On screen in half a second
0.56 s from click to a usable window on an Apple Silicon Mac: nothing loads before you need it.
Files, links, magnets.One player that gets them right.
Frame Player is a free, open-source video player for Windows and macOS, built on mpv. It streams torrents while they download, casts to Chromecast and DLNA TVs without re-encoding, and lets friends watch together.
Version 1.42.01,180+ installsWindows 10/11Apple SiliconWindows on ARMfree and open source, GPL-3.0
Frame Player playing a 4K file from a torrent: a hover preview of a later scene above the seekbar, chapter marks along it, and a skip-intro button over the video.
If it points at a video, it opens
Files, folders, links, magnets, .torrent files and a release's RSS feed all open in one window. Playback is libmpv, so anything mpv plays — MKV, HEVC, AV1, HDR, Dolby Vision — plays here.
- One episode opens the folder as a queue in natural order: ep2 before ep10.
- Video pages open through yt-dlp, which the player can install for you when a link first needs it.
- Resume survives a restart, even for a torrent episode.
Watch it while it is still downloading
Paste a magnet or open a .torrent and Frame Player starts playing while it downloads. Pieces near the playhead come first, and the seekbar shows what has arrived, so you know whether a jump will land.
- Nothing downloads until you open it, and seeding is off by default.
- Subtitles inside the release attach themselves, and the next episode is fetched ahead.
- A stall says why: download rate, peers and how much of the file is on disk.
Send it to the set, without repacking it first
Cast to Chromecast, a DLNA TV or — from a Mac — an AirPlay TV from one button. Each TV in the list says what will happen to this file; when the set can play the release as it is — often 4K HEVC HDR with Dolby audio — nothing is re-encoded.
- Otherwise the file is remuxed, with the video copied rather than re-encoded, so it is ready in seconds.
- A torrent can be cast while it downloads.
- The window becomes a remote: keys, chapters and the queue control the TV, and disconnecting resumes on the computer.
Two machines, one timeline
Share a six-character code and everyone in the room stays on the same position, pauses and episode. Seek on one and the other lands on the same frame, even on a slow connection.
- Drift is corrected by speed, not by seeking — ten seconds at 103% closes the gap without a jump.
- The room waits for whoever is buffering and resumes by itself.
- Torrents need no pasting: everyone joins the same swarm. Only the timeline goes through the relay, never the video.
Subtitles that are already in sync
Frame Player searches OpenSubtitles by the file's hash, which matches your exact release instead of guessing from the title. Title search is the fallback, and the panel says which one you got.
- A frame-rate mismatch is flagged before you download — a 25 fps subtitle on a 23.976 fps file drifts further out the longer you watch.
- Subtitles move above the controls while the bar is up, and a delay you set is kept for that file.
- The dub you picked in episode 1 is picked again in episode 2, matched by language and title, not track number.
Find something to watch without leaving the player
Browse posters, seasons and localized titles, then pick a release from your own Torznab indexer, such as Jackett or Prowlarr — the player ships with none. It opens as a torrent, with resume and the queue.
- Releases are sorted by quality, then dynamic range, then seeders.
- The player carries no API key: metadata goes through the project's own proxy.
- It is the one feature that sends what you search for, so it has an off switch, and everything else works without it.
Pick up where you left off, in anything
Files, links and torrent episodes all resume where you stopped. The start screen lists what is unfinished, each with a poster frame taken from the video itself.
- A finished video leaves the list by itself, and a torrent remembers which episodes you watched.
- A season is one row, not nine cards, and clicking it continues the episode you were on.
The picture, cropped and tuned by eye
Auto crop removes black bars baked into the video by measuring frames across the whole file, and the window takes the picture's shape. Brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma adjust live, with the menu out of the way.
- One choice covers the season: each episode is measured on its own, so a wider finale is not cut to the pilot's bars.
- It works on a torrent still downloading.
- Set a correction for one file, its playlist or everything; when two disagree, the player asks which to keep.
How auto crop finds the bars Why the same video looks darker in mpv than in QuickTime
The parts you only notice when they are missing
Small things other players get almost right.
Live media info
Codec, resolution, audio layout and the real bitrate, refreshed every second while the panel is open.
The window remembers where it was
Size and position come back at launch, or the window fits the video without leaving the screen.
The preview is the frame you land on
Seekbar thumbnails sharpen to the exact frame once the cursor stops, not the keyframe before it.
Skip intro that knows what an intro is
Chapters match by their whole title, so "Ending the war for good" is never taken for the credits.
A mini player that stays put
Small, always on top and snapped to a corner. On macOS it floats over other apps in fullscreen.
47 actions, all rebindable
Hotkeys follow physical keys, so they work in any keyboard layout. J, K and L do what you expect.
HDR, Dolby Vision, anything
Decoded by libmpv, as in mpv and IINA: full format coverage, hardware decoding and HDR tone mapping.
A–B loops and frame steps
Loop the stretch between two marks, and step one frame forward or back.
Zoom and pan without a jump
Zoom and position change in the same frame, so the picture never jumps between two redraws.
Export the frame you are on
Save or copy the exact decoded frame, HDR tone mapping included.
Audio that behaves
Pick the output device, level a film that whispers then shouts, and keep an audio delay per file.
The folder is the queue
The next episode starts after a countdown you can cancel. Repeat one file, the queue, or nothing.
Folders that leave no trace
Mark a folder private and nothing about it is recorded or sent anywhere. There is no account, and the player reports one thing, once: that it was installed.
Your own mpv.conf still wins
Settings change only their own lines in mpv.conf, so options you wrote by hand survive.
Questions
What is Frame Player?
Frame Player is a free, open-source video player for Windows 10, Windows 11 and Apple Silicon Macs, built on libmpv. It plays local files, links and torrents, streams a torrent while it downloads, casts to Chromecast and DLNA TVs, and lets several people watch on one timeline.
Is Frame Player free?
Yes. Frame Player is free and open source under the GPL-3.0, with no account, no subscription and no ads.
Can Frame Player play a torrent before it finishes downloading?
Yes. Paste a magnet link or open a .torrent file and playback starts while it downloads; the pieces near the playhead are fetched first. Seeding is off by default. How torrent streaming works
Can Frame Player cast to a TV?
Yes, to Chromecast and other Google Cast devices and to DLNA TVs, and from a Mac to an Apple TV or a TV with AirPlay. When the TV can play the file as it is, Frame Player sends it without re-encoding; otherwise it remuxes the file and copies the video stream. Casting to a TV
How is Frame Player different from VLC or IINA?
Frame Player decodes with libmpv, the engine behind mpv and IINA, and runs on both Windows and macOS, while IINA is macOS only. It has torrent streaming and watching together built in, which neither VLC nor IINA has, and casts to Chromecast and DLNA TVs without re-encoding; VLC casts only to Chromecast, converting the video on the fly, and IINA does not cast. Frame Player compared with VLC
Does Frame Player collect data?
No tracking and no account. Besides the update check and the services you use yourself, such as subtitle search, Frame Player sends one anonymous report on its first launch that names only the platform.
Does Frame Player run on Linux or Intel Macs?
Not yet. Frame Player is built for Windows 10 and 11, on x64 and on ARM, and for Macs with Apple Silicon.
Recently changed
Releases come often and install themselves. This is what the last few brought.
- 1.42.0On Windows, fullscreen can switch instantly, without the moment of black.Fullscreen without the black flash, on Windows
- 1.41.1Windows updates download once, the window moves with the settings open, and About is a right-click away.About is in the right-click menuThe window can be moved while the settings are openWindows updates download once again
- 1.41.0Volume leveling can now be switched with a key or from the right-click menu, and an icon by the volume slider shows when it is on.Volume leveling is one key away
Open something.It will remember where you stopped.
Version 1.42.0Windows on ARMmacOS builds are notarizedWindows builds are unsigned and stop once at SmartScreen