beam

NOTE: Major refactoring is to be expected next year on-and-off given time. It will be alpha-ready for testing and feedback later.

Beam is a high-performance, scalable media server to stream video, audio, and other content with real-time transcoding capabilities. It is ideal for home labs, small business that need to stream content on a variety of devices.

Features

• HLS/DASH streaming
• Real-time remuxing/transcoding with hardware acceleration (NVENC, VAAPI)
• Fully-distributed and Kubernetes-native architecture

Motivation

Beam originally started as a project to surpass the limitations of Jellyfin, a popular open-source media server. Jellyfin is a great project, but we need a more modern, straightforward solution that is as easy to use but more feature-rich and actively developed.

Architecture

Beam consists of multiple backend services that work together to provide a seamless media streaming experience. The main components are:

• beam-stream: Media streaming service that handles live transcoding, caching, and streaming of media files (Rust/GraphQL/gRPC/ffmpeg).

Currently, there is one client app to interact with Beam:

• beam-web: Web frontend that provides a user-friendly interface to browse and stream media content (TypeScript/React).

Installation & Deployment

Quick Start with Docker/Podman Compose

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/justin13888/beam.git
   cd beam

2. Configure environment variables:

   cp .env.example .env

3. Start the services:

   # Using Podman
   podman compose up -d
   
   # Or using Docker
   docker compose up -d

4. Access the application:

   • Frontend: http://localhost:8080
   • Backend API: http://localhost:8000
   • GraphQL Playground: http://localhost:8000/graphql

Production Deployment

For production deployments, we recommend reviewing all configurations in .env but at least:

1. Security:

   • Change POSTGRES_PASSWORD to a strong, unique password
   • Use HTTPS with a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, Traefik)
   • Set SERVER_URL and C_STREAM_SERVER_URL to your public domain

2. Storage:

   • Set HOST_VIDEO_DIR to your media library location
   • Ensure sufficient disk space for HOST_CACHE_DIR
   • Consider using external volumes for HOST_POSTGRES_DATA

3. Performance:

   • Enable hardware acceleration for transcoding (configure in beam-stream)
   • Set ENABLE_METRICS=true for monitoring
   • Adjust RUST_LOG to info or warn in production

Development

See individual README files for each component.

To spin up entire dependency stack with Docker Compose for testing, run:

podman compose -f compose.dependencies.yaml up

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL License - see the LICENSE file for details.