Free Mac Server

Mac Server free download - Technitium MAC Address Changer, Serv-U FTP Server, Radmin Server and Viewer, and many more programs. VNC® Connect is the latest version of our remote access software for personal and commercial use. It consists of a VNC® Server app for the computer you want to control, which must be licensed, and a VNC® Viewer app that you are free to download to all the devices you want to control from.

Amazon EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

Powered by AWS Nitro System, EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers featuring Intel Core i7 processors, and offer customers a choice of macOS Mojave (10.14), macOS Catalina (10.15), and macOS Big Sur (11.2.1). Access the Amazon EC2 Mac User Guide here.

Benefits

Quickly provision macOS environments

Time and resources previously spent building and maintaining on-premises macOS environments can now be refocused on building creative and useful apps. Development teams can now seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments to enjoy convenient, distributed testing and fast app builds, bringing additional choice to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud. EC2 Mac instances offload the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps.

Reduce costs

EC2 Mac instances allow developers to launch macOS environments within minutes, adjust provisioned capacity as needed, and only pay for actual usage with AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing. Developers save money since they only need to pay for the systems that are in use. For example, more capacity can be used when building an app, and less capacity when testing.

Extend your toolkits

EC2 Mac instances provide developers with seamless access to dozens of AWS services so they can more easily and efficiently collaborate with team members, and develop, build, test, analyze, and improve their apps. Similar to other EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, Amazon FSx for scalable file storage, and AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for configuring, managing, and patching macOS environments.

Features

Built on Apple Mac hardware

Amazon EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers, featuring 8th Generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Intel Core i7 processors with 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32GiB of Memory.

Enabled by the AWS Nitro System

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional software-defined functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed EC2 instances to provide 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth.

Scaled on highly reliable infrastructure

EC2 Mac instances are designed so that customers can build critical applications with confidence. AWS has the most secure, extensive, and reliable global infrastructure for running workloads that require high availability, and is recognized as an industry leader for uptime standards. EC2 Mac instances enable your macOS workloads to benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that AWS’s secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade.

Product Details

Pricing

EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase as Dedicated Hosts through On Demand and Savings Plans pricing models. Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement. Through On Demand, you can launch an EC2 Mac host and be up and running within minutes. At the end of the 24-hour minimum allocation period, the host can be released at any time without further commitment. With Savings Plans, you can save up to 44% off On Demand pricing with a 3-year commitment. Both Compute and Instance Savings Plans are available. For more information on Dedicated Hosts, please see the Dedicated Hosts product page. In addition to the table below, you can also access EC2 Mac pricing on the AWS Pricing Calculator for Dedicated Hosts.

• North America (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon)

• 3-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.083	$0.611	$0.650	$0.702	$0.764	$0.780	$0.842
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	44%	40%	35%	29%	28%	22%

  1-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.083	$0.849	$0.867	$0.910	$1.019	$1.040	$1.083
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	22%	20%	16%	6%	4%	0%

• 3-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.354	$0.764	$0.812	$0.764	$0.955	$0.975	$1.053
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	44%	40%	35%	29%	28%	22%

  1-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.354	$1.062	$1.083	$1.137	$1.274	$1.300	$1.354
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	22%	20%	16%	6%	4%	0%

• 3-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.207	$0.681	$0.724	$0.782	$0.852	$0.869	$0.939
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	44%	40%	35%	29%	28%	22%

  1-year term
  Purchase Option	On-Demand	Instance Savings Plan			Compute Savings Plan
  Terms	Pay-as-you-go	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront	All Upfront	Partial upfront	No Upfront
  								Price per Hour	$1.207	$0.947	$0.996	$1.104	$1.136	$1.159	$1.207
  Savings over On-Demand	N/A	22%	20%	16%	6%	4%	0%

Customers

“The Legends of Runeterra team was excited to take advantage of EC2 Mac instances to consolidate our entire build pipeline (Windows, Linux, and now macOS) on AWS . Our build pipeline currently supports ~100 builds per day, up to 3,000 builds per month, and our source control has over 270K commits to-date. Prior to migrating to EC2 Mac instances, our team had to spend time on managing on-premises Macs. Now, with EC2 Mac instances our build pipeline delivers a complete end-to-end cross-platform build process for Unity CI/CD in the AWS cloud. This has allowed our team of over one hundred talented engineers, artists, and designers to decrease development time and accelerate innovation for the games Riot players have come to know and love.'

Guy Kisel, Staff Software Engineer, LoR, Riot Games

'Flipboard is an award-winning app that curates news and information for millions of customers in a user-friendly magazine format. We recently started using Amazon EC2 instances for our iOS build machines for tasks such as daily betas, App Store builds and submissions, and UI testing. We were able to easily migrate from our previous solution to EC2 Mac instances in three days including software installation, VNC sessions, accounts created, and moving all of our Jenkins jobs. The setup has been very reliable, and we also enjoy the flexibility to use either command line or screen sharing. Build times have reduced from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. UI automation tests that used to take 3 hours now take less than 1 hour. Download speeds are amazing, and the VNC sessions are as smooth as butter. Needless to say, this project was a huge success and we are super happy with the finished results.”

Colin Caufield, Lead iOS Engineer, Flipboard

During the May 2021 America's AWS Summit, Flipboard's lead iOS engineer talks about his team's experience migrating to Amazon EC2 instances.

'Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company. Its products - including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint - are designed to empower more than 50 million consumer, small business and self-employed customers around the world to improve their financial lives. EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, altogether improving developer productivity. We’re experiencing up to 30 percent better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We’re now running around 80 percent of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space.'

Pratik Wadher, VP of Product Development, Intuit

Listen to Pratik Wadher, the VP of Product Development at Intuit, describe how and why Intuit is using Amazon EC2 Mac instances.

“We have been very happy using AWS services, so when AWS released Amazon EC2 Mac Instances, we realized we could use them for our build-and-test pipelines and immediately reached out to adopt them. Once we had the Amazon EC2 Mac Instances running, we migrated basically all our builds in about 2 weeks. The first comment we got from the development team was that this was the first time our Mac builds were faster than the ones for PC. Over the course of 1 year, we doubled the number of concurrent players and increased our player base by 39 percent; improving the game quickly wouldn’t have been possible without Amazon EC2 Mac Instances and on-demand scaling. It’s easy to see why it was a good decision.”

Martin Blomgren, Head of Operations, Star Stable Entertainment

“DeNA aims to entertain and to serve through our businesses, under our mission to delight people beyond their wildest dreams. DeNA's major business areas are in mobile games, sports, live streaming, healthcare, and automotive. SWET (SoftWare Engineer in Test) team is part of the DeNA Quality Control Department and offers automated test development and implementation support. We have been using on-prem Mac computers and Mac-aaS providers including MacStadium for our game distribution builds. The management and operation of physical Macs is expensive, and additionally, we found ourselves looking for on-demand access to Mac computers with richer features and capabilities. During our evaluation of EC2 Mac instances, we were delighted by a simple Jenkins CI/CD integration, ease of leveraging custom macOS images, and the ability to scale our capacity on-demand - allowing us to decrease build times and increase the number of concurrent builds we can support. We look forward to EC2 Mac instances helping us to improve our quality and productivity, so we can deliver on our vision to make testing fun, smart, and delightful for end-users.”

Hisashi Iguchi, CI/CD Engineer, SWET, Quality Control Department, DeNA

'Mobile Premier League (MPL) is an online gaming platform that offers 60+ exciting games, such as Fantasy Cricket, Match 3, Spider Solitaire, Bubble Shooter, Baseball Star, Bowling, 8 Ball Pool, and more. Our DevOps & Reliability Engineering team used to run all their builds with on-premises Macs and Jenkins integration. Hardware problems and sluggish manual builds consumed our iOS developers’ time, delaying both iOS app builds and testing cycles by QA Engineers. Following a private beta preview and EC2 Mac POC with Jenkins CI/CD integration, we migrated builds of all our games to EC2 Mac instances. Now, we are able run up to 3x more parallel build jobs with each parallel build running 5-10% faster than a single on-premises build, fully removing the previous iOS development and QA bottleneck we had. As a result of the overall app development modernization in the AWS cloud with EC2 Mac instances, we enjoy full iOS build automation, high availability, ease of access, and better build performance.“

Ashesh Nishant, Head Of Technology, MPL

“We were seeking an infrastructure capable of hyper-growth and scale so were thrilled when we heard that AWS is now offering macOS-based EC2 instances. We are delighted with the performance of our new, native-mobile, Visual AI-powered test cloud running on Amazon's EC2 Mac instances.”

Adam Carmi, CTO and co-founder, Applitools

“FiLMiC, Inc. is the creator of the award-winning mobile cinema camera app, FiLMiC Pro. With a global team of filmmakers, photographers, creatives and software developers who share the same passion for mobile cinema and content creation, FiLMiC has designed what has become the industry's most sought-after app that transforms a simple mobile device into a cinematic film camera. Amazon EC2 Mac instances give us the ability to scale up our continuous integration build farm in order to quickly go through development, testing and TestFlight stages. This leads to better velocity and more time working on the fun stuff.”

Seth Faxon, iOS Development Manager, FiLMiC

“At Ring, we are committed to making home and neighborhood security accessible and effective for everyone while working hard to bring communities together. EC2 Mac instances will allow us to migrate our Apple build infrastructure to AWS, unlocking the scalability, reliability, security, and capabilities of AWS for all our Apple developers. These EC2 Mac instances will also let us quickly scale up our Mac build fleet whenever we need it, simplify cross-platform app development through consolidation on a single infrastructure provider, and ultimately accelerate innovations for thousands of our Apple customers.”

Joshua Roth, CTO

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We all are fond of music and videos and everybody has their own collection of media files both on computers and smartphones. But you can’t carry every time your huge collection of movies, songs, and other media files with you. In such a situation, the home media server comes in handy. There are a bunch of the best open-source and free media server software available online that can set up on your own personal home computer. You can store all your media files in one place on the media server and can access them remotely or locally using a computer or smartphone. For example, you are out of town and want to access your movies or music, what you will do, just take out your smartphone enter your home media server address, and boom!! Using media servers you can create your own personal YouTube, Netflix, and Vimeo. Some Media servers based on lightweight Linux, which means to save electricity and other resources you can install them on Rasberry Pi.

Best Free & Opensource Media server for Linux, Mac, or Windows

Here we have listed Free and Open source Media server software to be used in 2021 that can be work on both Linux and Windows.

PLEX Media Server (Freemium, not opensource)

We already have a done couple of articles on Plex and it really has some great features that allow it in our best media server list. The Plex Media Server is available for a variety of platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker, and third-party NAS (network-attached storage device) Synology, Qnap, Netgear, Seagate, and more…

The Plex media server is not open-source instead of freemium software and offers some features on a subscription base only. However, still here because of its easy to use and install capabilities.

Whereas the Plex player comes under both freemium and open source license GPL v2. Due to its vast range of devices support the Plex continuously gaining popularity as a media streamer.

Plex server and Plex apps

The Plex media server is based on a client-server model. It offers a wide range of client apps for different devices to support and stream its media server content easily. The Plex app is available for Android, Web, Windows, Kodi, Windows Phone, TiVo, SONOS, Android TV, Chrome cast, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Amazon Alexa, Roku, Nvidia Shield, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 & 4 and Smart TV.

Plex Media Server Features:

• Account management
• Support all format videos and audios
• iOS, Windows, and Android Mobile platform support
• Privacy and security
• Media Libraries Sharing
• No Storage Limit
• Online channels
• Live TV
• Plex cloud
• Mobile and Cloud Sync
• Parental control
• Audio Fingerprinting
• Remote Controls
• Media Optimizer and more…

If you are interested in PLEX, also see: How To setup Plex Media Server on Ubuntu Linux.

Mac Server For Home

Kodi Open Source Home Theater Software

Kodi 100% Opensource Media center software that stores all your digital media files in one place like Plex and gives you a beautiful interface to access them. The Kodi was previously known as Xbox Media center or XMBC. Kodi provides a bit different media server software approach. It works more as a local media streamer rather than functions a server-client relationship like PLEX. It was developed as an XMBC open-source media center and still distributed under open source licenses. It plays content from two sources one is locally saved content and the second is via plugins.

It has a vast range of Addon for popular web services, applications, and scripts such as Pluto.TV, PS Vue, HDHomeRun, SoundCloud, Kodi Android Installer, Rooster Teeth, and more… It also provides an add-on to stream, video content from various sources like NBC, CBS, Funimation, and Crunchyroll. It is a perfect mixture of a media center PC/homer sever software. Kodi is also multi-platform support Media center/server software and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and embedded devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Kodi Features:

• TV Shows library supports
• Supporting all the main video formats
• Kodi can play all your music including mp3, flac, wav, and WMA formats
• Import pictures and view them in different styles such as slideshow
• Support Live TV recording
• JSON-RPC based remote interface
• Smartphone and Tablet Apps
• Add-Ons for popular web services, applications, and scripts.
• Works popular backends such as MediaPortal, MythTV, NextPVR, Tvheadend, and much more.

Emby Media Server

Emby is a great and best free Media server similar to Plex in features and user interface. While Plex is a closed source or freemium, Emby is totally open-source media server software. In comparison to Plex, the Emby is much easier to install for newbies and you can see our article: How to Install Emby media server, step by the step installation process. Emby offers lots of customization, media management, and database options.

The Emby Media server is available for Windows, Linux, Nas Devices, Mac OS, Docker, and FreeBSD. Like Plex, the Emby is also has a dedicated Linux installer for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and CentOS. If you are looking for a 100% open-source Media server for your office or home then Emby is the best one.

Web-based Management System of Emby to install plugins, edit metadata and subtitles, Sync, and more…

open-source Media server

Emby also offers Apps for the mobile operating system: Emby Web client, Android, iOS, Windows 10, and Windows Mobile. Apart from the Emby Apps, it also has a good collection of TV Apps as follow:

• Android TV
• Amazon Fire Tv
• Shield Android TV
• Apple TV
• Chromecast
• Roku
• Emby Theatre HTML5
• Emby Theatre for Windows
• LG Smart TV
• Samsung Smart TV
• PS4
• Xbox One
• Windows Media Center
• Xbox 360
• Kodi
• PS3

Emby Media Server Features

• Emby Server automatically converts and streams the media
• Stream Live TV to any device
• Web-based tools to edit metadata and subtitles
• Easy DLNA
• Parental Controls
• Easily control content access
• Cloud Sync
• Chromecast

Jellyfin Media Server

Jellyfin is another popular open-source project that lets us create quickly a modern media server with an interactive web user interface to manage videos, images, and music from any device.

We can browser media content using Jellyfin on various devices such as computers, apps on your Roku, Android, iOS (including AirPlay), Android TV, or Fire TV device, or via your Chromecast or existing Kodi. Whereas when it comes to installing the Jellyfin server platform it doesn’t limit to Linux only, we can set it up on machines running Microsoft Windows, macOS, or in a Docker container.

Learn the process to install Jellyfin on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04 or Debian.

MediaPortal

MediaPortal is a well-featured open-source HTPC media center and similar to Kodi. It does not have features like Emby and Plex, but still, it’s very good open-source media server software. Using it you can watch, schedule, and record live TV like TiVo, streaming media, radio, and TV to any HTPC connected to your network., Check the weather, news, slideshow of pictures & videos, and more. It can access easily the web or mobile device. It also based on Client/Server Architecture.

See:How to Install and Configure the MediaPortal Media server on Windows 10 PC

Media Portal Features

• Watch TV, Videos, and DVD
• Watch Online Videos
• Listening to Music, Radio, and Web Streams
• Schedule Recordings
• Client/Server Architecture
• Skin System
• Plug-in System
• Check Weather Forecast
• Picture and video slideshow Viewer
• Multiple Tuner Support
• Time Shifting, Pause, and Record TV/Radio
• Read RSS Feeds

OpenFLIXR Media Server

OpenFLIXR 2 is the easiest free all-in-one home Media server that offers all media solutions in one package. OpenFLIX Media server software download, install updates of media programs automatically. This home media server is a combination of all well-known open-source projects out there including Plex Media Server.

OpenFLIXR Media Server all-in on video streaming server

Software used in OpenFLIXR are:

• CouchPotato + Radarr for Movies
• SickRage + Sonarr for automated TV show downloading
• Headphones- Automated music downloader
• Mopidy-Music Server
• Ubooquity-Comics and Ebooks & Web-based Reader
• Subtitles- AutoSub, Sub-Zero, Sickrage
• HTPC Manager
• Plex Media Server to organizes movies, series, music, and photos
• SABnzbd, NZBge, qBittorrent
• Netdata + Monit for monitoring
• Home-Assistant
• And More…

The OpenFLIXR media server needs a virtual machine to install since it is a virtual application.

OpenELEC

OpenELEC is a lightweight Linux operating system built to create a media server like Kodi. The full form of the OpenELEC is Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center. Due to its lightweight, it can be easily installed on Raspberry, Apple TV, or low configurations systems.

Features of OpenELEC are:

• TV Show Management
• Movie Organizer and Player
• Music and Audiobook Player
• Freescale iMX6 ARM builds for Cubox-i, CuboxTV, and Hummingboard boxes
• TV and Personal Video Recorder
• Addon available to expand its feature
• Picture Browser

OSMC Media Center

OSMC Media center is last on our list. It is an open-source media center with a simple design and intuitive navigation system. The OSMC media center is based on Kodi and Debian. It also offers paid hardware kits and other accessories to enhance the OSMC user experience such as the Vero 4K. It is a hardware device with OSMC that supports 4K, HEVC, 10-bit content, and HD audio. It supports almost every type of media file. OSMC Media center is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Rasberry Pi, Vero, and Apple TV.

OSMC Media Center

A verdict on Best Free & Opensource Media Server Software Options

Although Plex, Emby, and Kodi are the best and most popular media servers. But that doesn’t mean that other media servers are not good some of them like OpenFlixr are worth trying. We have put everything we know on this list, now it’s all upon you which you want to use. If you want to install a media server along with a NAS server then you can go for open-source NAS software like FreeNAS.

Free Mac Web Server

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