Unmanic watches your media library and fixes files that do not match your rules. Want every video in HEVC to save space, all audio in AAC for compatibility, and foreign-language tracks you never use removed? Unmanic finds the files that do not conform and processes them in the background.

How it works

1. A library scanner and file watcher find files in your media folders
2. Plugins decide whether each file needs work, and what work
3. Workers process queued files, usually with FFmpeg
4. The result replaces the original, or goes wherever your plugins say

The plugin system is the core. Plugins handle video transcoding (with hardware acceleration), audio track filtering, subtitle handling, container remuxing, and custom commands, and you can chain several.

Features

• Scheduled and real-time processing
• Multiple workers, with queue management
• Hardware acceleration through plugins (NVIDIA, Intel, AMD)
• A web UI for configuration and progress
• Linked installations to share work across several machines

Deployment

Unmanic runs in Docker (josh5/unmanic). Mount your media library and a cache directory for temporary files; put the cache on fast storage with plenty of space, since transcoding writes a full copy of each file. Pass through a GPU for anything beyond light workloads.

Back up or test on a copy first. An optimiser that replaces originals will happily replace every file in your library with whatever your rules produce, including mistakes. Start with a small test folder.

Unmanic or Tdarr?

Tdarr is the better-known alternative, with a larger ecosystem and distributed transcode nodes. FileFlows takes a visual flow-based approach. Unmanic is simpler to set up and fully open source. For the underlying tool, see our ffmpeg guide.

License

GPL-3.0.

Links

• Repository