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 — and it's the only video player that AI agents (Claude, Cursor, Codex, anything that speaks MCP) can drive natively. Auto-skips YouTube sponsor segments via SponsorBlock. Generates AI subtitles locally with whisper.cpp. CLI and MCP coverage for every feature.

Install

One-line install:

# 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:

Related MCP server: mcp-mpv-player

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.

• CLI — every feature is also a command. unflick play <file-or-url>, unflick screenshot, unflick clip 0 5, unflick library scan, unflick subtitle generate. Output is JSON; pipe it to jq and automate.

• 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 26+ tools (play, pause, seek, screenshot, clip, sponsor_segments, generate_subtitles, library_search, …) plus live resources.

The CLI and MCP work without a window — every feature ships fully headless before it gets a GUI button.

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: bash build-both.sh   builds both Standard and AI editions

Requires Rust stable + Node 18+ + the Tauri 2 platform prerequisites (WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS, webkit2gtk-4.1 on Linux).

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.