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

Features

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 (also called "cloud accounts") are the social bridge between Media Server's, and the gateway to all of Cardinal's cloud services. Accounts are free to create and use, and optional [paid subscriptions](https://cardinalapps.io/pricing) are available that unlock capabilities in your self-hosted apps, and grant you access to Cardinal's other cloud services.

Using a Cardinal Account is entirely optional, and you can use local accounts instead. However, users that use a free or paid cloud account will benefit from these fundamental improvements to their apps:

### Stronger Authentication for Your Apps

Using a Cardinal Account enables stronger authentication security for your apps. The cloud authentication paradigm means that your Media Server is relieved of credential management duties, so that you don't have to worry about how passwords are stored or how your users will get their password reset emails.

You'll also have the full power of Cardinal's cloud security infrastructure on your side, enabling multiple extra security layers designed to detect and block bad users. There is a lot that happens when a user clicks the Login with Cardinal button, and it's all designed to keep your data safe.

### Social Gateway

(The features described in this section are currently in development).

You can use a single Cardinal Account across all of the Media Server's that you are invited to, allowing you to build a cross-server identity. Whether you're streaming from your server or theirs, your Watch Together chat messages will look exactly the same.

### Secure Sharing

(The features described in this section are currently in development).

Sharing your content from your self-hosted applications has traditionally been challenging, requiring configuring firewalls, forwarding ports, and configuring whitelists. When you use a Cardinal Account, you can take advantage of Cardinal's cloud services to securely share your media using trusted relay servers.

Information on how Cloud Accounts integrate with your Media Server.

Use a Cardinal Account

Gateway to the cloud for your self-hosted Cardinal apps.

⚠️ The column names for the SQLite database have been updated (well, fixed). SQLite users will need to reset their database using [these instructions](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-media-server/uninstall). Sorry about that.

#### General

- Added user setting for glass accents.
- Fix de-index media feature.

#### Music

- Added "Audio Playback Timeout" setting.
- Added Music History page
- Use colors from album cover for animation.

#### Music App

1. Add library switcher to Music Releases page.
2. Add library switcher to Music Artists page.
3. Fix various virtual scroll bugs.

#### Music

- Add playback queues.
- Mini-Player:
  - Add next/prev.
  - Show upcoming tracks in queue.
- Listen Now page:
  - Add Shuffle Library.
  - Add Most Played Tracks.
  - Add Recently Added Releases.
  - Enable global library filter.
- Music Tracks page:
  - Enable global library filter.

#### Admin

- Add local accounts.

#### General

- Update top-right header layout:
  - Add global Library selector (only visible on pages that support filtering by library).
  - Add connection status indicators for local server and cloud server.
  - Remove dedicated Settings button (the cog icon).
  - All-new expandable user menu layout for logged-in Cardinal accounts.

This is a quick release on the beta and stable channels to fix a crash that made it into 0.4.0 when enabling developer mode in an app.

#### Users

1. Add Users page to Admin app.
2. Add user management drawer.
3. Add enable/disable user feature.
4. Add user seats.

#### SSO

A new, more secure SSO flow is available. These features lock your self-hosted apps to your Cardinal account, and are visible on [account.cardinalapps.io](account.cardinalapps.io).

Users that are upgrading from v0.3.x and are currently using a Cardinal account will be asked to claim their server the next time they log in.

1. Add the ability to claim a self-hosted app with your Cardinal account.
2. Add App Authorizations for all users that join a self-hosted app.

[More info.](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-media-server/accounts)

#### Role-Based Access Control

1. Add RBAC page with roles and capabilities.
2. Add roles assignments to Users.
3. Add RBAC checks to all API endpoints.
4. Update OpenAPI docs to show which capabilities on each endpoint.
5. Add RBAC checks to app UI.

[More info.](https://help.cardinalapps.io/guides/cardinal-media-server/role-based-access-control)

#### Indexing

1. Update layout for the Indexing page.
2. Move Deindexing from the Settings Panel to the Indexing page.

#### Jobs

1. Update layout for the Jobs page.

#### Settings Panel

1. Update settings panel fields:
2. Disable Factory Reset (temporarily).
3. Added max concurrent players, and max current playing players settings.

1. Updated the [docker-compose.yaml](https://help.cardinalapps.io/getting-started/quick-start) service and container names to eliminate namespace conflicts when running multiple media servers simultaneously. Users must update their docker-compose.yaml file.

#### New

1. The Dashboard app has been renamed from "Dashboard" to "Admin", and the URL has changed to `/admin`.
2. A unique signing secret will be generated automatically by the server.
3. The build tag has been added to the app settings.
4. Added the Music Releases page.
5. Added the Music Release page.
6. Added the Music Artists page.

#### Fixed

1. Fixed an issue where users could get stuck in the First Time Setup until the next health check.
2. Fixed an issue where data could not be removed during a factory reset.

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

v0.6.0

stable

v0.5.1

v0.5.0

v0.4.1

v0.4.0

v0.3.3

v0.3.2

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