What is Finetic?
Learn what Finetic does, where your media and data remain, how its clients work and how it differs from a hosted streaming service.
The product in one sentence#
Finetic is a self-hosted media server that catalogues movies and television you already own, authenticates the people you allow, and selects a valid playback path for each device.
It is not a cloud locker and it does not sell media. Your source files remain on your storage. Finetic adds the catalogue, identity, user experience, playback engine and operational controls around them.
What runs on your server#
The Finetic server is responsible for:
| Responsibility | What it means |
|---|---|
| Catalogue | Identifies titles, seasons, episodes, files, metadata and artwork |
| Accounts | Authenticates users and enforces roles and library access |
| Playback planning | Chooses Direct Play, remux, audio conversion or full transcode |
| Media delivery | Serves authorised byte ranges or generated HLS assets |
| User state | Stores progress, favourites, history and playback preferences |
| Operations | Runs scans, metadata work, cleanup, backup, health and updates |
The responsive web application is the primary client. Fire TV and Android clients are in physical-device testing and use the same server catalogue, accounts, permissions and playback planner.
What Finetic does not do#
- It does not upload your source video library to the Finetic commercial service.
- It does not make an unavailable mount look like deliberate deletion.
- It does not claim every file can Direct Play on every device.
- It does not expose administrator functions in the television client.
- It does not currently provide a public installer or public app-store listing.
Viewer and administrator experiences#
Normal viewers see Home, Movies, TV Shows, Collections, search, details, playback, favourites and their own history. Administrators additionally see libraries, users, active streams, jobs, analytics, system health, configuration, backup and updates.
Permissions are enforced by the server. Hiding an administrator navigation item is presentation—not the security boundary.
Why playback is server-authoritative#
Clients report facts such as supported containers, codecs, profiles, audio channels, HDR formats and Media Source Extensions support. The server combines those facts with the probed source and user preferences. This prevents each client from inventing a different compatibility policy.
The chosen plan remains inspectable. An administrator can see the delivery method, codecs, reason codes, hardware backend, queue state and safe diagnostic identifiers.
How Finetic differs from hosted streaming#
You supply the server, storage, network and media. That creates freedom and responsibility: storage paths must remain stable, remote access must be secured, and transcoding capacity must match your household. Finetic's job is to make those responsibilities visible and manageable rather than hiding them in terminal-only configuration.
For an honest comparison with established products, read Finetic compared with Plex and Jellyfin.