Cadence Video Player
The best video player ever
Free
Still the best video player ever.
.
Point it at a folder, or at your NAS, and press play. Cadence is a small, fast, native video player for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV 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. One purchase. No subscription, no adverts, no account.
YOUR FILES, YOUR FOLDERS
Most people who keep their films on a NAS keep them tidy. Cadence takes that at face value: it opens the folder, plays the file, and remembers where you got to. Add an SMB share once and browse it the way you named it. Pin the folders you use most and they sit on the front page. Files on the device are remembered too. Every film keeps its place: come back and it offers to continue or start again; finish an episode and the next one follows.
ALL THE FORMATS THAT MATTER
MKV, MP4, MOV, TS, AVI and WebM. H.264, HEVC at 8 and 10 bits, AV1, VP9, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (in hardware where your chip has it). DTS, TrueHD, AC-3, E-AC-3, FLAC, Opus and the rest, decoded and mixed in the app. HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision in MP4 and MOV go through Apple's own pipeline, so your display's tone mapping applies.
SOUND, MIXED FOR YOUR SPEAKERS
A 7.1 soundtrack on a phone speaker is a mess unless someone mixes it down with care. Cadence knows whether you are on the built-in speaker, headphones, AirPlay or a receiver and mixes for that: a dialogue control for quiet films, the bass channel kept or folded in, passthrough for a receiver that would rather decode for itself, and a preferred language chosen once.
SUBTITLES YOU CAN READ FROM ACROSS THE ROOM
Text subtitles (SubRip, ASS/SSA, WebVTT, MOV text) and picture subtitles (PGS, DVB, DVD) from inside the file. Text tracks are drawn by the app, crisp at any size, in the style you choose: outline or shadow, sans, rounded or serif, weight, colour and size, a translucent band for bright scenes, with a live preview over four backgrounds. Say which language you read and it picks that track, and it knows a "signs and songs" track from the real dialogue.
TAKE IT WITH YOU
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.
EVERY APPLE SCREEN, DONE PROPERLY
On the Mac it is a proper window: pin it above your work, or go full screen with a double-click. On iPhone and iPad it turns with you, keeps playing in the background, and offers Picture in Picture. On Apple TV the Siri Remote does what you expect: click to pause, swipe to skip, swipe up for the audio and subtitle tracks, Menu to leave.
FOLLOWS YOU BETWEEN DEVICES
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, encrypted end to end. Nothing is stored with us, and iCloud is a switch you can turn off. Even your chosen colour travels.
UNDER THE BONNET
FFmpeg demuxes and decodes, Apple's VideoToolbox does the hardware decode, and each frame goes to the display as it is: at a film's native frame rate no pixel is touched by the app. An experimental motion-interpolation mode can raise a 24-frame film to 60 on the GPU. It measures what your device can sustain and switches off in one tap.
WHAT IT DOESN'T DO, ON PURPOSE
No posters, no artwork, no library database: nothing is scanned or indexed. No server and no transcoding: it plays the file as it is, from where it is. No accounts, no analytics, no adverts: the app sends nothing anywhere. No DRM: copy-protected films from a store will not play in any third-party player, this one included.
Cadence is for the person who keeps a tidy NAS, knows where everything is, and would rather open the folder and press play.
Support: support@cadencevideoplayer.com
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Improved interpolation shaders.
Various optimisations and bug fixes.
The developer, Gareth Herbert, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Gareth Herbert
- Size
- 56.6 MB
- Category
- Photo & Video
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 26.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 26.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later. - Apple TV
Requires tvOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 8 more
- English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Cadence Video Player