marver VS luvdb

marver https://github.com/sylv/marver

My NAS has a load of files dumped onto it over the years. Some are organised neatly, some are in a dumping ground that I promised myself I'd sort through and never did. Some are in old folders that I haven't touched in years. Instead of spending a couple weekends sorting through it like a sane person, I'm making something to index it and hopefully replace Plex in the process.

The goal for marver is to index all those files and rip as much metadata as possible from each, then display that in a pretty UI and give the user multiple ways to refine the metadata, search through their files and make the most of the piled up 1s and 0s they have.

So far I've mostly just been having fun making individual pieces - image search powered by CLIP, extracting information from hard to parse file names using llama.cpp, pulling information from EXIF on images, some building blocks for intro detection on videos. Right now I'm porting the machine learning code to rust so I can bundle it all into a single, small docker container a lot easier, and to learn how the black boxes I'm using actually work, at least on a basic level.

I've tried similar apps but they all either have mediocre UI, are painful to setup, or make me do all the indexing manually. I want something that most people can deploy in a few minutes and that can show off a lot of what it can do immediately, while still letting the user refine the results from automated approaches. The UI has to be amazing to bundle this all into something that is actually useful, but it's been really fun putting it all together, piece by piece.

It's still a bit all over the place, but my NAS has annoyed me enough recently that I'm going to be focusing on getting a version that can be deployed, even if it's missing most of the features I want, so that it can start being useful to me. I think once that happens I'll be more motivated to add features, especially with a solid base I can work from.

https://luvdb.com

https://github.com/huangziwei/luvdb

A self-hosted media cataloging web app, with which one can mark the books, movies, music and games one likes, along with some basic social networking features such as microblogging, normal blogging, bookmarking and curating stuffs into lists. It's just me trying out ideas in an highly self-indulgent way.

I spent 86 days with ChatGPT-4 and made a Goodreads clone (kinda) that I always want to have: https://github.com/huangziwei/luvdb

I have near-zero web dev experience before this project. After about a month, I started to rely on it less and less. But I still use it to debug when I hit the wall.

Build your own tool if there isn't one. I used to think it's impossible as I barely know web dev, but in 2023, with the help of ChatGPT, I managed to build my own Goodreads alternative (well, it's actually more than a Goodreads alternative) in two months:

https://github.com/huangziwei/luvdb