Most media servers work hard. They build libraries, they read files, they chew through video with ffmpeg when your telly asks for something the file cannot give it. Remux does almost none of that, and that is entirely the point. 🎬
Remux is now on the ElfHosted shelves as an Early Preview app, and it comes from a name you already know: lostb1t, the developer behind the Gelato plugin that powers our JellyGoblin stack. We are proud Ko-fi sponsors of their work, as we are with many of the developers whose software we host.
What Remux actually is
Remux is a media server that speaks the Jellyfin API. That single fact does a lot of work: the Jellyfin apps you already have on your telly, your phone and your desktop connect to it exactly as if it were Jellyfin, and so do third party players like Infuse and Swiftfin.
What sits behind that familiar API is quite different. There is no library to build and no import step to wait for. You point Remux at your sources (the AIOStreams addons that come with it, WebDAV shares, HTTP sources, or files on your own storage), and it resolves streams when you press play.
How it differs from Jellyfin and Gelato
If you run our JellyGoblin stack, you already have Jellyfin with the Gelato plugin, and it works nicely. It is also, by design, a clever hack: Gelato writes out a fake local library of Stremio sourced entries and lets Jellyfin scan it, so Jellyfin believes it is looking at files on disk. Everything downstream of that belief behaves accordingly, which is impressive, and occasionally exactly as fragile as it sounds.
Remux is what the same developer built after living with those limits. Instead of persuading a file based media server that addon streams are files, it treats them as what they are from the ground up. Same Jellyfin API on the front, no pretending underneath.
The other half of the difference is what happens when you press play. Jellyfin serves the file, and when your player cannot handle the format, it transcodes or remuxes on the server so that it can. On ElfHosted, Remux never transcodes and never remuxes. It resolves the stream and hands your player the source link, so the video travels from the debrid CDN to your device without passing through our servers at all.
Two things fall out of that. Nothing queues behind ffmpeg, so playback starts when your player is ready rather than when a server has caught up. And your stream runs at whatever speed the CDN can manage, instead of being funnelled through a hosted instance in the middle.
What else it does
Remux is a good deal more than a stream resolver:
- Multiple users, each with their own filters. Set what a user can see by parental rating, genre and tags, and what they are offered to play by resolution, quality, codec, size or audio language. The kids get age appropriate titles, the household 4K telly gets the good stream, and the tablet in the back seat does not pull a 40GB remux over hotel wifi.
- Import from your existing Jellyfin server. Bring your users and their data across rather than starting from an empty server and a long evening.
- Progress syncs across clients. Continue watching follows you from the telly to the phone in the usual way.
- Dynamic libraries. Build them from filters rather than folders: tags, catalogs, popularity, release year and so on.
- Proper track data on streamed content. Audio and subtitle track selection works the way it does for local files, because Remux sources track metadata rather than guessing.
- Music has its own pipeline. It is not bolted onto the video path, and it handles remote sources too.
- IPTV, if you bring your own. Point it at a playlist you already have, much as you would with Jellyfin. We do not supply one.
- Its own admin dashboard, built for this workflow instead of inherited from one designed around local files.
The honest catch
Direct play means your player has to handle the format itself, because nothing is going to convert it on the way. In practice:
- Native apps are happy. Infuse, Swiftfin and the Jellyfin apps for TV, mobile and desktop play the MKV, HEVC and TrueHD releases that fill most debrid catalogues. This is the way to use Remux.
- Web browsers are fussy. A browser wants MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, and most releases are simply not that. Expect to reach for an app.
When you do pick something your player cannot decode, Remux does not throw a cryptic error at you. It plays a short clip explaining what happened and what to choose instead, which is a considerably more civilised failure than a spinning circle of doom.
What comes with it
Remux is sold as a stack rather than a lone server, because a stream resolver with nothing to resolve is not much use. Your subscription includes:
- Remux itself, the media server.
- AIOStreams, which provides the Stremio addon sources that Remux plays. This is the half that feeds the other half, so it is included rather than left as homework.
- Debridge, our multi provider debrid gateway. Bring your own provider keys as well if you prefer, since it is happy either way.
- TorBox Essential and Usenet Essential accounts, bundled from third party providers.
No separate signups, no second bill, no hunting for API keys across four browser tabs. It provisions wired together, at $18 a month.
Early Preview, and what that means
Remux is young and moving quickly, so it joins the catalogue as an Early Preview app rather than a stable one. Expect rough edges and frequent upstream changes, and bring your bug reports to Discord where we can chase them.
Two deliberate limits worth stating plainly. The hosted build has the torrent engine removed entirely, so magnet links and peer to peer are not available and no P2P connections are possible: use the addon, WebDAV and local sources instead. And as with everything we host, you bring your own sources and accounts, and you are responsible for what you point it at.
If you want a media server that does the least work possible and stays out of the way of your video, Remux is exactly that. One does not simply stream into Mordor, but this gets remarkably close. 🧝
Grab Remux with a $1, 7 day trial, and tell us how it goes.