Swiftly for Jellyfin
A native Jellyfin client for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, Linux and Windows.
It never transcodes — every file plays as Direct Play or Direct Stream.
Swiftly for Jellyfin is a client for your own Jellyfin server. It is meant to
be plain, and to just work.
It opens, it finds your library, it plays. Most of it is the ordinary things
done properly, instead of a hundred switches nobody ever touches — and
underneath, it works hard never to make your server transcode, so the
picture stays untouched and your CPU stays cool.
If you came here looking for a Jellyfin app for iPhone or iPad, a
Jellyfin client for Apple TV, a native Jellyfin player for macOS, or a
Jellyfin desktop client for Linux or Windows — that is all one app, and
this is it. Picture in Picture, Direct Play without transcoding, several
accounts on one server, and handing a running film from one device to the
next.
But three things it does that no other Jellyfin client does at all.
📸 Screenshots
✨ Three things you will not find elsewhere
📲 Continue on this device
You are watching on the Apple TV. You get up, take your phone — and there is a
badge next to your profile picture. Tap it, and the film carries on here,
from the same second. The television stops on its own; you do not pause
anything, you do not scroll to find where you were.
It works in every direction: TV to phone, phone to Mac, Mac to TV. If two of
your devices are playing, Swiftly asks which one you meant. Only your own
account is offered, and only devices that are actually reachable.
I have not seen this in another Jellyfin client, and it is the thing people
notice on day one and then cannot do without.
👥 Several Jellyfin accounts on one server
Your household has one server and several accounts on it — yours, your
partner's, the children's. Swiftly holds all of them at once.
Above "Sign out" there is "Add another account". After that, a strip at the
top of your profile switches between them: press a picture, and you are in
that account. No password, no signing out, no waiting — both logins stay
in the keychain, and Continue Watching, Next Up and everything else changes
with them.
Signing out affects only the account you are on. The others stay.
📺 Every Apple TV profile keeps its own login
The Apple TV already knows who is watching — it has profiles at the top of the
screen. Swiftly follows them.
Switch the tvOS profile, and Swiftly is in that person's Jellyfin account.
Their Continue Watching, their watched marks, their Top Shelf on the home
screen. Nobody has to sign anything in or out; the television already asked
the question, and the app simply respects the answer.
🌟 Everything else
🎬 Watching
- Never transcode. The device profile declares containers, codecs and
every subtitle format, so the server has no reason to re-encode.
Undeclared subtitles are the most common cause of a needless transcode, and
they are all declared here.
- Resume exactly where you stopped, with the next episode following on its
own.
- Skip intro and recap where your server knows about them — the button
changes what it says, instead of appearing out of nowhere.
- Audio and subtitle tracks switch while the film keeps running.
- Playback speed, and the position is reported back to the server as you
watch.
📚 Finding things
- Several libraries of the same kind, and the app remembers which one you
were in.
- Search across your libraries, with the season and episode you meant.
- Top Shelf1: what you were watching sits above the app icon on
the Apple TV home screen, before you even open it.
📱 On your devices
- Picture in Picture2 — the one thing that sent me looking for
another client in the first place.
- Lock screen and Control Centre2 show the artwork and the
controls.
- Media keys3 work, and a small window stays on top while you
do something else.
- Quick Connect, so you never type a password on a television remote.
🔒 Yours
- No account, no subscription, no ads, no tracking. Nothing leaves your
device except the requests to the server you enter yourself.
- Free and open source, MPL-2.0.
1 Apple TV · 2 iPhone, iPad · 3 Linux, Windows, Mac
📱 Platforms
One app, one design, sized for the screen you are on. The logic — server
access, device profile, playback timing — is shared; only the views differ,
and only where distance, input or window size demand it.
| Platform | State |
|---|
| 📱 iPhone | 1.0.1 (1) · beta on TestFlight |
| 📲 iPad | 1.0.1 (1) · ships with the iPhone app |
| 📺 Apple TV | 1.0.1 (1) · beta on TestFlight |
| 💻 Mac | 1.0.1 (1) · beta on TestFlight |
| 🐧 Linux | 1.0.0 · GTK4, native, same shared logic · install |
| 🪟 Windows | 1.0.0 · GTK4 like Linux, the same source · download |
The beta is open. Join on TestFlight
— one link for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. What each build wants tested is
written in its release notes, and it is usually five specific things rather
than "have a look around".
🐧 Linux
One command. It works out which distribution you are on, adds the Swiftly
package source, and installs from it — so updates arrive with your normal
system update, like any other program.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paulherter/swiftly-for-jellyfin/main/Linux/Installieren/swiftly-installieren.sh | bash
Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, elementary, Zorin
sudo install -d -m755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/swiftly.gpg | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/swiftly.asc >/dev/null
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/swiftly.asc] https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/deb ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/swiftly.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install swiftly-jellyfin
Fedora, Nobara, RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux
sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/swiftly.repo <<'EOF'
[swiftly]
name=Swiftly for Jellyfin
baseurl=https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/swiftly.gpg
EOF
sudo dnf install swiftly-jellyfin
Arch, CachyOS, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda
curl -fsSL https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/swiftly.gpg | sudo pacman-key --add -
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 705D676A71BF0121804A90BAC8589885A042FB8B
sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf <<'EOF'
[swiftly]
SigLevel = Required DatabaseOptional
Server = https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/arch
EOF
sudo pacman -Sy swiftly-jellyfin
openSUSE Tumbleweed
sudo rpm --import https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/swiftly.gpg
sudo zypper addrepo -f https://paulherter.github.io/swiftly-for-jellyfin/rpm swiftly
sudo zypper install swiftly-jellyfin
Anything else — build it yourself. Same script, one flag:
… | bash -s -- --aus-quelle. It pulls the dependencies from your
distribution, fetches Swift into $HOME, and builds.
The packages are signed; the key's fingerprint is
705D 676A 71BF 0121 804A 90BA C858 9885 A042 FB8B.
Requirements: GTK 4.14 and libVLC. That is what rules out the older
releases — Debian 12 ships GTK 4.8 and could not draw the app at all. The
packages are built against Ubuntu 24.04 for glibc, which is the same floor
GTK already sets, so it costs nothing.
Why packages and not a Flatpak. Measured, not assumed: the GNOME 48
runtime carries GTK 4 but not a single libVLC library. A Flatpak would have
to compile VLC itself — and VLC's demuxers are exactly what "never
transcodes" rests on.
🪟 Windows
Download Swiftly-1.0.0-Setup.exe — 80 MB, Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.
The installer puts Swiftly where it belongs: Program Files (or your own folder
if you run it without admin rights — you choose in the dialog), a Start menu
entry, an optional desktop icon, and a proper uninstall. No unpacking a zip and
wondering where the folder should go.
Windows will warn you the first time. SmartScreen shows a blue box saying
the publisher is unknown: click More info, then Run anyway. That warning
is not about this app being unsafe — it means the installer carries no paid
code-signing certificate. Jellyfin's own desktop app is in exactly the same
position. The checksum below is there so you can verify what you downloaded:
SHA256 2a8a30616de1399fb5643fa8ae0118f9c828eb352b1a6cd7f0e6c3dbc9899b3f
It is the same program as on Linux — the same 8,900 lines of interface,
mirrored into the Windows build; what differs sits behind seven #if marks in
those same files. GTK 4, libVLC and the Swift runtime all ship inside the
installer, so there is nothing else to install.
📖 Documentation
- 🛠️ Building — clone, fetch VLCKit, generate the
project, run the tests
- 🎬 VLCKit — why this app ships a patched build,
with the measurements
- 📐 Device profile
— the file that decides whether your server transcodes, with the reasoning
in its comments
✅ Requirements
- Your own Jellyfin server, 10.10 or newer. Swiftly for Jellyfin hosts
nothing and has no account of its own — you sign in with the credentials you
already have.
- iOS 18, tvOS 18 or macOS 15 — or a Linux desktop with GTK 4 and libVLC,
which the installer takes care of.
🐞 Reporting bugs
The Discord is the fastest way: https://discord.gg/MeGwfv3UwN — there are
channels for bug reports and feature requests, and a beta chat.
If you are on the TestFlight build, the release notes name the handful of
things that changed since the last one. Reports against those are worth the
most, because they can be traced to a specific change.
The single most useful report is one where the server transcoded when it
should not have. If your Jellyfin dashboard says Transcoding instead of
Direct Play or Direct Stream, please include the container, video codec,
audio codec and subtitle format of that file.
🤖 Built with Claude
Swiftly for Jellyfin was written together with Anthropic's Claude, and the
commit history says so — every commit carries a Co-Authored-By line. The
decisions, the testing and the responsibility are mine; a good deal of the
typing was not. It seemed more honest to say that here than to let someone
work it out.
📄 License
The code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 — see
LICENSE. In short: you may use, change and redistribute it, and if
you change these files you publish your changes too.
The name and the artwork are not covered by that license. "Swiftly for
Jellyfin", the wordmark and the app icon remain the author's. You are welcome
to fork the code; please do not ship the result under this name or with this
icon.
Playback uses VLCKit under the
LGPL-2.1-or-later — see Documentation/VLCKit.md.
The screenshots show films by the Blender
Foundation — Big Buck Bunny, Sintel,
Agent 327, Sprite Fright and others — released under Creative Commons
Attribution.
