Snacks is a self-hosted media library transcoder that scans, decides, converts or remuxes, verifies, and keeps moving—across video and music, one machine or a whole cluster.
Docker / NAS · Windows 10/11 · Apple silicon macOS
From first scan to verified output
Automatic media transcoding, built around your library
Snacks remembers your library, applies media policy, routes work to the right hardware, and tells you exactly what happened.
Library-first
A persistent SQLite catalog and durable queue handle large libraries without starting over after every restart. Prioritize a file, a folder, recent additions, or the files with the greatest potential savings.
Video + music
Encode H.264, HEVC, or AV1 into MKV, MP4, or WebM. Convert music to MP3, M4A/AAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Opus, or FLAC while retaining metadata and supported cover art.
Track intelligence
Order language preferences, preserve originals, add multiple audio outputs, extract sidecars, remove SDH/CC tracks, and OCR bitmap subtitles into searchable SRT.
Hardware-aware cluster
Snacks discovers NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Apple, and CPU capabilities, reserves device slots, and sends each job somewhere that can actually encode it. Share storage to skip transfers, or throttle transfer concurrency and bandwidth.
Health + observability
Validate output before keeping it, deep-check older files on a rolling budget, inspect per-job and cluster logs, and scrape Prometheus metrics.
API + integrations
Drive the queue with an API key, pin settings from environment variables, consume SignalR events, connect media services, and surface read-only queue and worker data in Homarr.
A clear view of every encode
Monitor savings, shape encoding policy, inspect the queue, and manage every node from the same responsive web UI.
Set the policy. Snacks does the repetition.
Start with a preset, validate one representative file, then let watched folders handle new media while the catalog remembers the backlog.
Follow the safe first-run guidePick a preset, or build ordered Advanced Video rules and reusable encoding recipes alongside the standard track and file controls.
Inspect the policy's library impact or analyze a directory before queueing anything to see which files will transcode, mux, or skip.
Use a desktop, a Docker NAS, or a cluster. Snacks matches each job with a capable slot.
Outputs are probed, checked against policy, logged, and placed only after validation succeeds.
Meet your library where it lives
Start with one instance. Add workers later without rebuilding your workflow.
First-class container deployment for QNAP, Synology, Unraid, and Linux servers, with GPU passthrough and persistent config.
Native Electron apps bring the same web interface and local hardware acceleration to Windows and Apple silicon Macs.
Let a master own the queue while workers advertise their real capabilities and return verified output.
Documentation that ships with the product
The complete Snacks guide lives on this site too: setup, Advanced Video policies, Homarr dashboards, clusters, backups, troubleshooting, every public route, and SignalR events.
Open documentationDesigned for long, unattended runs
Every encode gets its own FFmpeg log. When the selected policy permits it, failed hardware paths can retry through safer fallbacks. Interrupted work survives restarts. Replacing original files stays off until you enable it.
Snacks discards outputs that fail validation or do not satisfy the configured output-retention policy.
Policy-aware retry paths, permitted software fallbacks, cluster reassignment, and persistent state keep sweeps moving.
Live progress, dashboard history, per-node logs, health endpoints, and Prometheus metrics reveal what is happening.
Before you install
Start with a copy of one representative file. The guide walks through what to inspect before scaling up.
No. Video and music use separate pipelines and independent slots, while sharing scanning, queueing, cluster dispatch, analytics, and automation.
Not by default. Original replacement is an explicit setting. Snacks can write beside the source or to a separate output directory while you validate your policy.
No. Software encoding is supported. Automatic fallbacks may use it when the selected policy permits; an exact Advanced Video encoder is never substituted and waits for a matching device. A supported GPU makes large sweeps much faster.
Yes. Snacks can trigger Plex and Jellyfin rescans and can appear in Homarr through a scoped iframe tile or its native Media Transcoding widget. It also supports Sonarr, Radarr, TMDb, TheTVDB, webhooks, Discord, ntfy, and Apprise.
Yes. Use API-key authentication for the JSON API, environment variables for headless settings, the OpenAPI contract for tooling, and SignalR for live events.
Snacks v2.18.1
Download Snacks, choose a preset, and confirm the result before you automate the rest of your library.
