Jellyfin MPV Shim
Jellyfin MPV Shim is a fully featured Jellyfin client built on top of MPV with support for offline sync, media browsing, background casting, syncplay, music, live TV, books, and photos. It does not depend on or use a webview and doesn't mess with MPV's video output pipeline, allowing for HDR and tone mapping support.
Download for Windows ·
Flathub (Linux) ·
pip (Linux) · macOS
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| Playback | Music |
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| Detail page | TV shows |
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| Live TV guide | Comic reader |
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| Audiobook | Epub reader |
Features
- Uncompromising Playback: MPV's rendering and video pipelines are completely untouched. It's not redirected, broken, or embedded in a toolkit. Native HDR and Dolby Vision are supported on Windows and Linux.
- Browse and play your entire library including films, shows, music, photos, Live TV
and books, comics and audiobooks.
- Offline sync: download media for offline viewing, automatically if desired.
- Cast target: Fully controllable from Jellyfin web and mobile apps.
- SyncPlay: Watch media with friends, without screen shares or awkward syncing.
- Smart Subtitles: No need to set for every episode, they're remembered by default and
can be forced globally.
- Video Enhancement: video upscaling, debanding, and motion interpolation.
- Advanced Audio: Audio passthrough and night mode so you can actually hear people talking.
- Seamless User & Server Switching via fast user switching and
optional PINs.
- Keyboard, mouse, Jellyfin remote and game controller support, and all of
MPV's shortcuts.
- MPRIS media controls on Linux, Discord Rich Presence, shell
commands on playback events, and an
external MPV if you prefer your own.
Getting started
Install it (below), launch it and log in. Enter your server's address, e.g.
http://192.168.1.10:8096 or https://jellyfin.example.com, including any subpath; port
8096 is assumed if you leave it out, so a server on port 80 needs :80. Quick Connect works
too.
Then browse from the window, or cast to it from another Jellyfin app. When a system tray is
available, closing the window keeps it running there as a cast target; you can change that in
Settings.
Windows
Download the installer from Releases.
There are ARM64 builds, and LEGACY64 builds for CPUs without x86-64-v3 support
(roughly pre-2013).
Linux
The Flatpak is the
most integrated option. To install with pip instead you need libmpv (or mpv). MPV 0.41
or newer is recommended:
pip3 install --upgrade jellyfin-mpv-shim
Optional extras:
- Tray icon: keeps it running in the background once the window closes (or enable
Keep Running in Background in Settings instead):
pip3 install 'jellyfin-mpv-shim[systray]', plus GObject and AppIndicator from your
distribution (on Debian: python3-gi gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1). The virtualenv must
have --system-site-packages; with pipx,
pipx install --system-site-packages 'jellyfin-mpv-shim[systray]'.
- Discord Rich Presence:
pip3 install 'jellyfin-mpv-shim[discord]', then enable it in
Settings.
With MPV older than 0.41, minimizing to the tray closes MPV rather than hiding its window, and
copy/paste in text fields needs wl-clipboard (Wayland) or xclip/xsel (X11).
If your distribution's MPV is old, mpv-build builds
a current one with libmpv by default; run sudo ldconfig afterwards. Add
-Dsdl2-gamepad=enabled to its mpv_options for controller support.
macOS
MacOS is not officially supported or released by this project, but unsigned builds are provided on a
best-effort basis via CI. If anything breaks, feel free to to submit a PR (AI is allowed subject to review) to fix it.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
