Video player for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
Point it at a folder, or at your NAS, and press play. Cadence is a small, fast, native player that reads what is on your disk and plays it beautifully — every common format, sound mixed for whatever you are listening on, subtitles you can read from the sofa — and does nothing else. One purchase. No subscription, no adverts, no account.
Most people who keep their films on a NAS keep them tidy: Films / Arrival (2016) / Arrival.mkv, Shows / Bluey / Season 1 / …. Cadence takes that at face value. It does not scan, catalogue or decorate your collection — it opens the folder, plays the file, and remembers where you got to.
Add a share once — name, host, user, password — and browse it the way you named it. Pin the folders you use most and they sit on the front page. Open a file from this device and it is remembered too.
Every film keeps its place. Come back and it offers to continue from where you stopped, or start again; finish an episode and the next one follows.
Written in Swift on Apple's own frameworks, for each screen it runs on: a real Mac window, a real iPhone app, not a web view in a box. Video decodes on the hardware and goes to the screen without being copied, so a film costs a fraction of one core.
It opens in a blink and is kind to a battery.
One price on the App Store. No subscription, no adverts, no in-app purchases, no account to make and no card on file with us — Apple handles the payment and we never see it.
Updates are updates, not upsells.
The same app, laid out for the device it is on rather than stretched to fit. On the Mac it is a proper window: pin it to stay on top while you work, go full screen with a double-click anywhere on the picture, delete a share with a trash button rather than a hidden gesture. On iPhone and iPad it turns with you, uses the whole screen or stays clear of the camera cutout — your choice — and keeps playing in the background. On Apple TV the Siri Remote does what you expect, scrubbing included.
Download a film, or a whole folder, from your NAS to the device for the car, the plane or the holiday. Downloads resume if interrupted, are checked against the original when they finish, and play from the front page with no network at all.
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and the soundtrack and subtitles it picks first follow the language your device is in. The text follows your text size, every control has a name for VoiceOver, and the scrubber answers a swipe.
MKV, MP4, MOV, TS, AVI and WebM. H.264, HEVC at 8 and 10 bits, AV1, VP9, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 — on the hardware where the chip has it, in software where it does not. DTS, TrueHD, AC-3, E-AC-3, FLAC, Opus and the rest, decoded and mixed.
A 7.1 soundtrack on a phone speaker is a mess unless someone mixes it down with care. Cadence does: it knows whether you are on the built-in speaker, headphones, AirPlay or a receiver and mixes for that.
Text subtitles (SubRip, ASS/SSA, WebVTT, MOV text) and picture subtitles (PGS, DVB, DVD) from inside the file. The text ones are drawn by the app, so they are crisp at any size and you decide how they look: an outline, a shadow, or both; sans, rounded or serif; weight, colour and size; and a translucent band behind them for the bright scenes. A live preview in Settings shows the same line over a white wall, a grey one, a busy gradient and a dark room, so you can judge a change on all four rather than on whatever happens to be playing.
Say which language you read and it picks that track. It knows the difference between a dialogue track and a "signs and songs" track that only subtitles the shop fronts, and skips the latter unless you ask.
On iPhone and iPad, keep watching in a corner while you do something else, and keep listening when the screen is off. On the Mac, where a floating picture is what a window is for, pin the player above everything with one click.
Your shares, pinned folders, recents, where you are in every film, and your settings travel by iCloud, under your own Apple ID. Share passwords go by iCloud Keychain, which is encrypted end to end. Nothing is stored with us.
Watch the second half on the train with no signal and the Mac catches up when you get home — every device's changes are kept, item by item, and nothing is lost to the newer one.
SMB 2 and 3 shares — a Synology, a QNAP, a Mac, a Raspberry Pi in a cupboard. A share is tested before it is saved, so a typo is caught at the door rather than in the dark. A share that is off the network says so quickly instead of leaving you looking at a spinner.
The controls, the highlights and the scrubber take one of the six colours of the app's own icon — cyan, azure, violet, magenta, amber or green. Pick it once; it follows you to your other devices with the rest of your taste.
Demuxing and decoding by FFmpeg, built under the LGPL and linked as a framework, with Apple's VideoToolbox doing the hardware decode and handing each frame to the display as-is. At a film's native frame rate no pixel is touched by the app at all. HDR (PQ and HLG, and Dolby Vision in MP4 and MOV) is handed to Apple's own media pipeline, which knows the display.
There is also an experimental motion-interpolation mode that can raise a 24-frame film to 60 on the GPU, from a research project on temporal shaders. It is marked experimental, measures what your device can sustain, and can be switched off in one tap.
If you want the cinema-lobby experience — posters, cast lists, "because you watched" — Jellyfin and Plex do it superbly and Cadence is not trying to. Half of this household gets on very well with them.
Cadence is for the other half: the person who keeps a tidy NAS, knows where everything is, and would rather open the folder and press play. The focus is speed, fidelity, and working the same on every Apple device you own.
Cadence reads containers and decodes streams with FFmpeg, and uses the hardware decoder in your device for the codecs it has. Green marks what is decoded in hardware on current Apple chips.
Audio on its own too: MP3, AAC, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, AC-3, DTS.
Hardware decoding needs a chip that has the codec: AV1 from the A17 Pro and M3 onwards, for instance. Where the chip lacks it, the film plays in software.
Everything is decoded in the app and mixed for your output; passthrough hands the soundtrack to the system for the formats it handles itself.
Tracks inside the file. Text tracks are rendered by the app in your chosen style; picture tracks are shown as they are.
HDR10 / PQ, HLG, and Dolby Vision inside MP4 and MOV, played through Apple's own pipeline so the display's tone mapping applies.
SMB 2 and 3 shares on your network, by name or address, with a port if you use an unusual one. Files on this device through the Files app on iPhone and iPad and the Finder on the Mac, remembered so they can be reopened.
Cadence is £4.99 on the App Store, paid once. Apple sets the equivalent in your own currency, and that is the whole price.
No. There is nothing to sign up for. Buy it on the App Store, open it, add a share or open a file. If you want your shares and history on your other devices, that goes through the iCloud account already on the device, and you can switch it off in Settings.
macOS 26 or later on the Mac; iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 or later on the phone and the tablet; tvOS 26 or later on the Apple TV. Cadence uses what those systems added rather than carrying old code for older ones, which is part of why it is small.
Yes. Download a file, or a whole folder, from your NAS to the device — a long-press on the phone, the download button on the Mac and the Apple TV — and it plays from the front page with no network at all. Downloads resume if they are interrupted and are checked against the original when they finish. On Apple TV they live in the system's cache, which the television may clear when it needs the room.
The app speaks English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese, and follows the language your device is set to. The soundtrack and subtitles it picks first follow that language too, and you can choose another in Settings.
Shares → Add a share. Give it a name, the host (a name like nas.local or an address, with :port if you use an unusual one), the share name, and your user and password. Cadence tests the connection before it saves, and tells you plainly if the host is not answering or the password is wrong. The password goes into your keychain, never into a file.
Yes. The soundtrack is decoded in the app and mixed for whatever you are listening on — the phone's speaker, headphones, AirPlay or a receiver — with a dialogue control for quiet films. If you have a receiver that would rather decode for itself, Passthrough hands it the formats the system supports natively.
Every film, by its content rather than its name, so the same file on two shares is one record. Come back and it offers to continue or start again; finish it and it is marked watched; finish an episode and the next one in the folder plays, if you want it to. All of this travels between your devices.
Shares (with passwords by iCloud Keychain), pinned folders, recents, where you are in each film, and your settings, including your colour. Sync is reconciled item by item: something added on one device is kept, something edited on both keeps the later edit, and a deletion is honoured unless the thing was edited afterwards elsewhere. A device that was offline for a fortnight merges when it returns without losing a thing on either side.
Entirely. iCloud is a switch in Settings; with it off, everything stays on the device. Playback never needs the internet at all — only your network, for a share, and not even that for a file on the device.
Because a Mac already has the better version of it: a window. The player window can be pinned to float above everything else, at whatever size you drag it to, and you can go full screen with a double-click. On iPhone and iPad, where a window is not a thing, Picture in Picture is there.
Size, weight, typeface (sans, rounded or serif), colour, an outline and a shadow or either alone, and a translucent band behind the text for bright scenes. Settings shows a live preview of your line over four backgrounds. Picture subtitles (PGS from Blu-rays, DVB, DVD) are drawn as they are, since they are pictures.
An experiment, marked as one. Cadence grew out of a research project on temporal shaders — GPU programs that make new frames between the ones in the file — and the player can raise a 24-frame film to 48 or 60. "Auto" measures what your device can sustain for the clip and keeps to that; "Off" plays the film exactly as it was made. Some people love it, some people hate it, and both are right, so it is a switch.
No. Those are copy-protected and can only be played by the store's own app. Cadence plays ordinary files: the ones you ripped, recorded, downloaded or made.
None. No analytics, no crash-reporting service of ours, no advertising identifier, no network request except to your own share or your own iCloud. If your device is set to share crash reports with Apple, Apple may pass those on to us; that is the only way anything reaches us, and it contains no personal information. See the privacy policy.
Email support@cadencevideoplayer.com with the device, its system version, what the file is (the container and codecs, if you know them — the player's info panel shows them) and what happened. Real bug reports get real answers; see Support for what helps most.
support@cadencevideoplayer.com
For bugs, questions, files that will not play, and things you wish it did. Cadence is made by a very small team, and the person who reads this address is the person who fixes things.
Cadence
