Noktus is an unofficial cross-platform desktop client for Jellyfin that combines the official Jellyfin Web interface with optional native MPV playback.
Rather than replacing Jellyfin with another frontend, Noktus focuses on providing a polished desktop experience while staying as close as possible to the official Jellyfin interface. Libraries, authentication, settings, and playback behavior continue to be driven by Jellyfin, allowing new server features and UI improvements to flow naturally without maintaining a separate frontend.
Noktus is intentionally lightweight.
Instead of reimplementing Jellyfin or building a complete media player from scratch, Noktus focuses on providing a reliable desktop runtime around the official Jellyfin experience.
The project aims to:
- Stay close to upstream Jellyfin.
- Minimize platform-specific behavior.
- Keep long-term maintenance manageable.
- Provide native desktop integration where it improves the experience.
- Use MPV where it offers a better playback experience.
Noktus loads the official Jellyfin Web interface directly.
For most content, playback works exactly as it does in a browser using the standard Jellyfin web player. Libraries, accounts, queues, authentication, and playback remain owned by Jellyfin.
For videos that benefit from native playback, Noktus can instead launch an external MPV window while keeping playback synchronized with Jellyfin. Progress, pause state, resume position, and other playback events continue to be reported back to the server.
On Windows, mpv.net can also be used as a drop-in replacement for MPV. Noktus automatically detects MPV first, then mpv.net, or either executable can be selected manually in Settings.
When MPV is used, Noktus adds desktop-focused features while remaining fully integrated with Jellyfin.
- Native Skip Intro and Skip Outro prompts.
- Playback reporting.
- Resume position synchronization.
- Automatic MPV detection.
- Optional mpv.net support on Windows.
- Named MPV video profiles from your existing MPV configuration.
- Per-series audio and subtitle preferences.
- Server-generated trickplay thumbnails while scrubbing the Noktus MPV seek bar.
Skip Intro and Skip Outro prompts are powered by Jellyfin's authenticated MediaSegments API, making them compatible with servers using Intro Skipper and other supported segment providers without requiring additional configuration.
Trickplay previews use the thumbnail tiles generated by the Jellyfin server. Noktus decodes only a bounded window around the current seek position and replaces that window as needed, avoiding a whole-video thumbnail cache. The Noktus controls preset enables this integration; Use my MPV configuration leaves OSC and thumbnail behavior to the user's scripts.
Video profiles can be selected in Settings. Noktus can discover profiles from regular MPV, or you can enter a profile name manually when using mpv.net.
When you change the audio or subtitle track during an episode, Noktus automatically remembers that choice for the series and confirms it in MPV. Noktus matches the language and track type on later episodes instead of assuming every file uses the same stream number. Use Playback → Forget automatically saved tracks for this series to return to Jellyfin's normal selection. These preferences stay local to Noktus and do not change the series on your Jellyfin server.
MPV is completely optional.
The built-in Jellyfin player remains available for content such as Live TV, music, active recordings, SyncPlay, or any scenario where the standard web player is the better choice.
Users are free to choose whichever playback method best fits the content.
Noktus uses a bundled Chromium runtime to provide consistent behavior across Windows, macOS, and Linux. This keeps the desktop experience predictable while avoiding platform-specific differences between system webviews.
The core of the codebase was written by me. I used a local LLM as a development aid for tasks such as debugging, documentation and grammar reviews, researching topics I was rusty on, and generating portions of the test suite (because, let's be honest, nobody enjoys writing tests).
All architecture, design decisions, implementation, and final code review were performed by me. Any LLM-generated suggestions were reviewed, modified where necessary, and verified before being incorporated into the project.