships a desktop client, an Android client written in Kotlin and Compose, and a one click Docker deployment.

Editorial conclusion

Nowen Video is released under the GPL-3.0 license and is written primarily in Go, with React for its interface and an official Docker Alpine image that bundles FFmpeg 8.1.2 for immediate deployment.