Plugin System

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

xnhbx

160 points

34 comments

iina.ioTechstory

excitedpositive

Debate

20/100

Media PlayersPlugin SystemsMacos

Key topics

Media Players

Plugin Systems

Macos

The IINA media player for macOS has introduced a plugin system, sparking discussion about its potential use cases and the benefits of extensible software.

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01Story posted
Sep 16, 2025 at 12:10 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Sep 16, 2025 at 12:23 PM EDT
13m after posting
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03Peak activity
14 comments in 0-1h
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04Latest activity
Sep 17, 2025 at 3:55 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (34 comments)

Showing 34 comments

dekken_

4 months ago

2 replies

> IINA - The modern media player for macOS.

nomilk

4 months ago

1 reply

Happy* IINA user here. I use youtube keybindings + 'video speed controller' (chrome extension) keybindings for quick speed up/down/reset and skipping back/forward through videos).

* It did have a problem with crazy power consumption, but I think that's been fixed (haven't noticed the problem for a few months).

elAhmo

4 months ago

Did you have problem with hw acceleration? I noticed that 4k videos can be a little choppy if hw decoding is on, with sw decoding they are fine but battery life is horrible then.

lenkite

4 months ago

I am glad there is an OSS player available, but I am never going to be able to remember this name.

m3kw9

4 months ago

1 reply

i've used VLC, but i prefer this simplicity.

clueless

4 months ago

4 replies

hmm I'm confused, whats the sell with inaa compared to vlc?

simlevesque

4 months ago

1 reply

Honestly I've been having more problems with vlc than with mpv, on Linux and macOS.

amelius

4 months ago

I love VLC but I have two problems with it:

1. Bluetooth audio does not play correctly the first second, often.

2. When pressing a random key accidentally, it is sometimes difficult to recover from the settings-change that it caused, and often a restart of the entire program is necessary.

kimfc

4 months ago

I’ve had less files that refuse to play using iina then vlc, also iina had none of that weird grey artifacting you get with vlc skipping/scrubbing through video (like actually how is that still a problem with vlc and vlc only). Those are the main technical reasons, but the ui is also much better/native feeling

sunaookami

4 months ago

IINA uses mpv so the compatiblity is much higher. VLC is kinda bad but works for "most people".

SoKamil

4 months ago

Native UI, blending into OS so you stop noticing it.

dmix

4 months ago

4 replies

A new MacOS player it seems?

I just recently switched to Infuse 8 after buying a couple Apple TV boxes. The network sharing + iCloud timestamp syncing between my phone/macbook/multiple TVs is the best thing ever. My macbook is basically a media server for every device in my house. No need for annoying plex servers.

yborg

4 months ago

1 reply

IINA has been around for quite a while, it's a front end for mpv. Pretty much Just Werks, it's my standard video playback client.

dmix

4 months ago

1 reply

Ah, I'll try it out thanks. I tried out https://mpv.io/ but wasn't a big fan.

notpushkin

4 months ago

mpv is a nice piece of tech, a solid foundation for a player. IINA agapts it to feel native on macOS, and it does amazing job at that.

pxc

4 months ago

1 reply

It's a player of the ffmpeg lineage; a GUI frontend for mpv. If you use mpv or some frontend (e.g., SMPlayer, Celluloid, or Haruna) on other platforms, IINA is a natural choice on macOS.

It's free software, it's keyboard friendly, it supports more of less every format, and it blends into the OS's native desktop environment. I don't have an eye for design, but it seems good to me. If there's a better choice for local multimedia playback on macOS, I don't know what that is.

(It seems the only other real contender on the backend is VLC, which is likewise excellent software.)

tiagod

4 months ago

1 reply

>It seems the only other real contender on the backend is VLC

Does VLC already support HDR content on MacOS? I switched to IINA because of that omission.

pxc

4 months ago

I don't know. I have a medical light sensitivity problem that makes most HDR content physically painful for me unless I manipulate picture settings to reduce peak brightness, backlight, and/or contrast in various ways. Between my light sensitivity and my progressive colorblindness, I don't get as much out of HDR as most people do, so I just turn it off where possible.

Maybe some day when I have more external displays with OLED or something else that can do millions-to-one contrast ratios, I'll play around with HDR and see if I can find a way to reliably make it comfortable, but for now I don't own any-- it's just the built-in displays of my mobile devices, and I spend as much time as possible on much larger screens because I also have visual acuity problems.

torarnv

4 months ago

1 reply

Another vote for Infuse. In my experience Infuse 8 handles HDR and color management correctly (1:1 with Safari or QuickTime), while IINA does not (too dark).

chazeon

4 months ago

1 reply

Infuse is good, but it does not feel so well-polished for the desktop, for example, some windows for pop-up could have been a real window, but were a pop-up that blocks the main player.

dmix

4 months ago

Agreed. I still use it anyway because I like icloud syncing

shrinks99

4 months ago

Not that new, I've been using IINA for years! It's pretty good.

9dev

4 months ago

1 reply

This looks amazing, I’m just desperately trying to think of a use case for a universal media player that built-in tools couldn’t have handled in the last few years. VLC used to be a staple on my machines, but it’s really been a while since I’ve seen an obscure media file…

notpushkin

4 months ago

I think QuickTime still doesn’t play MKV? Anyways, I usually use IINA just for the keybindings.

yoz

4 months ago

1 reply

"The StandaloneWindow module provides a way to create a separate window to display custom content. You are able to control a full-sized webview inside the window, therefore you can use HTML, CSS, and advanced techniques like WebGL to render the contents." [1]

So... someone could make a Webamp[2] plugin?

And Butterchurn[3] for viz? (Assuming one can plumb in a compatible audio node)

[1] https://docs.iina.io/interfaces/IINA.API.StandaloneWindow

[2] https://docs.webamp.org/docs/intro

[3] https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn

no_wizard

4 months ago

1 reply

I was really hoping that butterchurn was a hi fidelity rendering of butter churning to the pacing and sound range of any given media that was playing

yoz

4 months ago

oh no, now I really want that too

pizza

4 months ago

1 reply

Any general tips on the construction of a great plugin system? I imagine most sort of follow the same principles

formerly_proven

4 months ago

A lesson learned over and over again is that you can build amazing things with tightly coupled plugins, but once you have about three of them upgrading or changing anything gets kind of impossible - Hyrum's law. On the other hand, loosely coupled out-of-process plugins are a lot less flexible, but tend to work a lot better and more reliably, at the cost of more up-front engineering and overall investment. Assuming that what they can do is sufficient to work.

Consider that e.g. kubernetes has basically just one actual core component (the API server) and everything else is loosely-coupled plugins. Alternatively, consider any of the projects stuck for 15 years on Python 2 because that's what their plugin system was in 2009. These are two points on a spectrum.

rickcarlino

4 months ago

With LLMs being a thing now, plugin systems like this can bring a lot of value to users, assuming the docs are easily LLM readable.

I wish more apps had Lua or JS sandboxes for plugins.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/ideas/using-llms-to-create-end...

cschep

4 months ago

I'd love to have a system where I could run a script from the command line to randomly choose an episode from my collection and airplay it to my tv.

Are those API's available here? anyone know?

Cool!

edit: Without full mirror mode. I use Airflow for this right now and I love it, but would be more fun with automation.

jd3

4 months ago

Tried using the "Online Media" built-in plugin for a couple of trivial test cases — Youtube and archive.org — the former worked, while the latter failed, so I disabled it and switched back to yt-dlp in

  Settings => Network => Enable youtube-dl => Custom youtube-dl path => "~/.local/bin/"

because I installed yt-dlp globally through uv

  uv tool install yt-dlp

_diyar

4 months ago

IINA is the kind of app that disappears into the background. I've used it for years and almost forgot it's not a part of the OS.

jrmiii

4 months ago

The plugin architecture here reminds me of what happened with VS Code - once you give users a proper JavaScript API and decent documentation, the community starts solving problems you never even knew existed. But there's something particularly clever about IINA's approach: they're essentially turning every media file into a potential canvas for interactive experiences.

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ID: 45264190Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 4:47:35 PM

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