Introduction
What Airwave is, and how this documentation is organized.
Airwave is a self-hostable service that turns your Plex library into custom, always-on live-TV channels — a real channel guide, DVR, and bumpers — streamed directly from your own Plex to native apps on webOS, Apple TV, iPad, Android TV, and Fire TV. It's free and self-hosted: you run the server, there's no subscription.
You build channels from metadata filters over your library ("90s comedies", "everything Studio Ghibli", "unwatched sci-fi"), Airwave lays each one onto a continuous, deterministic timeline, and your viewers channel-surf it like cable — joining whatever's on now, mid-program, at the correct offset.
Start here
Quick Start
Zero to watching — connect a source, build a channel, add viewers, and tune in.
Media sources
Connect your Plex server, enable libraries, and sync metadata.
Channels
Build a channel from a filter — ordering, grouping/rotation strategies, and its schedule.
What's here (and what's coming)
These docs cover using Airwave and how it works internally. Still to be written up: the apps
and their stacks, the deterministic scheduling engine, the effectiveTime/DVR playback model, bumpers
& ambient music, and the self-hosting/Docker deploy. For install today, see the project
README.