You need a new media server!
10/02/26
Disclaimer: This whole article is just a shill to convince you to use my media server which I’m planning to take over the world with!
Note: When referring to media server, I mean a program which lets me stream video or audio away from the device which stores it.
For the longest time, I used to use online streaming platforms to consume content; it’s what I was used to and what was convenient. Eventually, I dipped my toes in downloading content and realised that what I was watching looked crap! But, I can’t just download everything, it takes too long and I don’t have the storage for it!
Around this time, I was also setting up my home server so I decided that it was a perfect opportunity to attach a media library to it. This led me to Jellyfin and Plex, the two largest and most popular options in this space–I chose Jellyfin.
After a long time setting it up, I was frustrated to find Jellyfin playback being inconsistent across clients and many problems which seemed to stem from the whole do everything all at once model that it seems to have. As a full-time UNIX larper, I was not too happy, but I trudged on; it was all I could do really.
Then, a few months back, I decided to wipe my perfectly good, Debian home-server, to replace it with something even better; OpenBSD. While I was getting it set up, I got hit with the realisation that Jellyfin was not available–in fact, not one good media server was available on OpenBSD! For this reason, I have relied on dubious streaming sites but I, once again, was faced with the problem which led me to use Jellyfin in the first place!
Dissatisfied, I finally had the motivation to make my own.
I had, early in October of 2025, attempted to create it, but
I ran into the ever infamous skill issue; I had to learn
how the HTTP protocol worked
! Because I am lazy, I further delayed the project until
December 2025, where I began to read around HTTP/1.1.
After a while, I have finished my initial version of parados. It has shaped to be a really simple media server which has served all my needs and does most of what I expect it to do. If you want to know more about the philosophy the project follows, click me!
Very Reliable Benchmarks!
Performance:
According to my personal experience, parados loads almost
instantly while Jellyfin (even with transcoding disabled)
seems to take a while to load any video; this is especially
noticeable when I’m trying from my phone.
Neither of them have problems loading 18GB 4K videos.
Clients:
Jellyfin’s clients are.. inconsistent. They regularly
just break in my experience; not very nice. parados, on
the other hand, has never failed me! The only (major)
problem that I have, is I can’t load subtitles from the
WebUI, but that, I hope, is easily solvable.
You can also rice parados.
At the end of the day, parados exists because there are no good, minimal media server solutions for OpenBSD or Linux.
After reading my propaganda post, if it interests you at all, you can find parados HERE
If you feel inspired enough to create your own client, there are man-pages on the parados repo!