Kahawai is an open-source, self-hosted media server written in Rust that streams movies, series, anime, and music from your own collection. It intelligently decides per-stream whether to play files directly, remux, transcode audio only, or fully transcode based on client capabilities, minimizing unnecessary processing. The system supports distributed storage and transcoding across machines, comprehensive metadata from AniDB and AniList, and preserves subtitle formatting including typeset anime subtitles.