fliks-app/fliks

Your personal video collection, on every screen in the house.

Point Fliks at the folders where your videos live and it does the rest: covers, descriptions, cast, seasons and episodes, laid out like the streaming apps you already use — except the library is yours.

It turns a folder of video files into a proper streaming service for the household. Everyone gets their own profile and their own place in every episode; start something on your phone, sit down, and the TV picks it up where you left off. It plays on whatever screen is in front of you, and converts the video on the fly when that screen can't handle the original file.

Self-hosted: the server runs on your machine, there is no account to create, no subscription, and nothing leaves the house.

• Server — Docker, a Windows tray app or a macOS menu-bar app
• Clients — web, iOS, Android, Android TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG, desktop, Chromecast
• License — AGPL-3.0-or-later

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What you get

Watching

• Adaptive streaming — quality follows the bandwidth without a hiccup, or lock a bitrate by hand when you'd rather decide.
• Resume anywhere — start on the phone, finish on the TV; the position syncs live.
• Every track, switchable mid-playback — all embedded audio renditions, all embedded and external subtitles (.srt, .ass), with your choice remembered per show.
• Subtitles found for you — a video that came without any? Fliks goes looking on the usual subtitle sites and picks the one that actually matches your copy, in the languages you asked for.
• Out of sync, fixed in one click — Fliks listens to the dialogue and slides the subtitles back onto it. No hunting for the right offset, no re-downloading three files hoping one lands.
• Translated on demand — nothing available in your language? Take a track you do have and have it translated into one you can read. You bring the translation service; the result is saved next to the video so it's only done once.
• Subtitle appearance per user: size, colour, shadow, background opacity, margins.
• Skip intro, next episode, chapter markers and thumbnail previews when you scrub.
• Commercials skipped, cuts and mutes honoured — drop an .edl file next to a video (the Kodi format Comskip and MCEBuddy write) and every client skips the ads, jumps the cuts and silences the muted stretches on its own. Each user can turn it off.
• Live TV, from your own IPTV subscription — add an M3U playlist or an Xtream account and channels line up next to your library, with a program guide and a rewind buffer to pause live and jump back a few minutes. Setting one up: docs/livetv.md.

Browsing

• Several libraries side by side — movies, shows, home videos, kids — each pointed at its own folder.
• Search across all of them, filter and sort by status, date added, rating, runtime.
• Metadata from TMDB / TVDB: posters, fanart, genres, cast and crew. Every person is a page listing everything they worked on in your libraries; every genre is a filter.
• Home rows — Continue Watching, Recently Added, and recommendations weighted by what you've actually watched.
• Calendar of upcoming episodes for the series you follow.
• Spoiler protection — an account-wide switch that blurs the synopsis of a film, a season or an episode you haven't watched, along with an unwatched episode's thumbnail and backdrop, and shows Episode 3 in place of a title that gives the plot away. Click a masked item to reveal it, or mark it as watched and it unmasks for good. Each of the three is its own toggle, and the setting follows your account onto every device.

Sharing with the household

• Watch parties: watch the same film together, each on your own screen, with playback kept in sync, a chat and press-to-talk voice. Plan one ahead, let guests propose and vote for what to watch, and build the evening's programme on the party page.
• Recommend something to someone — pick a film or a season and send it to another user. It shows up on their home page under Recommended for you, with your name on it.
• Playlists — your own running order, drag to reorder, autoplay from one item to the next, and watched items drop off on their own if you want them to.
• Shared playlists — invite other users as viewer, editor or admin and build one together, or save someone else's public playlist to your own list.
• Downloads that keep themselves current — turn a playlist to automatic on your phone, tablet or the desktop app: what you haven't watched is downloaded to the device, and what you have watched is removed to give the space back. Nothing to think about before a flight. A whole season or show downloads in one go, or keeps the next episodes on the device, over wifi only if you prefer.
• Everyone stays in control — each user decides whether their profile is public and what appears on it: tastes, recent activity, favourites, statistics — or nothing at all.

Running it

• Multi-user, each with their own history, progress and preferences.
• Quick Connect for TVs: pick your account on the screen, then approve the request from the Login requests page on your phone.
• Live transcode dashboard for admins: who's watching what, at which quality, on which hardware path, and why a transcode was needed.
• Why is it stuttering? Every client reports how its playback is going, and each session gets a verdict: the network, a device too weak for the stream, a transcode that can't keep up, or a playback error. See it live next to each stream, or look back over the last weeks per device to spot the TV that struggles with HEVC. The numbers stay on your server, and an admin can switch the collection off.
• Library cleanup rules: titles nobody watches go to a Leaving soon list, with reminders before they're removed after a grace period. Or browse the suggestions (never played, ended series) and decide title by title.
• Images cached locally — no hotlinking to external services while you browse.

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Plugins

Fliks ships with no way to acquire media. You install what you want from Settings > Plugins: the official catalog is configured out of the box, and you can add other sources or import a .fkplugin archive by hand.

• The Download plugin brings torrent indexer search, download-client management and the grab pipeline. Install it and the search, the clients and their settings pages appear in the interface.
• Archives are signed, and the signature is checked before anything is written to disk.
• A plugin that runs code runs apart. A data plugin ships JSON and executes nothing at all; a process plugin is a WebAssembly component sandboxed by the server, with capped memory and run time, one private folder, and its own PostgreSQL role and schema. It cannot reach another plugin's tables, or yours.
• Plugins extend the interface, not just the backend. Their pages, menu entries and settings appear where they belong and follow your permissions like everything else.
• Updates are checked daily, and you can turn that off.

Writing one: docs/plugins.md.

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Client compatibility

Fliks runs on plenty of devices. Start a film on your phone and finish it on the TV: your place follows you from one to the other. Here is the full list of what it runs on.

Client	Where to get it	Minimum	Notes
Web / PWA	your browser, at the server URL	any current browser	installable to the home screen
iOS · iPadOS	App Store	iOS 16.6
Android	Play Store	Android 6 (API 23)	phone + tablet
Android TV	Play Store	Android 6
Samsung TV (Tizen)	sideload for now	Tizen 5.5	works fully, not yet on Samsung Apps
LG TV (webOS)	LG Content Store	webOS 7.0	approved, on the store
Desktop	release assets, APT or Snap Store on Linux	macOS: Apple Silicon	Windows .exe, macOS .dmg, Linux .deb / AppImage
Chromecast	built in, cast from any client	any	custom receiver, same player engine
Apple TV	App Store	tvOS 17	native SwiftUI app
Nintendo Switch	build the .nro from switchfliks	homebrew-enabled console	beta, native client with hardware decode

The Linux desktop client through APT (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and later):

sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fliks.sources https://github.com/fliks-app/fliks/releases/download/apt/fliks.sources
sudo apt update && sudo apt install fliks-desktop

The first command adds the Fliks repository and its signing key to APT. A .deb installed from the release assets adds the same source, so apt upgrade keeps it up to date.

Or from the Snap Store: sudo snap install fliks.

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Server compatibility

How you run it	Platforms	Hardware transcoding	Ships with
Docker (recommended)	linux/amd64, linux/arm64	Intel QSV · VAAPI · NVIDIA NVENC · AMD	server, web client, FFmpeg
Windows — tray app, NSIS installer	Windows x64	Intel QSV · AMD AMF · NVIDIA NVENC, auto-detected	everything, no dependencies
macOS — menu-bar app, .dmg	macOS 13 Ventura+, Apple Silicon	VideoToolbox	everything, no dependencies
From source	anywhere Rust and Node (client build) run	whatever your FFmpeg exposes	—

The image is a single container: the Rust server (fliks-server, behind the fliks-engine streaming engine), the built Angular client served as static assets, and a self-contained jellyfin-ffmpeg build. A PostgreSQL container sits beside it (the example Compose pins 18.3).

Encoders

Which hardware path is available depends on the machine, not on Fliks — it probes at startup and falls back to CPU when nothing else answers.

Codec	CPU	Intel QSV	VAAPI	NVIDIA NVENC	AMD AMF	VideoToolbox
H.264	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
HEVC	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
AV1	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	—

HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision are tone-mapped to SDR when the receiving device can't render them.

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Get started

The server runs on one machine in the house — the one holding your video files. Everything else connects to it. Three ways to install it; they give you the same Fliks, so pick whichever suits the machine. All you need is a folder with your videos and about two minutes.

Windows

Download the installer from the latest release and run it. Fliks sits in the system tray and starts with the machine. Nothing else to install. Details in windows/.

macOS

Download the .dmg from the latest release and drag it to Applications. Fliks sits in the menu bar. Apple Silicon, macOS 13 Ventura or newer. Details in macos/.

Docker — Linux, NAS, or a home server

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliks-app/fliks/main/docker-compose.example.yml
mv docker-compose.example.yml docker-compose.yml

Open the file and set three things:

1. POSTGRES_PASSWORD and DB_PASSWORD — the same real password
2. the /path/to/your/media:/medias mount: where your files are
3. PORT — only if 4848 is taken on the host

docker compose up -d

First run

Whichever you picked, open http://<host>:4848 in a browser — on the machine itself that's http://localhost:4848. A fresh install has no account: Fliks shows a setup page where you pick the administrator's username and password (at least 8 characters). Then add a library pointing at your video folder (/medias under Docker), and Fliks scans it and goes looking for the covers.

Then install the app on your phone or TV, point it at the same address, and you're done.

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License

AGPL-3.0-or-later — run a modified version on a network and you owe its users the modified source.