Flux is a high-performance, modular media center designed exclusively for macOS. Built with pure SwiftUI and powered by the industry-grade libmpv engine, Flux delivers fluid animations, Apple TV-style glassmorphism, instant local stream racing, and hardware-accelerated 4K HDR playback.
⚠️ Beta Status: Flux is currently in beta. While the core functionality is stable, there may be bugs, performance issues, or incomplete features. Please report any issues on the Issue Tracker.
📖 User Documentation: Explore the Flux Official Wiki for an in-depth walkthrough of all settings, autonomous stream racing, addons, and keyboard shortcuts.
Grab the latest beta release (.dmg) from the Releases page. Drag Flux.app to your /Applications folder.
A single universal binary (Flux-*.dmg) runs across all supported Macs (macOS 15.0+ through macOS 26+). Flux dynamically engages Apple's native Liquid Glass on macOS 26+ while providing seamless vibrancy material rendering on macOS 15.
Because Flux is distributed independently outside the Mac App Store without an Apple Developer ID notarization certificate, macOS Gatekeeper may present a security alert on first launch ("Flux cannot be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software").
To launch Flux for the first time:
- Finder: Open
/Applicationsin Finder. Right-click (or Control-click)Flux.app, click Open, then click Open in the confirmation alert. - Terminal (Alternative): Remove the quarantine extended attribute:
xattr -cr /Applications/Flux.app
After this one-time approval, Flux opens instantly with full macOS Hardened Runtime protections enabled.
Flux features seamless Over-The-Air (OTA) updates via Sparkle 2. Updates are checked periodically in the background and verified using Ed25519 cryptographic signatures.
- macOS-Native Design: Built with pure SwiftUI, liquid glass materials, specular rim glints, and spring physics adhering to Apple’s latest design language.
- Interactive Toggles & Sliders: Fluid, rubber-banded segment controls and responsive player controls that stay completely out of your way during playback.
- Local Client-Side Racing: Discovers and evaluates stream candidates concurrently using 64KB ranged GET probes (
bytes=0-65535) directly from your Mac to content CDNs. - Smart Health & Quality Scoring: Prioritizes genuine 4K/1080p stream health, seeders, and low-latency hosts while completely filtering out dead links and mismatched releases.
- Zero Cloud Proxying: 100% of video queries and streams race on your machine—never routed through intermediary cloud servers.
- Powered by
libmpv: Plays nearly any video container, audio codec, or subtitle format natively without transcoding. - Hardware Acceleration & HDR: Hardware decoding (
videotoolbox) with tone mapping for HDR10 and Dolby Vision on Apple Silicon displays. - Acoustic Volume Curve & +200% Boost: Perceptual volume mapping matching human hearing curves, with clean amplification up to 200% (+18 dB power boost) for quiet dialogue tracks.
- Intelligent Track Selection: Automatically pairs your preferred audio language with matching subtitles. If foreign audio is detected, English subtitles are auto-engaged.
- OpenSubtitles v3 & Embedded Subtitles: First-class subtitle lookup alongside instant embedded track switching.
- 10-Language UI Matrix: Seamless native interface localization in English, Japanese (日本語), Spanish (Español), French (Français), German (Deutsch), Italian (Italiano), Portuguese (Português), Korean (한국어), Hindi (हिन्दी), and Simplified Chinese (简体中文). Switch languages live in Settings (
⌘,) → General with zero app restarts required.
- Real-Time Technical Overlay: Right-click the player anytime to reveal stream diagnostics: active video/audio codecs, hardware decoder state, resolution, bitrate, and live demuxer buffer telemetry.
- Multi-Profile Support: Distinct profiles with independent watch progress, continue watching rails, and custom settings.
- Lightweight Cloud Sync: Fast, end-to-end tokenized library synchronization powered by Cloudflare Workers—or stay 100% offline with zero login required.
- Sparkle 2 Integration: Silent update checking and one-click upgrades cryptographically signed with Ed25519 signatures.
Flux features full compatibility with the Stremio Addon ecosystem. Any community or official Stremio addon can be installed directly into Flux:
- Catalogs & Metadata: Browse custom catalogues, anime indexes, YouTube channels, and niche movie lists.
- Streams & Debrid: Connect your favorite streaming providers and debrid services for autonomous stream racing and instant playback.
- Subtitles: Add multilingual subtitle providers (e.g., OpenSubtitles v3, SubScene).
- Live TV & IPTV: Stream live sports, news, and M3U-based TV channels right from the Flux sidebar.
- One-Click Deep Links: Clicking any
stremio://addon link in your browser will automatically launch Flux and prompt you to install it with one click. - Settings Menu: Navigate to Settings (
Cmd + ,) → Addons, paste any addon manifest URL (manifest.json), and click Install.
- UI Framework: SwiftUI (macOS 14.0+)
- Video Playback:
MPVKit(libmpv) - Metadata: Cinemeta Catalog API & TMDB API (Optional user key)
- Local Engine: Embedded
StremioServerdaemon (localhost:11470) - Network Stack: Apple Network framework TCP proxy (
localhost:51547) & Swift Concurrency (async/await,TaskGroup) - Updates: Sparkle 2.9+
- Mac running macOS Sonoma (14.0) or newer
- Xcode 16.0+ with Command Line Tools installed
-
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/entanglon/flux.git cd flux -
Open in Xcode:
open flux.xcodeproj
-
Build and Run:
- Xcode will automatically resolve the Swift Package Manager dependencies (
MPVKit-GPLandSparkle). - Select the
fluxscheme and destination My Mac. - Press
Cmd + Rto build and run.
- Xcode will automatically resolve the Swift Package Manager dependencies (
Flux is currently in beta. The following issues are known and being worked on:
- Playback: Occasional stuttering on high-bitrate 4K content over slow networks
- UI: Some animations may feel choppy on older Intel Macs
- Sync: Cloud sync may occasionally fail to merge watch history correctly
- Addons: Some community addons may not work as expected
- Subtitles: OpenSubtitles v3 integration may timeout on slow connections
If you encounter any issues, please report them on the Issue Tracker.
Flux is an open-source media player frontend designed to organize, display, and play media files and streams provided by the user.
- Flux does not host, index, scrape, cache, or distribute any copyrighted media or pirated content.
- Third-party addons are installed solely at the discretion and direction of the end user.
- Flux is distributed in good faith under the principle of substantial non-infringing use.
For the full legal notice and third-party terms, see DISCLAIMER.md.
Flux is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3). See LICENSE for details.
The "Flux" name, logos, and artwork are trademarks and intellectual property of Entanglon (reserved under GPLv3 Section 7(e)).