are you a media user an avid media consumer whether it's tv movies music are you a long
time plex user maybe you use jellyfin or maybe perhaps you use mb or one of the other various
different media servers that you are currently using to get your media to your friends and family
or for yourself and getting out to the world we've covered plex a few times here on the
channel and we still use plex personally and it's an amazing product but there's always room
for improvement and there's also space on the horizon to look for new and different options
hello every army and welcome to another ibra call video thank you for joining us today it's
a pleasure to have you with us and today we're going to be looking at dim dim is a media server
or as it claims here it's a self-hosted media manager with minimal setup dim will organize
and beautify your media collections letting you access and play them anytime from anywhere
now luckily for us dim is available as a docker container which is fantastic it always makes it
easy for us to deploy especially if you're using something like compost or if you're using unraid
and want to use the app store to get the app today we're going to give you an introduction of
dim it's going to be an introduction for ourselves as well so we're going to go through it together
and just see how it looks how it feels give you a pretty bare idea on where it's at at this current
point in time if you enjoy what we're doing please don't forget to subscribe and hit the like button
we really appreciate it and it really helps youtube get us out there to a bigger audience
so that we can keep bringing you better content so if you're interested in checking out a new
media server maybe you just want to know a little bit more about this particular one maybe you have
some ideas for your own media server at home and you want to see how this is implemented then this
is going to be the video for you we hope you enjoy and without further ado let's get stuck into it
a good beautiful morning on a sunday here in melbourne australia i hope you are having the
same wherever you are when you're watching this video and i'll be looking forward to this video
to be honest guys this has been an interesting one it sort of popped up on the horizon recently we've
had a few of our members in discord mention it to us and we really appreciate them bringing it up
if you haven't joined our discord be sure to join it's really really fun to have everyone in there
and have an active community where we support each other and help each other learn some valuable
information now i'm here on the project page for dim and if we just scroll up it's dusk labs
forward slash dim and dim is the media manager as they claim fueled by dark forces now here at
ibracorp we like dark forces if you've seen our logo you've seen our uh trailers and you've seen
our you know teasers we like the whole mysterious dark forces thing so that kind of works for us
here i've actually had a comment on reddit before calling us out as uh hypocritical because we're
called ibracorp and yet we cover open source stuff now i know sarcasm doesn't really get
picked up very often it's kind of subjective but for those who don't realize the name is a play
on words it's actually for fun it's not actually serious we don't treat it as a corporation we love
open source and that's all we've been covering so it's kind of meant to be an ironic name for anyone
that doesn't know so make sure you go back and let that reddit user know we're just here for fun guys
so here's dim anyway let's go through it real quick on the project page now it's got the
install steps if you're running docker so if you want a docker run command you've got that here
you've got the hardware acceleration as well which will go through ourselves
most importantly is this part here and if you're already using plex and you've been using it with
your driver you probably know how to apply this already we covered it in one of our plex videos
now it looks pretty clean to me i think that looks you know fairly straightforward very similar
in terms of the initial impression that i get with something like plex mixed with a
probably a little bit of envy as well with its flatness but that's kind of nice so i like that
so here on the page obviously it's going to give us very minimal information for what we want to
see we actually want to get in there and give it a go so we're going to get it started for
you and have a quick look and we're going to have a look together guys this is a fresh one
for me personally so hopefully we can sort of experience it together so jump into your unread
server go to the app store and search for dim now if you don't have unraid you're using docker
obviously i've just shown you the project page where you can get the docker run command or if you
want to build a docker compose file out of it we won't be providing one on this occasion but if you
guys are interested in them we can definitely do that and do a more in-depth guide at a later stage
today's video is just video based because there's an introduction we're going to have
a look at it together so let's click on dim and click on install keep in mind if you're not using
underaid and you're watching this video just hang in there because once we get this initial install
done which is going to be in about two seconds uh then we can carry on with the actual looking
of the application which you can join us for it's not os specific at that point so here we
are on the template and uh by default it's got a couple of options we're going to change them okay
network type we're going to set that to our custom docker network we always love to do that you guys
know this and watch our video on that if you haven't we'll click on show docker allocations
because port 8000 that seems like familiar to me i may have already mapped that to something
okay only one of one that means i don't have it mapped that's fine so we'll leave it at 8 000.
now it's going to ask for our media path where's our media stored if you guys have watched our hard
link video this is not where our media is stored so we're going to change that obviously apply it
to whatever you've called yours i highly recommend you guys really check out the hard links video
it is phenomenal the difference it will make to your experience and a big big thanks to trash
and his guides trash guides we have him in our discord and we have links to all of his stuff
including his own discord as well be sure to join and give him some props support him for his work
it's a fantastic guide so in the media path let's click edit and we're just going to go back here
and our media is actually saved in user forward slash data for and then media so as you can see
we've got our media in here so we want to map the root folder click save so now that we've mapped
our media location then the graphics card path now this is setting for us already and that's going to
use our intel integrated gpu for us with this default setting if you're using anything else
like a dedicated graphics card if you need to pick it specifically you may do that but as you can see
in our case this will work fine okay again if using intel gpu you can just leave that as is
the config path we have our mnt user app data and then dim that's perfect not many settings
for us to configure which is nice so once we're ready go ahead and click apply and while that's
loading and already a selling point for them there they did say that it was lightweight ready to go
easy to set up so that's a good start so there you go our docker container started we'll go back to
the docker tab and you can see dim is running now at this point if you have installed it or started
it on a different os you can now join in with us we're going to be on the same page so it doesn't
matter what os you're running open it up and let's get started first things first authenticate and
continue to your media we don't have an account yet so we're going to click create a new account
and you are making an admin account okay it's telling us straight up so let's start creating
that so i've created a username called admin and the password and i'll go ahead and click register
okay so here we are it's brought us straight in basically and uh we're thrown right into the deep
end the first thing it's going to want us to do is add our library so naturally why don't we do
that so that we can get an idea on how everything is laid out so click on add library and i'm going
to call this tv it's going to be a type of shows and we obviously mapped our media location so
that's their media and then tv okay so what it actually wants us to do is just check this box
and that matches up with what we've got tv now if you've got tv 4k obviously you pick your 4k folder
go ahead and click add library and straight away it's time to spin up and scan our library
which is great picking up stuff fairly quickly to be honest look at it go that's really cool we're
on the dashboard here what i'm going to do is then go to libraries click the plus and we're going to
add movies as well so let's add movies and again we'll go down to our media folder which we mapped
check movies and click add libraries so now we've got both locations there and it's starting to do
its thing now the layout is really nice i will say that it's very snappy which which is great
to see still scanning all the content which we have quite a bit so hopefully that will start
loading up a bit quicker now while that's scanning our content and filling up all the metadata what i
might do is just go through the preferences and we'll see what options we have in there
so we click on preferences and we'll start going through we've got our password for our account
and we can also delete the account if we so choose click on profile we can upload a picture
so there we go i've uploaded a picture you can see that now and our username as well so we can change
the username if we wanted to as well go down to playback and what do we got in playback so
first of all just looking at this if you're an avid user of plex you've known how many settings
are in there this looks a lot smaller so i'm interested to see how this is going to work
so the player settings select default video quality we've got direct play and then you've got
the option to choose different quality settings not as detailed as plexus from what i can see
it's just either 1080 720 or 480 and at these bit rates but we're going to leave it as direct play
and see how that goes enable hardware acceleration is checked by default now that's different to plex
where you have to have plex pass to enable it and that's already enabled for us straight off the bat
so big plus there to the developers thank you for doing that next you have the auto play if enabled
the next video will be played once the current media finishes so that's good and subtitle enable
experimental support for ssa and well do we have to really say that one out loud uh ass subtitles
now we have invites we want to invite someone so why don't we create a new token for example
and we have this token what do we do with it at this point i'm not too sure to be honest
i've tried looking into the wiki i can't see anything about this so what i might do what if we
just log out it doesn't seem to be any option there go to preferences doesn't
seem to be an option there either so i'm not really sure how to accept an invite
if anybody knows be sure to drop it in the comments below because that would
be really useful to know but i like the idea so basically we're giving them a secure token
and it will be assigned to that person perhaps we need to create a user account and then give
them the token i'm not really sure on that one we'll go down to appearance now this is nice we
have some different uh theme options that we can choose from i love that they've called this blind
and forgive me for a second we're going to try it so you will actually be blinded for a moment
pretty bright and then you've got absolute dark which is lights off i like that um i
think i prefer just normal dark but it's nice to give you the option there because everybody's
different with the cards so show media name under cards across the dashboard and libraries
and show media information when hovering over a card i love that it's toggled that's a good option
then we're going into advanced and we have a couple of different things here
now general we don't have to touch the port that's been controlled by docker so we've
set that in the docker container the cache looks interesting to me tmp streaming underscore cache
and you also have a path for where the metadata is going to be saved now this
is interesting because in the docker container template that we've used if we go back to it
we don't actually have a location mapped here to tell us where the metadata is going to be saved
now if we just have a look at this this cache area here for example tmp slash streaming cache
we go back to the docker template that we've got in unraid we don't actually have that mapped
so that kind of gives me the impression that it's going to start filling up the container
image itself unless we map that so i feel like it might be in our best interest to map that and
what we'll do is pretty much use the same thing that plex used but we'll change it up a little
bit so go to add another port path of variable and with the path we're going to just call that
cache in the container path we want this path here so copy that we've got tmp streaming underscore
cache and then for the host path we can pick a spot that we want it to live in so preferably it's
going to be somewhere that's going to be on your cache obviously for obvious reasons so i actually
have a share called cache fs you can have one if you like you can put it in the app data folder
for dim if you prefer just somewhere where you have a permanent spot where it lives on the case
drive so what i'm going to do is put it here and call it kcfs dim and we can leave the rest and
click add reapply that and so now we've mapped the location for our cache so let's go back to
preferences continue where we were so now we have this spot actually mapped to our host do the same
on any other platform if you're using it on ubuntu for example whatever the case might be just make
sure you're mapping that i'm sure it's probably in the docker run command anyway but just worth
making sure you've got that mapped now authentication require a valid auth
token for each request to the server now that's likely the token that we've seen just up here
create a token to invite someone and allow them to access your media
so at any point i can revoke that access if we want so we've got that token here we can
just click trash and see you later it's gone and that's pretty much all we've got in our settings
thus far let's go back to the dashboard we'll see if any of these content started to load up now
and it looks a lot better we're starting to see a lot more metadata now which is good
so let's click on a item of content and see how this plays so we've clicked on the content
now the way this seems to work is you select the season here so as you can see we're on season one
and it's showing me season one episodes you've then got season two and that will then change
the episodes down here i don't know whether these just haven't loaded yet so we'll click on that
and uh that played almost instantly and what i'll show you off screen is in our cache location that
we've mapped you can now see the folder being created after we've just clicked play on the
content so it is actually storing it on our cache so yeah like i said i really highly recommend that
you guys add that parameter i'll see if we can get in touch with the current maintainer
see if they can add it to their template and just it benefits the community obviously but
that's streaming perfectly fine now obviously i'm working locally so i haven't tested this remote
just yet but that seems pretty good so let's stop that there i'll stop the content playing and now
that folder is empty so it is clearing itself out which is good as well and um now i started to load
up all the other metadata which is great and what can i say that is probably the easiest setup i've
ever seen in terms of a media server it's pretty straightforward we didn't really have to do much
there we get some nice details on stuff as we hover over them for example see how it just cuts
in there now the other thing we'll test is our cpu once it's going i don't see any sort of dashboard
to monitor the content as it's playing inside of dim but we can monitor the server itself so
why don't we play something and why don't we play this for example and i'll go to the server itself
and we're just having a look here on our cpu how that's handling things at the moment
now do bear in mind i have all these other containers and vms running as well so you're
gonna see activity but i'm not seeing any cpu threads being uh absolutely smashed i'm not
seeing them get hung up on so i would assume that the transcoding is working pretty well
and the content is playing perfectly fine as well oddly enough there isn't a back button there in
in the media player itself i had to actually use back on my mouse
seems to be odd but other than that seems okay so i don't know if you guys have heard of dim or if
you've given it a try already but i reckon give it a go i mean why not it's free and open source and
the developers seem to have done a pretty good job it's nice and clean and functional you may find
that some of the features you're used to when plex aren't in here or maybe they're not here just yet
in which case i recommend you go to the github page for the project
leave your feedback or leave any issues you know log it with the developer so they're aware
but definitely give them some attention because i think they've done pretty well here that seems
very very smooth i'm sure guys we could spend a whole day doing all sorts of thorough testing
and i would love to do it but i just thought i'd do this first introduction with you guys
and if you're interested and you like what you saw we can do more on this for sure
so leave a comment down below and what you thought about them if you enjoyed it be sure to join our
discord and be part of the discussion on the latest video i'm gonna leave it there for today
but i hope you enjoyed it this is psychotics from ubercorp we'll see you in the next hyprocorp video
you