Server dashboard

Includes a powerful dashboard for operating your Media Server.

Index your media

Index all your music, photos, and video files without needing to change your folder structure.

Modern web apps

Comes bundled with the Music, Photos, and Cinema web apps.

Share with friends

Invite your friends to your Media Server, and join theirs.

Login with Cardinal

Create a free account for access to Cardinal's online services, and to better secure your Media Server.

Total privacy

Your personal data never leaves your hardware. Only you know what you're listening to, watching, or looking at.

Web scale at home

Designed around being container-first, with plug-and-play support for PostgreSQL.

Relay access

Avoid exposing your Media Server to the internet by using Cardinal's secure relay servers.

Offline access

Cardinal apps can be used on your home network without an internet connection.

Open API

Includes a fully documented API for you to build with.

The Media Server is the heart of the Cardinal ecosystem, and powers all of your self-hosted apps.

Features

cardinal-home-server-hero.jpg

Cardinal Home Server login screen

Indexing in Cardinal Home Server

Selecting a Cardinal Home Server job

Running Cardinal Home Server jobs

Get all Cardinal apps for free with Cardinal Media Server. Comes with a dashboard and everything needed to run your apps. No sign up required.

All your music

Browse through your artists, albums, and songs with a sleek UI.

High bitrate playback

Get the complete sound signature of your music without ever needing to compromise on bitrate.

Smart suggestions

Let Cardinal learn about your listening habits and moods to get music suggestions.

Playlists

Make playlists for any occasion, and get playlist suggestions.

Lyrics

Listen along with lyrics sourced from your file metadata and from online.

Genres

Browse and play your music according to genre.

Playback history

Keep an archive of everything you've listened to.

Visualizers

Hit "fullscreen" and party like it's 2005.

Ratings

Assign ratings to your songs, albums, and arists to improve suggestions.

For audiophiles and casuals alike, with a set of features that long time music collectors will love.

cardinal-music-hero.jpg

Cardinal Music login screen

Collect, curate, and rediscover your music every day with Cardinal Music's modern interface and powerful audio playback features.

Photo archive

Use a powerful interface to scrub through decades of photographs.

Face detection

World Map

Browse a world map of everywhere you've snapped a picture.

Use your photos from Google Photos

Cardinal fully supports the format exported by Google Takeout, so that you can make the move.

OCR support

Use optical character recognition to make text in photos searchable.

HEIC support

View HEIC photos on any device, even ones that don't support the format natively.

Photo albums

Get smart photo albums, and create your own albums too.

Videos, too

"Photos" also means videos, gifs, and photo bursts.

Keep your folders

Browse with your file system folder structure so that you don't have to reorganize anything.

Made to handle the era of camera ubiquity, and the lifetime of photographs that comes with it.

cardinal-photos-hero.jpg

All photos sorted and grouped by date.

Photo timeline with multiple photos selected.

Photo viewer showing a single photo and its EXIF metadata.

Photos in a photo album

Archive a lifetime of photographs, and keep them safe from prying eyes. Only you can be trusted as the keeper of your photos and videos.

Your own theater

Enjoy your own movies & TV with that familiar online streaming experience.

Watch history

Keep track of what you're watching, and resume at any time.

Recommendations

Let Cardinal learn your viewing habits and moods to get relevant movie & TV suggestions.

Custom TV channels

Create and manage any number of custom TV channels, each with their own program lineup.

Watch together

Transcoding

Transcode your video and audio for greater client device support.

Collections

Group your movies & TV by series and saga to browse by collection.

Organize your movies & TV into whatever works best for your binge weekends.

Embrace your inner projectionist and never worry about your favourite show leaving again.

cardinal-cinema-hero.jpg

Cardinal Cinema login screen

Take back the future of movie and TV streaming in your home, and get that familiar online streaming experience for your own media.

Cardinal accounts provide secure authentication for your Cardinal Media Server and other self-hosted apps. Accounts are free to create.

Accounts are not required to use your Media Server and all of its offline features locally. However, an account is required to use Cardinal's cloud services.

Information on how Cloud Accounts integrate with your Media Server.

Use a Cardinal Account

Free

Early Adopter

Secure authentication for your Cardinal apps.

Cardinal Home Server is now known as Cardinal Media Server.

##### New:

- Added music indexing.
- Added music playback capabilities to the Music app.
- Added the Tracks page to the Music app.

##### Changed:

- Removed server owner info from login screen.
- Updated the Factory Reset and Reset Media Data flows.

##### ⚠️ Breaking changes:

You will need to start with a new database instance. Run `docker compose down -v` before updating to remove your current database and cache.

##### New:

- Added the [Libraries](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-home-server/libraries) page to the Dashboard for music.
- Jobs now run concurrently.
- Added new environment variables:
  - `POSTGRES_HOST`
  - `POSTGRES_PORT`
  - `MAX_CONCURRENT_JOBS`

##### Updated:

- Updated login screen layout.
- Updated layout of the Advanced tab in the Dashboard settings.
- Removed GraphQL and moved the four GraphQL endpoints to the REST API.
- The EventSource endpoint now requires an auth token.
- Optimized indexing update stream to the clients.
- Optimized out most of the preparation phase of jobs.
- These environment variables have changed:
  - `LOG_HTTP` is now `HTTP_LOG_LEVEL`
  - `LOG_EVENTS` is now `EVENTS_LOG_LEVEL`
  - `DEBUG_INDEXING` is now `INDEXING_LOG_LEVEL`
  - `DEBUG_JOBS` is now `JOBS_LOG_LEVEL`
- Added logging levels.

##### Fixed:

- Various uncaught errors that could arise during indexing.

- Added an option to disable the Guest account.
- Added the SIGNING_SECRET environment variable.
- Added buttons to copy tokens to the developer tools.
- Various styling improvements for mobile devices.

##### New

- Added [music indexing](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-home-server/indexing/music).
- Added the [Album Art](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-home-server/jobs/album-art) job.
- Added the [Photo Variations](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-home-server/jobs/photo-variations) job.
    - Photo variations will be used during the [Photo Thumbnails](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-home-server/jobs/photo-thumbnails) job  and will be served to client devices.
- Added the Apps widget in the Dashboard Overview.
- Added the Activity widget in the header.
- Indexing history now shows the list of all indexed files.


##### Updated

- New indexing page layout in the Dashboard.
- New login screen layout for self-hosted apps.
- Improvements to the photo viewer layout are in progress.

##### New:

- Added the jobs system, and the first job: create_photo_thumbnails.
- Added the beta release channel.
- Added a setting to open apps in a new tab.
- Added app logos to the login pages.

##### Changed:

- Initial file indexing is faster now because jobs run afterwards.

##### Fixed:

- Fixed an issue where the theme selected during setup was being discarded.
- Fixed a timezone issue with some date values in the database.
- Fixed an issue where active users would get stuck loading.
- Fixed an issue where photos were not filling entire rows.

##### New:

- Active users on the Overview page in the Dashboard.

##### New:

- Added fallback photo thumbnails for certain edge cases.
- New container variable: HEIF_CONVERSION_TIMEOUT

##### Fixed:

- Fixed an issue where indexing would hang when encountering a corrupt HEIC file.
- Fixed an issue where some unsupported browsers were trying to load HEIC files.
- Fixed a few issues with the dark colour theme.
- Fixed an issue where reloading the page would cause the login state to be lost.
- Fixed an issue where there was an extra "v" in the available update URL.
- Various other small improvements.

##### Fixed:

- A specific photo indexing issue with Google Photos dates.

##### New:

- Server name setting
- Telemetry setting

##### Fixed:

- Various photo indexing issues.

##### New:

- Cloud status icon.

##### Fixed:

- Fixed various indexing issues.

##### New:

- "Automatically check for updates" feature and a setting to disable it.
- Can add photos to photo albums.
- Automatic cover photo for photo albums.

##### Fixed:

- Photo indexing bugs.

Release notes

Cardinal Media Server

beta

stable

v0.3.1

v0.3.0

v0.2.2

v0.2.1

v0.2.0

v0.1.15

v0.1.14

v0.1.13

v0.1.12

v0.1.11

v0.1.10

v0.1.9