MediaFlick Desktop

The Jellyfin desktop client that plays through your real mpv.

Not libmpv baked into an app — your actual external mpv process, with SVP4 motion interpolation, SDR-to-HDR, custom shaders, and your full mpv.conf. Browse a fast native library, hit play, and mpv takes over while watched state and resume points sync straight back to your server.

Why this exists, and why it's different

Every other Jellyfin desktop app plays video inside itself with libmpv. That's convenient, but it quietly caps what mpv can do — the features power users actually chase, like SVP 4 frame interpolation and SDR-to-HDR tone mapping, are exactly the ones that don't survive being embedded.

MediaFlick Desktop takes the opposite approach. It has its own UI — no embedded Jellyfin Web — and when you press play it hands the stream to the external mpv you already configured. Original-quality direct playback remains the default, with optional automatic or bitrate-limited Jellyfin transcoding for slower connections. Your mpv.conf, your scripts, your shaders, your SVP4 pipeline, your HDR profiles, your input bindings — all of it applies, because it's the real mpv, not a stripped-down copy.

Browsing is fast because it isn't a web client talking to a server on every keystroke: the app keeps a local SQLite mirror of your library and searches it directly, so type-ahead search stays instant even on a big library and posters keep working while the server is slow.

The catch with playing outside the browser is usually that Jellyfin loses track of what you watched. MediaFlick solves that: while mpv plays, it reports playback start, progress, watched state, and resume position back to your server, so your library stays correct across every device.

Features

• Real external mpv playback — original or server-transcoded streams handed to your own mpv process, so your entire setup applies: mpv.conf, scripts, shaders, profiles, SVP4, custom HDR, input bindings.
• Selectable streaming quality — keep original quality, use Jellyfin's automatic connection limit, or cap playback from 1.5 to 120 Mbps with server-transcoding fallback.
• Playstate synced to Jellyfin — playback start, progress, watched state, and resume positions report back to your server.
• Media-segment skipping — skip intros, credits, recaps, and commercials, with per-type prompt or auto-skip (countdown) settings.
• Skip markers on the seek bar — the mpv timeline shows exactly where segments are skipped, merged with the file's own chapters.
• Its own native UI — sign-in (password or Quick Connect), home rows for Continue Watching / Next Up / Recently Added, a virtualized poster grid, and a details view with cast, seasons, and episodes.
• Local metadata cache — your library is mirrored into SQLite with full-text search over titles, overviews, genres, and cast, kept current by a background sync.
• Release calendar — agenda and month views of upcoming episodes and film releases. It works from Jellyfin metadata alone and gains monitored/file truth from the optional Companion plugin.
• Server-mediated requests — the optional MediaFlick Companion keeps Sonarr, Radarr, and Seerr credentials on the Jellyfin server, runs Seerr calls as the signed-in user, and works when those services are not exposed outside the LAN.
• Server administration in your browser — anything the app deliberately doesn't rebuild (dashboard, users, metadata editing) opens in your default browser from the right-click menu.
• One-click mpv download on Windows — no manual setup; Linux and macOS auto-detect a system mpv.
• Optional MPC-HC backend on Windows — switchable live from Client Settings (mpv stays the default).
• Automatic in-app updates from GitHub Releases (Windows).
• Cross-platform — Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Install

Windows — download the latest MediaFlickDesktop-Setup-<version>.exe from Releases and run it. Don't have mpv yet? There's a one-click Download mpv in the app.

On first launch, enter your Jellyfin server address and sign in. Right-click anywhere for Client Settings, Open Jellyfin dashboard, and About.

Linux / macOS — grab the release archive and run mediaflick-desktop. mpv isn't bundled; a system mpv is auto-detected.

Build it yourself

See BUILDING.md.

MediaFlick Companion

The optional server plugin lives in plugin/. It targets Jellyfin 10.11.11 and exposes only typed, authenticated operations—there is no generic service proxy. Configure Sonarr, Radarr, and Seerr once from Jellyfin's plugin dashboard; desktop clients discover it automatically through Jellyfin and never receive the service API keys.