REEL
REEL
Reel is one native app for all your media — it plays video and music, shows images, records your screen, converts between formats, and opens an editing timeline when you want more. Linux-first. Free.
Version 0.16.0 · x86_64 · install instructions
No separate player, converter, screenshot tool and recorder. They belong together.
Hardware-decoded playback with real A/V sync, subtitles, frame-exact seek and live scrubbing — powered by libmpv when present. mpv/VLC keyboard muscle-memory works out of the box.
Audio plays with cover art or gnarly visualizers — musical spectrum, spectrogram, vectorscope, waveform — rendered by the playback engine itself. Press V to cycle.
Stills open in the same window — ultrawide screenshots, 8K photos, and SVG, rasterized crisply. Convert to PNG, JPEG or WebP with resize in two clicks.
H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9 with quality presets or custom CRF; instant lossless remux; audio extraction to MP3/FLAC/Opus — straight from the player, no editing required. And when you've made a cut, export the edit itself — Reel renders your trims, splits and multiple source files into one new video, on the GPU encoder where your machine has one.
Screenshot the full screen, a region or a window. Record your screen with system audio — no OBS, no external tools: Reel speaks your desktop's portal directly. Captures open in Reel, ready to trim or convert.
Hit Edit and your file is on a multi-track timeline: trim by dragging clip edges, split at the playhead, move with snapping, undo/redo, and save the cut as a .reel project that reopens with a double-click. Compositing and timeline export are landing milestone by milestone — the model is real today.
One binary per platform. No installer wizard, no account, no telemetry.
One line — installs to ~/.local/bin and checks your codecs:
curl -fsSL https://reel.pixygon.io/install.sh | bashOr grab the tarball and put reel on your PATH yourself.
Add the Pixygon repo once, then it's a normal package with updates:
# /etc/pacman.conf
[pixygon]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://pixygontech.b-cdn.net/releases/pacman-repo/x86_64sudo pacman -Sy reelUnzip anywhere and run reel.exe. If ffmpeg isn't on your machine,
Reel downloads its own private copy on first launch.
Every file has a published SHA-256 next to it (append .sha256 to any download URL).
Release history lives in the manifest.
Zero manual steps is the goal: dependencies install with Reel, and Reel offers to become your default player.
Reel plays best with libmpv (hardware decode, audio sync, subtitles, visualizers) and ffmpeg (convert & record). On Arch the package installs both automatically; the one-line installer offers to install them anywhere else; and if ffmpeg is still missing, Reel downloads its own private copy on first launch. No codec hunting.
On first launch Reel asks whether to open Video, Music and/or Images by default — tick what you want, done. From then on double-clicking a file opens it in Reel. Change your mind any time under ⚙ → Default apps; Reel always stays in your "Open with" menus either way.
reel video.mkv # play immediately
reel song.flac # music + visualizer
reel photo.svg # view imagesThe first screen recording shows your desktop's own "share screen" picker — approve it once and Reel remembers.
If you've used mpv or VLC, your hands already know Reel.
Open it → ⬇ Export → pick format & quality → Start. Live progress, cancellable, never overwrites. Works on video, audio and images alike.
Reel’s tray icon → Record → choose screen, window or region in the system picker → ⏹ Stop. The clip opens in Reel — trim it or convert it on the spot.
Reel’s tray icon → Screenshot → Full screen, Region or Window.
It opens in Reel immediately — export to JPEG/WebP or just find it in ~/Pictures/Reel.