Cinestar vs QMedia

Cinestar is an open-source application for searching images and videos with locally run AI services. It can ingest folders or videos, transcribe audio with Whisper, embed frames with BGE, and create captions with Moondream. Natural-language searches return matching moments with timecodes and thumbnails. Cinestar stores vectors in SQLite-Vec and uses Llama 3.2 for language tasks and content organization. The maker says it has no analytics, telemetry, usage tracking, or data uploads. It is available for Linux and macOS under the MIT license, and the listed open-source core costs nothing. Local AI services require Ollama; the install guide lists BGE, Moondream, and Llama 3.2 model downloads totaling about 2–4 GB. The site describes plugins for functions including face recognition, metadata extraction, collaboration, backups, and multi-user access, plus an open API for custom plugins. The maker presents it for personal media managers, content creators, media organizations, and academic or market researchers. Its changelog lists v0.1.52, dated October 11, 2025, as the latest release on that page.

QMedia is an open-source multimedia AI search engine for content creators. It searches and extracts information from text, images, and short videos, combining those formats in a multimodal retrieval and question-answering system. Its web service displays content and sources as cards with image, text, and short-video breakdowns. The project can run locally for offline search and question answering over private data. The web service, RAG search and Q&A service, and image, text, and video model service can be deployed separately. The standalone model service offers an API for image and text encoding, video transcription, and image OCR. Documented model options include CLIP, BGE, Qanything OCR, LLaVA, and Faster Whisper, with local Ollama model switching. Google content search is configurable but disabled by default, as is video service use in the RAG server configuration. The RAG service depends on a separate mm_server service. QMedia is self-hosted, available through its web service, and licensed under MIT.