Shows what you are playing in VLC on your Discord profile, with the cover art when it can find one.
VLC already exposes everything it knows over a local HTTP interface. This app reads that, works out
what the file actually is, looks for artwork, and hands the result to Discord. The interesting part
is the middle step, because a file on disk is usually called something like
[SubsPlease] Frieren - 11 (1080p) [A1B2C3D4].mkv, and nobody wants that on their profile.
| Music | Anime | Paused |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
graph LR
A[VLC Media Player] -->|HTTP interface| B[VLC Discord RP]
B -->|filename and tags| D[Identification]
D -->|title, season, episode| B
D -->|cover art lookup| E[AniList / iTunes / MusicBrainz]
B -->|Rich Presence| C[Discord]
The app polls VLC's status endpoint roughly every 1.5 seconds. When something is playing it reads the file's tags and parses its name, then decides whether it is looking at a series, a film, or a track. From there it tries to find a cover, and sends Discord a presence built from what it found.
It only sends an update when something meaningful changed. Playback position alone does not count, because Discord animates the progress bar on its own from the start and end timestamps.
The app tries sources in order and stops at the first confident match. It would rather show no cover than the wrong one, so a weak match is discarded.
| Content | Source | Needs an account |
|---|---|---|
| Audio with cover art in the file | The file itself | No |
| Audio with usable tags | iTunes Search, then MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive | No |
| Audio with no usable tags | The sound itself, see below | No |
| Anime | AniList | No |
| Films and western television | Nothing automatic, see Limitations | No |
A file ripped from YouTube usually has no artist and a title that is really its filename, so no text search can find it. For those the app computes an acoustic fingerprint of the audio and asks AcoustID which recording it is, which does not care what the file is called. When the match is strong enough it supplies the title and the artist as well, so Discord reads the song and not the file. Naming asks for more confidence than artwork does, so a match can be good enough for the cover and still leave the text as it was. That step runs last, only for what nothing else could identify, because its usage budget is shared by everyone running the app rather than being yours alone. You do not need an account for it.
Artwork embedded in an audio file cannot be handed to Discord directly, because Discord fetches images by URL and knows nothing about your disk. The app uploads that image to a temporary public file host so Discord can reach it. Read the Limitations section before you decide how you feel about that.
- Windows 10 or 11, 64 bit. These are the only builds published.
- VLC Media Player, with its HTTP interface, which the app turns on for you.
- The Discord desktop app, running. Rich Presence does not work through Discord in a browser.
- In Discord, under Settings, Activity Privacy, "Display current activity as a status message" must be on.
An internet connection is only needed for cover art lookups and for updates. Everything else is local.
Take a build from Releases.
vlc-rpc-x.x.x-setup.exe installs normally and can start with Windows.
vlc-rpc-x.x.x-portable.exe runs from wherever you put it, and still keeps its configuration in
your user profile.
VLC's HTTP interface is off by default, so the app walks you through turning it on. It writes the
port and a password into VLC's own configuration file, vlcrc.
VLC reads that file when it starts, so you have to restart VLC once after the setup. The app cannot do that part for you.
The default port is 9080. If something else on your machine is already using it, change it in Settings and restart VLC again. The password is generated if you leave it empty, and it is only ever used to talk to VLC on your own machine.
The app lives in the system tray, and closing the window does not quit it. Right click the tray icon to turn Rich Presence off, or to turn it off for 15 minutes, an hour, or two hours, which is what you want when you are watching something you would rather not broadcast.
A new release announces itself with a button in the window header, next to the VLC and Discord chips, and there is nothing there the rest of the time, so an empty header means you are current. An installed copy reads "Update to 5.0.0", downloads it and restarts to finish. A portable copy reads "Get 5.0.0" and opens the release page, because a portable build cannot replace the file it is running from. While it downloads, the button becomes the version and the percent. If you would rather ask than wait, Settings has a "Check for updates" button under About, which answers next to the version it checked.
Layout is where you build what your profile shows. On the left is a palette of pieces named the way you would name them: Title, Artist, Album, your own words, and for video Title, Episode, Year, Season number and Episode number, each one showing what it is worth for the file playing right now. On the right is the Discord card, the same one Home draws, and its lines are where the pieces go. Drag a piece onto a line, or pick a line and press a piece; a piece already placed moves with the arrow keys and comes off with delete. There is no preview beside it, because the card you arrange is the card your profile draws. Music and video are arranged separately.
The lines are Discord's own, in the order it draws them: the header, where the verb and the name of the activity share one line, then the bold line, then the line under it, then the text on the artwork. Left empty, the header is Discord's to fill, and it writes the name of the app there, the way a Spotify card reads. Video has only the bold line and the one under it. A piece with nothing to draw takes itself off the line and takes the words beside it with it, which is how one arrangement reads for a series and for a film without writing "Unknown" or leaving empty brackets behind. The builder warns you when two lines would draw the same value, and when a line holds pieces but draws nothing in any of the examples.
Corrections are for when the app gets it wrong, or when there is no source to get it right from. On Home, the "Correction" row of "What VLC reports" opens a small form already filled in with what the app worked out. For video you can change the title, the cover, and whether it is a film or a series. For audio that carries tags you can change only the cover, because the text is built from those tags. For audio whose tags name nothing you can type the title and the artist too, and there the cover is optional: once the track has a name, the ordinary lookup usually finds the artwork by itself. A cover is a web address, and saving checks that it really loads before keeping it.
When a file was named from its sound rather than from its tags, the "Audio match" row says so, with a button to go back to what the file says. That refusal is saved as a correction like any other, and the same row takes it back.
A correction always wins. It is not weighed against anything and it is never scored, and the cover you give it for audio also beats the artwork embedded in the file. That last part matters more than it sounds, because a wrong or low resolution cover baked into an MP3 is the most common reason to want a correction in the first place.
Saved corrections are listed in Settings, where you can see what each one applies to and remove it.
These are real, and worth knowing before you file a bug.
There is no automatic cover for films or western television. Not because it is unfinished, but because there is no source for it that works without credentials. Film posters are studio property, and every catalogue that carries them puts an API key in front, usually behind an application form. Anime works because AniList is open. Music works because iTunes and MusicBrainz are open. For everything else, corrections are the answer, and they exist for exactly this reason.
Embedded cover art is uploaded to a public file host. To show the artwork inside your audio
files, the app uploads that image to five temporary hosts at once (x0.at, catbox.moe, uguu.se,
0x0.st, tempfile.org) and gives Discord the first link that comes back. The uploads still in flight
are cancelled the moment one host answers, but a host that finished first has a copy of its own.
Anyone holding one of those links can open the image for as long as it lives, and the app asks for
roughly seven days. Only the image goes up, under a generated name like cover_1757980800000.jpg,
so neither your filename nor its path travels with it. If you would rather not, leave Rich Presence
off for those files, or point a correction at an image that is already on the web, which is handed
to Discord as a link and uploads nothing.
A correction is tied to what the app matched, not to the file you were playing. A video correction is filed against the title read out of the filename, so the same series under two release names counts as two different things and a correction saved for one will not apply to the other. An audio correction is filed against the artist and the record its tags name, so it covers the whole album at once. Audio with no tags has nothing to be filed against except the file itself, so that correction ends the day the file is moved or renamed. Settings spells out what each one applies to, so you can see why one stopped working instead of guessing.
VLC has to be restarted after the initial setup, and again after any change to the port or the
password, because VLC only reads vlcrc at startup.
Identification is confidence based and prefers silence. If nothing scores well enough you get the filename and no cover, rather than a confident guess at the wrong show. Replacing the text takes a better score than showing a cover does, so a file identified by its sound can end up with the right artwork and still read as its filename.
Windows only, as published. The core has no Windows specific logic, but no macOS or Linux builds are produced or tested.
Electron with TypeScript throughout, React in the renderer, built with electron-vite, linted and formatted with Biome, tested with Vitest. The package manager is bun.
The main process is organised by feature rather than by layer. Each folder under
src/main/features/ owns its own types, handlers and services, and src/main/main.ts is a
composition root that builds the object graph by hand. There is no dependency injection framework
and there are no singletons: everything arrives through a constructor, which is what lets the test
suite run with no VLC, no Discord and no network.
src/main/ main.ts, core/ (logger, config, ipc, clock), features/<name>/
src/preload/ the only bridge between main and renderer
src/renderer/ React, also organised by feature
src/shared/ the contract between main and renderer, and nothing else
src/shared/ipc/channels.ts is the single source of truth for every IPC channel. Adding one there
makes the compiler demand both the handler in main and the bridge in preload, so the two halves
cannot drift apart quietly.
Identification lives in features/catalog for video and features/music for audio. Both follow
the same shape: parse, build a cache key, ask the providers, score the candidates, and return a
result only above a threshold. Scoring uses Sorensen-Dice bigram similarity over normalised titles.
Results are cached to disk, so replaying the same album does not repeat the lookups.
Running it locally:
bun install
bun run dev # electron-vite in watch mode
bun run test # vitest, needs no VLC and no network
bun run typecheck # main and renderer
bun run lint # biome, writes fixes
bun run build # typecheck, then bundleAudio fingerprinting needs two things a clone does not have. bun install fetches
Chromaprint's fpcalc for your platform into resources/bin/, which is git ignored, and the
AcoustID client key is read at build time from MAIN_VITE_ACOUSTID_KEY. Copy .env.example to
.env and put your own key there if you want that step to run; see
acoustid.org/new-application. Without a key the app skips
it and everything else behaves exactly as it does in a release.
CONTRIBUTING.md documents the conventions the codebase actually follows, including file naming, the barrel rules, and the logging rules that keep your VLC password out of the log file. Read it before writing code.
Nothing appears on Discord. Check that the Discord desktop app is open, and that "Display current activity as a status message" is on under Settings, Activity Privacy. Discord also hides your own activity in some views, so it is worth asking someone else before concluding it is broken.
The app says it cannot reach VLC. Restart VLC. This is almost always the first run case, where
the settings were written but VLC has not read them yet. If it persists, check that the port in
Settings matches the one in vlcrc, and that nothing else is using it.
A show is identified as the wrong one. Use a correction. If it happens with a common release naming pattern, an issue with the exact filename is genuinely useful.
The cover disappeared after a while. Uploaded artwork lives on a temporary host and expires. Playing the file again uploads it again.
Fork, branch, and open a pull request. Add a changeset for anything a user would notice:
bun changesetSee .changeset/CONTRIBUTING.md for what goes in one, and CONTRIBUTING.md for the code conventions.
AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE-CODE.
Bugs and feature requests go to Issues. For an identification bug, include the exact filename, since that is what the app reads.
If you want to support the project:
