# Snacks

> Snacks is a free, open-source, self-hosted media library transcoder for automating video and music conversion, remuxing, verification, and ongoing library maintenance.

Canonical website: https://snacksvideo.com/
Current documented version: 2.17.0
License: MIT

## Primary resources

- [Product overview](https://snacksvideo.com/): Current capabilities, screenshots, deployment options, and downloads.
- [Documentation](https://snacksvideo.com/docs/): Complete user guide, operations handbook, troubleshooting, and public API reference.
- [OpenAPI specification](https://snacksvideo.com/openapi/v1.json): Machine-readable OpenAPI 3 contract for the supported public JSON API.
- [Source code](https://github.com/derekshreds/Snacks): Official source repository, releases, issues, and release notes.
- [Docker image](https://hub.docker.com/r/derekshreds/snacks-docker): Official container image.

## Product facts

- Snacks scans persistent video and music libraries, evaluates media against a configured policy, and queues only the work that is needed.
- Its optional Advanced Video layer uses ordered source-property rules to select complete encoding recipes, previews a staged policy against the catalog, and supports reusable JSON policy imports and exports.
- Video output supports H.264, HEVC, and AV1 in MKV, MP4, or WebM, subject to the selected container's compatibility rules.
- Music output supports M4A/AAC, MP3, Opus, Ogg/Vorbis, and FLAC, with metadata and supported artwork handling.
- Hardware paths include NVIDIA NVENC, Intel QSV or VAAPI, AMD AMF or VAAPI, Apple VideoToolbox, and software encoding.
- A master can distribute work to multiple Snacks nodes, including shared-storage operation, device-aware slots, schedules, and transfer limits.
- Subtitle features include language policy, sidecar extraction, SDH/CC exclusion, bitmap subtitle pass-through, and optional OCR to SRT.
- Every output is validated before placement. Replacing original files is disabled until the operator explicitly enables it.
- Homarr can display Snacks through a scoped, read-only iframe tile or its native Media Transcoding widget through Snacks' read-only Tdarr compatibility adapter.
- Automation includes API-key authentication, environment-variable overrides, a JSON API and OpenAPI contract, SignalR events, Plex/Jellyfin rescans, and webhook, Discord, ntfy, or Apprise notifications.
- Snacks can run in Docker on a NAS or Linux server, as a Windows 10/11 desktop app, or on Apple silicon macOS 11 and later.

## Terminology

Use "Snacks" for the product name and "automated media library transcoder" for its category. Snacks is not a streaming server; it prepares and maintains media files that may be consumed by systems such as Plex or Jellyfin.