A native media player for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, built for Jellyfin servers and SMB/NAS shares. Swift and SwiftUI, iOS 26.
Captured against Jellyfin's public demo server.
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- Sign in to multiple Jellyfin servers, with a password or Quick Connect
- Continue Watching, Next Up, watched state, and favorites stay in sync across every screen
- Plays files directly when the format is compatible and falls back to remux or transcode when it isn't
- Browses SMB shares and plays straight from them, with Bonjour discovery. No media server required.
- External subtitle matching, language-aware track selection, and subtitle styling with a live preview
- iPadOS 26 sidebar layout, Liquid Glass, BlurHash artwork placeholders
Problems Parallax can't fix on its own, or could only fix with trade-offs it doesn't want to make:
- Jellyfin 10.10 or newer is required. Older servers don't report modern HDR video-range types, so Parallax assumes the worst and may transcode files that could have played directly.
- Subtitles can run early after a seek on Jellyfin 11 and older. When the server transcodes a file with long gaps between keyframes (common with AV1), it starts the stream at a keyframe before the requested position while its timeline claims the exact position. External subtitles then lead by that fixed gap after a resume or seek, and no player can line the two up. Jellyfin 12 fixes this on the server.
- No seamless quality switching. Jellyfin serves one rendition per session; there is no adaptive ladder to move across. Changing quality opens a new stream, with a brief reload.
- TrueHD Atmos doesn't survive transcoding. Apple's player can't take a TrueHD bitstream, so the server re-encodes it to AAC 5.1. Spatial audio still works, but the Atmos object metadata is gone. Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) Atmos passes through intact.
- Dual-layer Dolby Vision (profile 7) plays as HDR10. Apple hardware can't use the enhancement layer, so the server sends the HDR10 base layer.
- Some formats always transcode in this release. Apple's decoder can't open VC-1, MPEG-2, AVI, and similar older formats, and the second playback engine that will handle them natively isn't ready yet, so the server transcodes them for now.
The app is coming to the App Store (link to follow). The App Store build is compiled from this repository; the price covers the Apple developer membership and ongoing development.
To build it yourself you need Xcode 26. Clone the repo, open Parallax.xcodeproj, and run; simulator builds work as-is. For device builds, supply your signing team once (it stays out of git): echo 'DEVELOPMENT_TEAM = YOURTEAMID' > Config/Signing.local.xcconfig. App logic lives in the local Swift packages under Packages/; the app target is UI and wiring.
Parallax is open source under the GNU GPLv3.
You can read, build, modify, and run it, and redistribute it under the GPL's terms. One consequence is worth spelling out: Apple's App Store terms are incompatible with the GPL, so only the copyright holder can publish this app there. If someone else uploads Parallax or a derivative to the App Store, paid or free, that violates the license and I will have it taken down. If you just want the app without building it, buy the App Store version.
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome; see CONTRIBUTING.md. Contributions need a small extra license grant so the App Store build can keep shipping. It's explained there.
Third-party components and attributions are listed in CREDITS.md.