Your footage stays put. Your team can finally find it.
Downlink Media is a media asset management server for video teams whose footage lives on a NAS. It runs on your own hardware, indexes your shares where they are, and gives editors, producers and clients one place to search, watch, comment and share.
Find and watch
Indexes media in place
Connects to NFS, SMB or local disks and checks them on a schedule. A pass over 100,000 unchanged files takes about a tenth of a second.
Libraries that match how you work
A library is a named set of folders, per client or production. It can span an active and an archive volume, and libraries can nest.
Every format an editor uses
Video, audio and stills, including DPX and OpenEXR image sequences treated as one asset, with codec, frame rate, colour, timecode, camera and reel read from each file.
Search and filters
Search names, reels, cameras and notes. Filter by kind, keyword, rating, resolution, frame rate, codec, duration and date. Every view is a link you can bookmark.
A player made for review
Frame stepping, JKL shuttle and a running timecode that knows about drop-frame. Hover over any card to scrub through the clip.
Proxies when you need them
FFmpeg makes 720p H.264 proxies. Choose per library: every file, or only the ones someone opens. Files a browser can already play need none.
Review and share
Comments on the timecode
Each comment is pinned to a frame and shows as a marker on the timeline. Assets also get notes and a 1 to 5 star rating.
Keywords and collections
One keyword vocabulary for the whole installation. Collections can follow folders or keywords and fill themselves.
Share links
Share a library, folder, collection or chosen clips with people who have no account, with an optional password, expiry and downloads. Every link has an access log.
Uploads straight to the NAS
Drag whole folders into the browser. Uploads resume after a dropped connection and land in the right folder on your share.
Download originals
Tick the clips you need and Downlink builds a zip of the originals in the background.
Roles per library
Viewers, editors and managers, granted per library to people or groups. What someone cannot see does not exist for them.
It never writes over your footage
A scan only reads. Downlink writes nothing to a share except a small marker file that identifies the volume, plus the uploads and new folders your team asks for, and a volume can be read-only.
If a share drops off the network, nothing looks deleted: the marker is missing, so Downlink waits. Files still being copied are left alone until they settle, and snapshot folders, recycle bins and editing caches from Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Avid are skipped.
Hardware encoding on Apple silicon
On a Mac, Downlink can encode proxies with VideoToolbox outside Docker. A ProRes 422 HQ proxy took 2.6 seconds instead of 4.7 on a Mac Studio, using about a fifth of the processor time.
The same images run on Linux servers and NAS units, on amd64 and arm64.
What you need
- A server
Linux or macOS with Docker Engine 25 or later and the Compose plugin. Docker Desktop works. It can sit beside the NAS or be the NAS itself.
- Processor and memory
About 5 cores and 1 GiB of memory for each encode you want running at once.
- Storage
Your existing shares over SMB 3 or NFS. Room for proxies and download archives, ideally on the NAS too.
- Network
Runs on your network and loads nothing from the internet. HTTPS with a certificate you install.
- Under the hood
PostgreSQL, Redis, nginx and FFmpeg, all in the images. Daily database backups are kept for 14 days.
Questions
Does Downlink copy my media?
No. It indexes your footage where it already is and keeps only proxies, thumbnails and its database. The originals stay on your shares.
What happens when a share goes offline?
Nothing is lost. Each volume carries a marker, so an unmounted share is treated as unavailable, not empty. Files that are really gone are kept offline for a retention period you choose before they are removed from the index.
Does it work with our editing apps?
Every file shows its path on a Mac and on Windows, ready to paste into Finder, Explorer or your editing app. Downlink ignores the cache folders those apps write.
Can clients watch without an account?
Yes, through a share link. You choose what it shows, whether it needs a password, when it expires and whether originals can be downloaded.
Where does it run?
On one server on your network, with Docker Compose. Updates are a docker compose pull away.
Want to see it?
We will show you Downlink running on footage like yours.