Nomad Mk3: A Open Source, Pocket-Sized, Low Power, Fully Offline Media Server. (DIY, designed to be pretty easy to build)
(repost, Mods aproved this already)
Howdy folks!
Its me again… I’m back lol. A few months ago I posted here looking for feedback on my latest weird little project, and after way too many late nights I’ve finally got it to a place I’m pretty happy with.
Nomad has been my hobby project for about a year now. The idea was simple: I wanted a media server that could run on basically no power, take up almost no space, and still let me and my friends watch stuff together while roadtripping or just hanging out, without dealing with garbage internet or passing devices around. Everyone connects, does their own thing, no setup, no forgetting things at home.
I’ve been running a Jellyfin server for a few years (I’m the designated “host everything forever” guy for my group, MC server and all), and Nomad ended up becoming my answer to taking that experience offline. It’s a super lightweight all in one way to host and share content locally. It’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not trying to replace a real server, but I hope yall will give it a chance.
Nomad handles Movies, Shows, Music, Books, images, and general files. It’s not just file hosting either, you get a full web UI with search, resume tracking, a music player with playlists and queueing, plus support for PDFs, EPUBs, audiobooks, and comics (even webtoon format). Its designed similar to jellyfin, not just a folder of files. Everything runs in the browser, so any device that can connect and open a webpage just works. No apps, no setup. It’s fully open source and meant to be easy to DIY. The build is pretty cheap, around $30 depending on storage (which can get outta hand fast for some of yall), no soldering, and you don’t need any programming experience to get it running at its base level.
Now for the part nobody here is gonna love: this thing is ESP32 based, so it has limits. It’s not a full server, it’s not built for UHD, and it’s definitely not the place for your giant untouched files. FAT32 means 4GB max per file, and that lines up anyway since throughput is hardware limited. The whole point is to keep it small, simple, and efficient so you can cram a lot of usable content into not a lot of space. Nomad is built for quantity over quality.
I know some of you just took psychic damage reading that. If you are already thinking “yeah but I want more than this” check out Gallion at the bottom. It does or will do literally everything yall want Nomad to do with the downside of being... wallet sized (and a tad bit more hungy for volts).
As for performance, Nomad is happiest around 480p, where I usually get about 6 to 8 streams at once. At 720p it drops to around 2 to 4, and under ideal conditions 2 simultaneous 1080p60 streams is about the ceiling. Those numbers are from my college dorm using Big Buck Bunny, so depending on your environment, your mileage may vary.
And yeah… 480p sounds rough, I know. But most of the time this is being watched on phones or small screens, and in practice it holds up better than you’d expect. The upside is you can fit way more on the device, I’m running a 256GB SD card with around 300 movies, 40 shows (mostly season 1s), plus a ton of books and music. For what this is trying to be, that’s a lot of content in your pocket.
That said, I did extend support for 720p and 1080p because I know some people just can’t deal with visible pixels (fair enough). It works, but you do have to be more careful with encoding, and you’re trading off how many streams you can realistically run at once. I don’t really recommend it as the default, but it’s there for people who want higher quality and are willing to accept the limits that come with it.
Setup does take a bit of effort. You’ve gotta build it, stock it, and re-encoding helps a lot if you want it to run well. Some people can just drag files over and call it a day, but the best results definitely come from being a little picky up front. That said, once it’s set up, it just does its job. The system only writes to the SD card when an admin runs tasks (never during normal use), there are no user accounts, and everything like watch progress is stored locally in the browser, not on Nomad. It’s very much a set it once and just use it kind of thing. Its designed to be super simple for the end user.
If you want to poke around the project, the GitHub and build guide are here:
GitHub: https://github.com/Jstudner/jcorp-nomadInstructables: https://www.instructables.com/Jcorp-Nomad-Mini-WIFI-Media-Server/
Project site / prebuilts: https://nomad.jcorptech.net/.
And now that Nomad is getting pretty stable, I’m shifting more attention toward Gallion, which is basically the bigger sibling. Same offline-first idea, but built for more capable hardware (Raspberry Pi, Orange pi rv2, etc (needs like 2gb ram)). Main things I am focused on are 4K video, external drives, ZIM archives, map tiles, ROM emulation, and all the stuff that doesn’t fit on an ESP32. It’s still WIP, and I’m figuring it out as I go, so if you’ve got ideas for that direction I’d love to hear them too.
and yeah, I know this sub is gonna have opinions, I’m here for it, everything welcome, as I said at the top I am here for feedback, for better or for worse.
Thx for checking it out!
-Jackson