Everything you wanted to ask.

Yes. There is no paid version, no subscription, no ads and no account. Nothing is held back. If you want to support the project, a donation is welcome — and so is a good bug report.

Technical note. MacLC is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later; the playback engine (libVLC) is LGPL 2.1 or later. The complete source is public on GitHub.

Any Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) running macOS 26 Tahoe or later. The HDR features shine on a MacBook Pro with a Liquid Retina XDR display, a Pro Display XDR or an external HDR monitor, but MacLC plays everything on any screen.

Technical note. Intel Macs are out of scope. The bundled libraries require macOS 26. Hardware AV1 decoding needs an M3 or newer.

macOS opens downloaded apps without asking only when their developer pays Apple for a Developer ID and has the app checked by Apple. MacLC is a free project, so it isn’t yet. The first time you open it:

1. Open MacLC. macOS says it could not verify it: click Done.
2. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security.
3. Next to “MacLC was blocked”, click Open Anyway and confirm with Touch ID or your password.

You only do this once. The button stays there for about an hour after the first attempt.

Technical note. The app is signed ad hoc (the files cannot be altered without breaking the signature) but not notarised. The Terminal equivalent is xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MacLC.app. If macOS ever says MacLC “is damaged”, the download is incomplete: download it again and compare the SHA-256 checksum.

MacLC’s whole source code is public, so anyone can read it and build it. It has no tracking and never sends your viewing to anyone. The download page shows the file’s fingerprint, so you can check that your copy is exactly the one published.

Technical note. The fingerprint is the SHA-256 checksum of the disk image. In Terminal, shasum -a 256 followed by the file prints it.

No. MacLC plays every video on any Mac screen, and shows HDR films properly on ordinary screens too. Only SDR to HDR — making ordinary videos glow — needs a screen that can go brighter than white, such as a MacBook Pro’s XDR display.

Most videos are made for ordinary screens, so on a bright HDR screen their highlights stop at plain white. SDR to HDR finds what should shine — lamps, the sun, reflections, skies — and lets it glow using the extra brightness your screen has. Faces and shadows stay close to how they were filmed; at the Balanced level, everything below diffuse white is left as it was.

It can’t invent detail that wasn’t filmed, and on an ordinary screen it does nothing.

Technical note. Fast lifts the drive (the larger of luminance and 85 % of the brightest channel) above half of SDR white along a fixed quadratic; Balanced lifts only what lies above diffuse white, by less when large areas are bright; High and Maximum predict a grid of brightness gains for each scene with two small trained networks. The whole pixel is scaled by one factor, so hue is kept. See the HDR page.

It can, which is why it’s off by default and one click away. Many people like it for sport, nature and animation, and prefer the classic 24-frame look for cinema. Try both on the same scene and keep what you like.

Technical note. Automatic picks a method that keeps up in real time (low latency, Balanced optical flow at 2×, motion compensation or blend). It never picks optical flow Quality, RIFE or SVP: those you choose by hand.

When the window is larger than the video, MacLC enlarges it on the GPU with one of nine methods: Auto, Apple Neural 4x, Anime, Anime4K, FSRCNNX, Sharp (AMD FSR 1), NIS, Efficient (MetalFX) and Classic (EWA Lanczos). Each is explained in plain words in the Upscaling panel.

Apple’s neural passes, Anime, Anime4K and FSRCNNX work on 8-bit SDR video. On HDR and 10-bit video, and with SDR to HDR on, MacLC uses the other methods.

Technical note. Upscaling runs in the Metal video output when the window is at least 1.2 times larger than the video. Apple Neural 4x is a one-time download from Apple and steps back to 2× when the Mac cannot keep up; FSRCNNX is downloaded only after you accept its LGPL-3.0 licence. Neural passes stand down on battery, in Low Power Mode, when the Mac is hot, or when a frame would take more than 60 % of its time.

Choose File › Open Web Video (⌘U), paste the link and press Play. MacLC needs a free helper called yt-dlp to read video pages; if it isn’t installed, MacLC shows you the one command to install it.

Technical note. Install with brew install yt-dlp. MacLC looks for it in Homebrew’s locations, since apps opened from the Finder do not inherit your shell’s PATH.

MacLC provides a dedicated YouTube section in the sidebar with Home, Subscriptions, History, Watch Later, Liked Videos, playlists, channels and search. It runs on the free yt-dlp helper (installed once with brew install yt-dlp).

Signing in is entirely optional: Home and search work without an account. To see your subscriptions or playlists, you can sign in on Google’s own page, shown in a web view inside MacLC, or reuse a browser where you are already signed in. MacLC keeps only the session cookies yt-dlp needs, in a private file on your Mac, and clicking Sign Out deletes that file immediately.

Technical note. Runs yt-dlp with --cookies <file> (file mode 0600) or --cookies-from-browser. Options are placed before -- so addresses cannot be parsed as flags.

Open a .torrent file, or paste a magnet link in Open Web Video, and MacLC starts playing within seconds while the rest downloads. Subtitles included in the torrent are picked up, and episodes play one after another. Only stream what you have the right to watch.

Technical note. MacLC does not register itself for magnet: links, so your torrent app keeps handling links from the browser.

MacLC waits for a few verified seconds of the film before playback begins, so the stream can play smoothly without stalls. An animated loading screen explains each step as peers are found and the start gate fills. The buffer adapts to the swarm’s download speed, and a marker on the playback bar shows what is buffered ahead with speed and peers.

Technical note. The BitTorrent start gate waits for 20 s of media until swarm speed is measured, then sets a buffer of 10 to 90 s depending on download speed relative to playback bitrate (playing anyway after two minutes). The deadline window requests two minutes ahead (at least 48 MiB). The DHT routing table is saved across launches so peers connect in seconds.

Because MacLC keeps them at a comfortable brightness on purpose. In some players, white subtitles over HDR video shine as bright as the brightest highlight, which is painful in a dark scene.

Technical note. Subtitles are composed at SDR white rather than at the video’s peak.

Turn on Voice Boost in the Sound button on the playback bar, or choose Audio › Sound Mode › Voice Boost. It makes dialogue louder and clearer without raising music or effects. You can fine-tune its intensity with the slider, or shape frequencies with the 10-band equalizer (⌥⌘E).

Technical note. The maclc_dialogue filter: on 5.1 mixes it lifts the centre channel (+7.4 dB dialogue advantage); on stereo it extracts centre dialogue via STFT with Apple vDSP (1024 points, 16 ms latency) and lifts the 1–4 kHz voice band (+4.8 dB). A limiter at -1.5 dB prevents clipping.

Click the Play On button (in the toolbar, or in the Now Playing bar) and pick an Apple TV or another AirPlay receiver, or a Chromecast. While casting, MacLC shows “Playing on <device>” and you can control playback from your Mac or with your TV’s remote. Play on TV is currently in beta.

Technical note. AirPlay: a new airplay stream output. MacLC serves the video as HLS (fragmented MP4, the audio as an EXT-X-MEDIA rendition) on your network, and AVPlayer sends it to the receiver over AirPlay. Chromecast: the Chromecast output of libVLC.

All four are ways to store brighter highlights and richer colour. HDR10 is the common base. HDR10+ and Dolby Vision add scene-by-scene instructions that help when a film is brighter than your screen. HLG is used by TV broadcasts and by iPhone videos. MacLC plays all four and picks the best one a file offers for your screen.

Technical note. HDR10: PQ (SMPTE ST 2084) with static ST 2086 / CTA-861.3 metadata. HDR10+: ST 2094-40 dynamic metadata. Dolby Vision: profiles 5, 7, 8.1, 8.4. HLG: ARIB STD-B67, no metadata.

Usually because the player doesn’t fit the film to what your screen can show right now — or reads the wrong screen. MacLC measures the screen the window is on, and measures again when you move the window to another screen. Its Balanced and Bright picture styles help on screens dimmer than the film.

Bright HDR uses more power. MacLC tells you when brightness is limited on battery, and when two formats would look the same on your screen, it picks the one that uses less power.

Yes, every Mac that runs MacLC can. Macs with an M3 chip or newer have AV1 support built into the chip, which saves battery; other Macs use MacLC’s built-in software.

Technical note. Hardware AV1 decoding through VideoToolbox on M3 and newer, checked at run time with VTIsHardwareDecodeSupported (macOS 14 or later); dav1d in software elsewhere.

No. You choose the folders; MacLC reads them where they are and keeps its catalogue on your Mac. Nothing leaves your Mac.

Name episodes like “Show Name S01E02” and MacLC groups them by show and season.

Watch is a section in MacLC’s sidebar that lets you browse films and television series in the style of the Apple TV app. It shows featured carousels, shelves of popular and new titles, Top 10 ranks and genre grids over the catalogs of the add-ons you install.

Technical note. Native AppKit views with NSBackgroundExtensionView extending artwork under the toolbar on macOS 26. Connects to catalogs through the Stremio add-on protocol.

Add-ons are small web services that provide catalogs, title details and streams. MacLC speaks the add-on protocol of Stremio, so you can install official and community add-ons in Settings › Add-ons with one click, or paste an add-on address or stremio:// link. Cinemeta comes built in for posters, descriptions, cast and search.

Technical note. Implements Stremio’s manifest, catalog, meta, stream and addon_catalog endpoints. Torrents stream through libtorrent 2.1; web video streams through yt-dlp.

No. MacLC ships no films, shows or video streams. All catalogs and streams are operated and provided by third-party add-ons. You should use add-ons only for content you have the right to watch.

Everything stays entirely on your Mac in your user folder at ~/Library/Application Support/org.maclc.MacLC/Watch/library.json. MacLC saves Continue Watching, Favorites, History and finished titles locally. Nothing is ever sent to Hazen Studio or anyone else.

Technical note. Saved in a single JSON file written atomically. A title counts as watched from 92 % of its length; playback under 15 seconds is treated as an accidental click and is not remembered.

MacLC is built on part of VLC 4’s open-source code, chiefly its playback engine (libVLC). The interface, the library and Watch, the Metal video output, the HDR pipeline, SDR to HDR, upscaling, motion interpolation, Voice Boost and AirPlay were written or rebuilt for MacLC, for macOS on Apple Silicon only. It is an independent project.

No. MacLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by VideoLAN. VLC, VideoLAN and the traffic-cone logo are VideoLAN’s trademarks; MacLC uses none of them. MacLC builds on more than twenty years of work on VLC by the VideoLAN project and many volunteers. Please report MacLC problems to MacLC, not to VideoLAN.

No — MacLC is made only for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 26 or later.

MacLC is free and stays free. Donations pay for what a free project cannot: Apple’s Developer ID (€99 a year), so macOS stops asking you to click Open Anyway; an Apple TV and a Chromecast to test Play on TV; a second HDR screen; a full accessibility pass; and updates that install themselves.

Open an issue on GitHub. Tell us your Mac model, macOS version and display, what you played and what you saw. For HDR problems, the “What’s happening right now” panel in Settings › HDR & Colour has everything we need.