Directory
Media players and servers covers software for playing, streaming, and organising video and audio files. Listings include desktop players, home media servers, sync tools, and add-ons for streaming setups. What matters is the file formats and codecs each one supports, whether they transcode on the fly, and how they organise a large library across drives or devices. Some entries are clients that connect to third-party sources the tool does not control, so what you can play depends on what you are allowed to access in your region. Check the source rights and the licence before you install anything.
mpv is a free, open source, cross-platform media player for the command line that supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. It offers scripting and a small on-screen controller for basic control.
Mzelo is a web-based watch party platform for watching movies, YouTube videos, and anime together in synced rooms. It offers chat, voice, and video hangouts alongside tools such as a virtual browser, YouTube sync, screen sharing, local media playback, and a web player.
neko (stylized as n.eko) is a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker using WebRTC technology. It supports use cases including watch parties, interactive presentations, collaborative work, teaching, content embedding, automated browsing, ultra-low-latency streaming, multi-participant control, and live broadcasting.
OpenTogetherTube is an open source online service that lets users watch videos together with friends via real-time synchronized playback. It includes an optional voting system, a dark theme, and requires no user sign-up.
OSMC is a free and open source media center built on Debian Linux and Kodi Media Center. It offers an App Store for customization and plays major media formats from various devices and streaming protocols. Vero V is the project's flagship device, with support for 4K, HDR and HD audio.
Overseerr is a video tool for encoding, conversion, repair, playback, editing, or processing workflows.
Panoptic is a web tool for collecting, mixing, and watching multiple simultaneous video streams from platforms including YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Kick, and Rumble. Users can drop in video URLs to build a mix, and save, export, import, or share mixes.
Plex is a video tool for encoding, conversion, repair, playback, editing, or processing workflows.
Plezy is a client for Plex and Jellyfin. It is available on iOS, Android, Android TV, tvOS, Windows, macOS and Linux. The site also mentions HDR, Dolby Vision and offline downloads.
Plyr is a media player project. According to its site, the people behind Plyr, Vidstack and Media Chrome have joined forces on Video.js. The page states that Plyr is now deprecated and directs users to Video.js.
A site offering Let's Play archiving scripts, alternative players for video streaming sites, and information on anime rhythm games. It lists alternative players for services including Nico Nico Douga, Veoh and YouTube, and covers games such as BanG Dream and Theater Days. It also provides a bare-bones iTunes search, a Unicode string decoder and a YouTube region restriction checker.
PotPlayer is a multimedia player from Kakao that supports Windows 7 through Windows 11 in 32-bit, 64-bit and arm64 builds. It offers hardware acceleration through DXVA, CUDA and QuickSync, 3D output formats, and support for text, DVD and Blu-ray subtitles. It also supports OpenCodec for adding codecs, snapshot previews and bookmarks for scenes or chapters.
Prowlarr is an indexer manager distributed for Windows, Linux, macOS, NAS, Docker, BSD and other systems. The site provides installers, manual installation options and instructions through the Servarr Wiki, with packages available via the Arch Linux User Repository and Docker. The macOS app requires self-signing and is not compatible with OSX versions below 10.15.
Rave is a watch party service for watching Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and HBO Max with friends in sync, and for texting and talking while watching. It is available for Mac, iPhone, Android and Windows. The site states that Apple removed Rave from the App Store.
Reaparr is a Plex downloader that transfers content from accessible Plex servers into a user's own Plex server. It offers multi-threaded, resumable downloads, browsing and filtering of libraries, multi-account management, and Docker-based deployment. It can act as an indexer and download client for Sonarr and Radarr.
Seanime is a self-hosted media server for anime and manga. It scans local files and matches them with AniList, automates downloads based on rules, and streams from torrents, Debrid services or online sources. It includes a manga reader, watch parties, transcoding and direct play, and an extension system.
Simkl is a beginner-friendly guide, reference, or tool for safer browsing, media, apps, or web resources.
SMPlayer is a free, open-source media player for Windows and Linux that includes built-in codecs for playing audio and video formats without external codec packs. It serves as a graphical interface for MPlayer and mpv, and can play and download YouTube videos, find subtitles, generate thumbnails and resume playback. It is available in more than 30 languages.
SMTube is a free, open-source YouTube browser for SMPlayer that allows browsing, searching and playing YouTube videos. Videos are played with a media player such as SMPlayer instead of a flash player, which the site states gives better performance, particularly with HD content. On Windows it is distributed as an SMPlayer plugin.
SPlayer is a video tool for encoding, conversion, repair, playback, editing, or processing workflows.
SyncLounge is a video tool for encoding, conversion, repair, playback, editing, or processing workflows.
Syncplay is free software that synchronises video playback across multiple media players, so people who have the same videos can watch them together. Pausing, unpausing and seeking are synchronized over the Internet. It is used alongside VoIP software such as Mumble or Skype. Supported players include mpv, mpv.net, MPC-BE, MPC-HC, VLC 3, IINA and memento.
Tautulli is a third-party Python application run alongside a Plex Media Server to monitor activity and track statistics on watching, users and history. Statistics appear in a web interface with tables and graphs, and the tool supports notifications, library statistics, media info and view and delete synced content.
TheIntroDB is a video tool for encoding, conversion, repair, playback, editing, or processing workflows.
