Source and lineup, side by side
Browse the source's groups and channels in one pane and your own filtered lineup in another, searching each independently. Pick what you want without losing your place.
Features
A complete television system,
A complete television system,
running on your own machine
Mimir is one install that covers the whole job: reading channels from your tuner, filling a guide, recording what you ask it to, and serving all of it to every screen you own.
Live channels
Channel streaming that behaves like television
Press a channel and it should start, not buffer, negotiate, or think about it. Mimir picks the delivery format from the device asking, so each screen gets the one that suits it.
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Direct transport stream for televisionsDesktop browsers and TV apps get the raw stream with no repackaging in the path, which is what keeps channel changes quick and lip-sync honest.
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Adaptive HLS for phones and tabletsMobile devices get fragmented-MP4 HLS segments generated on demand, so a channel works just as well on a phone over mobile data.
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Streams are normalised on the way throughReal-world channels vary wildly in how they're packaged. Mimir straightens out timing discontinuities as it goes, so a glitch upstream doesn't become a stutter or a broken recording downstream.
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Capacity limits you controlSet how many concurrent streams each source is allowed. When the limit is reached, the person who asked is told plainly what's using it. No silent failure.
Fast start
Channels open in seconds, and viewers joining a channel already in flight join the stream that's running.
Graceful failures
When something can't play, you get a sentence explaining why, not a spinner that never resolves.
Self-healing
If an upstream connection drops mid-programme, the server reconnects and carries on recording.
Honest logging
A real log of what streamed, what recorded and what went wrong, useful when you actually need it.
Recording
A recorder that doesn't miss the ending
Scheduling is one click from the guide. Everything after that is the server's problem, and it treats a recording as the most important thing it has to do.
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Padding either sideStart early and finish late by however much you like, so an overrunning match or a late-starting film is still captured whole.
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Recording beats watchingIf capacity runs out, a scheduled recording takes the slot. Anyone watching casually is told what happened rather than being dropped without explanation.
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Clashes caught at scheduling timeBook two overlapping recordings that can't both happen and Mimir says so immediately, naming the programme that's in the way instead of quietly failing at 8pm.
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Watch it while it recordsIn-progress recordings are fully playable and seekable. Start the film half an hour after it began and skip forward as it fills in behind you.
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Survives a restartReboot the machine mid-capture and scheduled and in-flight recordings are picked up again when the server comes back.
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Ordinary files, your folderRecordings land in a directory you chose as normal video files. Copy them, back them up, or play them in something else entirely; they're yours.
Match of the Day
RECORDING · 47 MIN SO FAR
Deep Ocean, Part Two
SCHEDULED · TONIGHT 20:00 · +2/+5 MIN
The Long Interview
COMPLETE · 1 H 04 M
Channel management
The lineup you want, not the one you were handed
Sources give you what they give you: thousands of entries, arbitrary numbering, inconsistent names and missing logos. Mimir gives you a workspace to turn that into a lineup that makes sense in your house.
Up to a thousand channels
Enable as many as a thousand live channels and drag them into the exact order they should appear in on every device.
Override anything
Change a channel's name, number, group, logo, stream address or guide mapping, all without editing the source playlist.
Several sources, ranked
Combine multiple playlists and guide feeds, then drag them into a priority order that decides which listing wins when two describe the same channel.
Refreshes that don't undo your work
Channel and guide data update on their own schedules, daily or hourly, and every customisation you've made is layered back on top afterwards.
Add channels by hand
Have a single stream that isn't in any playlist? Add it directly with your own number, group, logo and guide mapping.
Access & security
Nobody should type a password on a remote control
Most home media servers ask you to key a long secret into an on-screen keyboard with a D-pad, then store the same secret on every device. Mimir does the opposite.
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Approve on screen, onceA new TV shows a short code. You confirm it from the web interface on your phone, and the pairing is done. Nothing is ever typed on the remote.
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A key per device, in hardwareEach device generates its own key inside its secure hardware, the Secure Enclave on Apple devices or the keystore on Android, and that key never leaves it.
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Revoke one, disturb noneSell a TV or lose a tablet and you revoke that one device from a list. Every other screen in the house keeps working, untouched.
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Short-lived, narrow credentialsPlayback runs on tokens that expire and can do nothing but read media. There is no permanent all-powerful secret travelling over your network.
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See what's connectedA devices page lists every paired screen with when it was last seen and from where, and a revoke button beside each one.
Living Room Apple TV
SECURE ENCLAVE · SEEN 2 MIN AGO
Bedroom Android TV
HARDWARE KEYSTORE · SEEN 1 H AGO
Kitchen tablet wants to pair
CODE 4821 9037
In more detail
What a personal TV server actually is
A personal TV server sits between the hardware that receives television and the screens you watch it on. The receiving hardware, whether a network TV tuner, a gateway box, or a service that publishes channels over your network, is good at one thing: turning a broadcast signal into streams a computer can read. What it doesn't give you is a television experience. There's no guide worth using, no way to schedule a recording, no library of what you've kept, and no sensible way to get any of it onto four different screens at once.
That gap is what Mimir fills. It reads your channel list and your programme data, presents them as a proper guide, records what you ask for, keeps a library of the results, and streams live channels and recordings alike to whichever device is asking: a browser on a laptop, a phone on mobile data, or a television in another room.
Why simultaneous viewing is the hard part
The question people ask first is nearly always some version of "can we all watch at once?", and the honest answer has two halves.
Watching different channels simultaneously is limited by your tuner hardware. A single-tuner device receives one channel at a time; a dual- or quad-tuner device receives two or four. No software can conjure extra tuners, and any product claiming otherwise is misleading you.
Watching the same channel simultaneously is a software problem, and it's one Mimir solves properly. When the first person tunes to a channel, Mimir opens exactly one connection to it and then broadcasts that single stream to every viewer who joins. The tenth person watching the same match costs no more tuner capacity than the first. A recording of that channel is treated as just another subscriber, which is why you can sit and watch a programme while it's being recorded, something a surprising number of systems still refuse to do.
Inside the home and outside it
On your own network, discovery is automatic. The server announces itself and apps find it without anyone typing an address; if your router hands the machine a new address, the apps follow it rather than breaking. This removes the single most common support problem in home media setups: the day the IP changed and every device stopped working at once.
Away from home, Mimir is designed to sit behind a standard reverse proxy such as Caddy or Nginx. That gives you a real hostname and a publicly trusted TLS certificate, so remote viewing is properly encrypted rather than relying on port-forwarding tricks or a third-party relay service that sees your traffic. The interface, the guide and the library are identical whether you're on the sofa or in a hotel.
Working with network tuners and gateways
Mimir is deliberately agnostic about where channels come from. Anything that publishes an M3U channel playlist and an XMLTV programme guide can be added as a source, which covers the great majority of networked television hardware.
- SiliconDust HDHomeRun: the most widely used network tuner family. It places off-air or cable channels onto your LAN and publishes them as a channel playlist; multi-tuner models let several different channels run at once.
- VBox TV Gateway: covers terrestrial, satellite and cable, and publishes both a channel playlist and a full XMLTV guide, which is exactly the pairing Mimir wants.
- Local files: a playlist and guide already sitting on the machine can be used directly, with no network fetch at all.
More than one source can run at the same time, with a priority order deciding which listings win where they overlap. Individual streams can also be added by hand with their own number, group, logo and guide mapping.
What Mimir is not
Mimir supplies no channels and no content. It is the software half of a system whose other half you already own or choose separately. What you connect it to, and whether you hold the rights to view and record that material, is entirely your responsibility, exactly as it is with any recorder you might buy off a shelf.
Free server. Ten-minute setup.
Windows, macOS or Docker: pick your platform and have a guide and a recorder running tonight.
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