Unflick

unflick

A free, ad-free video player — for humans and AI.

unflick.app · MIT · Cross-platform · CLI + MCP first

unflick plays your video files and your YouTube / Bilibili / Twitch / Vimeo / 26 other streaming-site URLs, in a beautiful native window. Auto-skips YouTube sponsor segments via SponsorBlock. Finds subtitles on OpenSubtitles, or generates them locally with whisper.cpp when none exist.

What makes it different: MCP is a built-in control surface, not a third-party wrapper. Other players can be scripted from the outside; in unflick the CLI, the MCP server and the window share one player instance. Ask Claude to skip to the next chapter and the video you are watching skips — same mpv, same playback, no second hidden process. Every feature ships headless before it gets a button.

Install

One-line install:

# macOS — Homebrew
brew install --cask zhitongblog/tap/unflick

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://unflick.app/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://unflick.app/install.ps1 | iex

Or pick an installer for your platform from the latest release:

Platform	File	Size
Windows 10/11 (x64)	unflick_<ver>_x64-setup-standard.exe (or .msi)	~80 MB
Windows 10/11 (x64), AI edition with bundled Whisper	unflick-ai_<ver>_x64-setup.exe	~150 MB
macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon + Intel, signed + notarized)	unflick_<ver>_universal.dmg	~15 MB
Linux x86_64 (Debian / Ubuntu)	unflick_<ver>_amd64.deb	~10 MB
Linux x86_64 (Fedora / RHEL / openSUSE)	unflick-<ver>-1.x86_64.rpm	~10 MB
Linux x86_64 (distro-agnostic)	unflick_<ver>_amd64.AppImage	~80 MB

Three interfaces, one core

unflick exposes the same playback engine through three surfaces:

• GUI — modern player window with libmpv-quality playback, keyboard shortcuts, drag-and-drop, picture-in-picture, true fullscreen, chapters, bookmarks, A-B loop, frame stepping, subtitle timing and styling.
• CLI — every feature is also a command. unflick play <file-or-url>, unflick chapter next, unflick bookmark add --name "the good bit", unflick loop a, unflick subtitle auto, unflick subtitle bilingual on, unflick audio eq preset speech, unflick clip 0 5, unflick library scan. Output is JSON; pipe it to jq and automate. Started with --allow-dev, unflick dev snapshot / click / eval drive and read the player's own window, which is how unflick is tested on all three platforms.
• MCP server — unflick --mcp starts a Model Context Protocol server over stdio. Add it to Claude Desktop / Cursor / Codex CLI's MCP config and your AI agent gets 101 tools (play, seek, chapter_seek, bookmark_goto, ab_loop, subtitle_delay, subtitle_bilingual, screenshot, clip, sponsor_segments, get_subtitles, equalizer_preset, generate_subtitles, library_search, …) plus live resources.

Claude Code users can install the skills and the MCP server in one step:

/plugin marketplace add zhitongblog/unflick
/plugin install unflick

That brings seven skills (play, navigate by what was said, clip/GIF, subtitles, library, screenshot, SponsorBlock) plus the MCP server — see marketplace/.

All three drive the same player. When the window is open it hosts the control port, so unflick pause from a terminal — or an agent calling pause over MCP — pauses the video on screen rather than some invisible second instance. With no window running, the CLI and MCP fall back to a headless daemon and everything still works.

What an agent can do that a wrapper can't

Because MCP talks to the player rather than at it, an agent gets tools that need the player's own state:

• search_transcript / seek_to_text — "skip to where she explains the refund policy". Searches whatever subtitles are open: a loaded file, a sidecar .srt, an embedded track, or the ones you just generated with whisper.
• generate_chapters / set_chapters — give a file that shipped without chapters a real chapter list. It's not just data back: the chapters appear on the progress bar and respond to chapter_seek and PgUp/PgDn.
• describe_frame — hand the model the frame that's on screen right now, as an image. Same player, so it sees what you see.

Free, ad-free, local — by charter

unflick will never:

• carry banner / pre-roll / "sponsored" ads
• collect telemetry of any kind
• require an account, login, or cloud connection
• gate features behind a paid tier or trial countdown
• bundle adware, browser hijackers, or "recommended" software at install time

Everything that matters runs on your machine. Library scans, subtitle transcription, AI rewriting — all local. Your files stay on your filesystem.

The SponsorBlock auto-skip for YouTube is the active form of "ad-free" — actively skipping ads in the content unflick plays, not just refusing to show its own.

License

unflick is released under the MIT License — see LICENSE.

unflick bundles, dynamically loads, or invokes the following third-party software at runtime. Each upstream license is enumerated in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md, and the canonical license text for the LGPL/GPL/MPL-licensed components ships in the licenses/ directory of every installer:

• libmpv — LGPL-2.1-or-later — dynamically loaded at runtime (source)
• ffmpeg (Windows bundle) — GPL-3.0-or-later — invoked as a subprocess only (source)
• yt-dlp — Unlicense (public domain) — invoked as a subprocess (source)
• whisper.cpp (AI edition) — MIT — invoked as a subprocess (source)
• Tauri + wry + mpv-player/mpv + glutin + objc2 + 590+ Rust crates — all MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD, MPL-2.0, or Unicode-3.0 (full breakdown)
• React 18, Zustand, Framer Motion, Tailwind, Vite — MIT

See THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md for the complete attribution and compliance notes (subprocess invocation vs. dynamic linking, GPL aggregation, MPL file-level scope, etc.).

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/zhitongblog/unflick.git
cd unflick
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build
# Windows: ./scripts/fetch-windows-deps.sh   fetches libmpv / ffmpeg / yt-dlp / whisper
#          bash build-both.sh                builds both Standard and AI editions

Requires Rust stable + Node 22 + pnpm 10 + the Tauri 2 platform prerequisites (WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS, webkit2gtk-4.1 on Linux). Linux loads the system libmpv, so apt install libmpv-dev first. macOS ships its own universal libmpv (it is the only way to play DVDs there — Homebrew's mpv is built without libdvdnav): ./scripts/build-mac-libmpv.sh builds it once, and brew install mpv still works as a fallback for everything but discs.

Releases are cut with ./scripts/release.sh <version> — see scripts/README.md for how the three platforms are built and why macOS is the one that is not built in CI.

Acknowledgments

unflick stands on the shoulders of mpv, ffmpeg, yt-dlp, whisper.cpp, Tauri, and a long list of MIT/Apache-licensed Rust and JavaScript libraries. None of this would exist without those projects.

The website at unflick.app and a sibling project (SoloMD) — also free, also MIT, also bundling MCP — are by the same author. If you like the design, that's where it comes from.