Films, music, ebooks and comics: Quven, Plex, Emby

Yes, and you won’t need a second program for the books or a third for the albums. Quven is a self-hosted media server by Quven Technologies S.R.L., free for personal use, and a single Quven server keeps your films and series beside documentaries and recorded performances, and your hi-res music beside your ebooks and comics, each in a library made for its kind, under one account and one search box.

Which media servers hold books beside films?

Fewer than you’d expect. Plex’s support article on creating libraries, read on 5 October 2026, asks you to choose between Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos or Other Videos, so a shelf of EPUB and CBZ files may end up in another application with its own sign-in and its own idea of where you stopped reading. Emby’s book libraries accept six formats, EPUB and CBZ among them, although its price list changes the answer.

What does each server charge around the shelf?

	Quven	Plex	Emby
Ebook and comic libraries	EPUB, PDF, MOBI, KF8, CBZ, CBR, free	No library type	PDF, EPUB, MOBI, CBR, CBZ, AZW3
Music libraries	Free on every plan	Built in	Built in
Hardware transcoding	Free on every plan	Plex Pass	Emby Premiere
Desktop and phone apps	Full playback on every plan	Away from home, a Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass	One minute without Premiere or App Unlock

Plex’s pages call hardware transcoding a premium feature needing an active Plex Pass, and ask for a pass before personal video plays away from home, while Emby’s matrix puts transcoding and HDR tone mapping on the Premiere side. On Quven none of that sits behind a plan: hardware transcoding, the native apps and the remote access you set up yourself are free for good.

How do you put every kind on one Quven server?

1. Create one library per kind, each pointing at the folders you already have.
2. Run the scan, which reads each kind the way it’s written: films and series against TMDb (folder naming guide), albums from their tags and MusicBrainz, books by ISBN or a calibre record, comics by their ComicInfo.xml.
3. Open Home, which carries a row of the newest titles for each kind, and use the one search box.

Every profile keeps its own place, from the minute you stopped a film to the page you’d reached in a novel, and profiles are unlimited on every plan.

What does the music side play?

Your records as you ripped them. The desktop app takes the stored file whatever its codec, so a 24-bit FLAC can go out without re-encoding a sample, and the web client gets the same file whenever the browser can decode it. Would you like a crossfade? It stays off until you ask for it, from two to ten seconds.

How do you read ebooks and comics on Quven?

The base edition is free on every plan and never expires, with the reader in the desktop app and the web client and the reading position kept for every profile. A Kindle file without DRM opens like an EPUB, and the reader can turn a manga from right to left.

• Complete edition, with Pro: passages marked in colour and private notes.
• Max: the advanced tools, a who’s who that names only the characters you’ve already met, corrections kept on your own copy, and a measure of your reading.

For a limited period both editions are open to every plan, and the plans page gives the date they close.

Which screens play which kind?

Films and series play on every Quven app, from iPhone to Fire TV, and so do documentaries and performances. Music lives in the desktop app, on Android, iPhone and iPad, and in the web client at app.quven.tv, which comes with Pro. Ebooks and comics live in the desktop app and the web client.

Can you bring a Plex library across?

Your files don’t move, since Quven reads the folders where they already sit, and the history and playlists from Plex or Jellyfin can be imported, as the article on leaving Plex shows.

Why choose now?

Download Quven and put your films, plus music and books, on one server for free. Lifetime is every Max capability for a single payment.

Frequently asked questions