macOS · Windows · free and open source
Reel opens nearly every film, show and song you have, from 4K HEVC to DTS-HD Master Audio, and adds a library, find in dialogue and lossless clip export. Every container and every decoder is written from scratch in Tessel, with no FFmpeg inside.
The home screen shows what you were watching, how much is left, and the next episode of each show. Reel remembers every file's position, audio and subtitle tracks, volume, speed, delays, picture settings and equalizer.
Point Reel at your folders. Films go under Movies, episodes under their show and season with watched marks and progress, and music under artist and album. History and playlists sit alongside.
Search every subtitle track for a word, see each match with the lines around it, and jump straight there. Or open the transcript, which follows along as the film plays.
A 10-band equalizer with presets, loudness normalisation for quiet dialogue and loud explosions, a compressor and limiter, and headphone crossfeed. For the picture: brightness, contrast, colour, crop, aspect ratio, zoom, rotation, sharpening and denoising.
Pick a start and an end, and Reel writes that part to MKV or MP4 without re-encoding, in seconds. Or make a GIF of it.
Hover over the seek bar to see the picture at that time.
Thumbnails of every scene, and chapters for files that have none.
Step forwards and backwards one frame at a time.
Repeat a passage, or mark moments to come back to.
HLS, DASH and plain web addresses, with a quality menu.
Disc folders and .iso images, with titles, angles and languages.
Stop after a while, or at the end of what's playing.
A small window that stays out of the way.
Every action has a key you can change.
Each decoder is compared picture by picture and sample by sample with the official conformance streams and reference decoders.
| H.264 | 180 of 185 JVT conformance streams bit-exact |
| HEVC (H.265), 8 and 10-bit | all 146 Main and Main10 streams bit-exact |
| AV1, with film grain | all 242 libaom test vectors bit-exact |
| VP9, 8 to 12-bit | all 314 libvpx test vectors bit-exact |
| VP8 | all 62 libvpx test vectors bit-exact |
| MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX, Xvid) | bit-exact |
| WMV 7/8/9, VC-1, DivX 3 | bit-exact |
| Theora, ProRes, DNxHD, Motion JPEG | bit-exact |
| DTS, DTS-HD Master Audio | bit-exact |
| Dolby TrueHD, Atmos bed | bit-exact |
| FLAC, ALAC, WMA Lossless, PCM | bit-exact |
| AC-3, E-AC-3 up to 7.1 | matches to 90 dB or better |
| AAC (LC, HE, HEv2), MP3, MP2 | matches to 90 dB or better |
| Vorbis, Opus, WMA 1/2, WMA Pro | matches to 90 dB or better |
Containers: MP4/MOV, MKV/WebM, AVI, Ogg, MPEG-TS/M2TS, MPEG-PS/VOB, ASF (WMV/WMA), WAV/AIFF, IVF, and raw MP3, AAC, AC-3, DTS and TrueHD.
Every part of Reel, from the MKV reader and the HEVC decoder to the equalizer and the interface, is written in Tessel, a programming language for native desktop apps. No FFmpeg, no native media libraries, one small program.
Reel is free software under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later; the source code is on GitHub.
Apple silicon · disk image
Not released yetSigned and notarized by Apple. Open the disk image and drag Reel to Applications.
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · installer
Not released yetEarly preview, not yet tested on Windows. The installer isn't signed yet, so Windows may warn about it the first time: choose More info ▸ Run anyway.
Downloads appear here when a release is out.
Reel