A modern, open-source media player for Windows built on the VLC engine (libVLC), with a redesigned VLC interface, synced lyrics, an equalizer and effects, a converter and streaming to TV.
One click downloads Pylon-win-Setup.exe (the latest version). Open it and Pylon installs itself, no admin rights needed.
That's the only file you need: the other files on the release page are for updates.
· Portable version (zip) · All versions
Pylon brings Juxtopposed's open "VLC Redesign" to life as a real player. Under the hood it's libVLC 3, so it plays what VLC plays: almost every audio and video format, discs, network streams.
- Player: rounded video frame, music mode with blurred cover art, waveform seek bar with frame previews, fullscreen with floating controls, a "hide UI" mode, and a miniplayer.
- Library: Home (Continue Watching, Listen Again), video and music folders, albums, artists and genres from tags, playlists with covers, history, and the play queue.
- Network: network streams, devices on your local network (UPnP / mDNS), podcasts (RSS), and internet radio from radio-browser.info.
- Settings: 13 categories and about 150 options. They apply instantly; when libVLC must restart, playback resumes where it was.
- Effects: a 10-band equalizer with presets, compressor, spatializer, stereo widener, pitch shift, and karaoke. For video: color, crop and rotate.
- Themes: dark, light, follow Windows, OLED black, Midnight, Nord and Sepia, plus 9 accent colors and adjustable corner rounding (including the window corners on Windows 11).
- Lyrics: syllable-by-syllable karaoke in the style of Spicy Lyrics (glow, blur by distance, click a line to jump). Reads
.ttml(Apple / Spicy Lyrics / spicy-translate, with background vocals and duets) and.lrcnext to the track, or finds synced lyrics on LRCLIB. - Video: NVIDIA RTX / Intel Super Resolution and RTX Video HDR, chapters on the seek bar, bookmarks (
Ctrl+B), 360° video you look around with the mouse, a blurred backdrop of the video's own frames instead of black bars. - Windows: media session (track and cover in the volume flyout and on the lock screen, media keys), taskbar thumbnail buttons, own icon for every file format.
- Websites: YouTube, Twitch, VK, Rutube, SoundCloud and about 1,800 other sites through yt-dlp (downloaded on first use, kept up to date). Paste a playlist or channel and its videos join the queue.
- Crossfade: songs blend into each other (Settings → Playback → Crossfade between songs).
- Phone remote: scan a QR code and the phone's browser controls playback (⋯ → Phone Remote).
- Spotify: import playlists by link (your files first, YouTube for the rest), and Spicy-style lyrics for what the Spotify app is playing.
- Connected: Last.fm scrobbling, Discord status, subtitles from OpenSubtitles, songs recognized by their sound (AcoustID), watch together.
- Playback tools: A-B loop (
Shift+L, range shown on the seek bar), sleep timer with a gentle fade-out, a real waveform on the music seek bar (decoded once in the background, cached). - Motion: quick ease-out transitions for panels, menus, dialogs and library pages; hotkey actions stay instant, and Windows' "Animation effects" switch turns them off.
- Audio spectrum: live bars under the cover art, optionally over video too. Only Pylon's own sound is captured (WASAPI process loopback, Windows 10 2004+).
- Languages: English and Russian (Settings → General → Interface language).
- Updates: checks GitHub Releases at startup and updates itself in place, downloading only what changed (delta updates). After an update it shows what's new.
- Controls: keyboard shortcuts you can rebind (also system-wide), mouse-wheel and click actions, and a control bar you choose the buttons for.
- Also: record (
Shift+R), snapshots (Shift+S), Chromecast, subtitle matching across a whole season, profiles, and a single instance. - Windows integration: the installer registers audio and video file types, each with its own icon, and adds "Play with Pylon" to folders.
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Download Pylon-win-Setup.exe and open it. That's all.
| File on the release page | Who needs it |
|---|---|
Pylon-win-Setup.exe |
Everyone. The installer: per user into %LocalAppData%\Pylon, no admin rights, registers file types. |
Pylon-win-Portable.zip |
If you want Pylon in a folder of your choice (a USB stick). Updates itself too, but doesn't register file types. |
Pylon-x.y.z-setup-win-x64.exe |
Nobody new: it moves Pylon 1.0–1.2 to the current installer when they update. |
*.nupkg, RELEASES, releases.win.json |
Nobody: Pylon's own updates download these. |
To make Pylon the default player for every audio and video format: Settings → General → Default player → Make Pylon the default (one click).
Coming from Pylon 1.0–1.2? Update from the app as usual. It moves to the new installer and removes the old copy; your settings and library stay.
Requires Windows 10 or 11, x64. The .NET runtime is bundled.
Pylon checks the latest release at startup. You can turn this off in Settings → General → Check for updates automatically, or check yourself with … → Check for Updates….
Click Update now: Pylon downloads only the files that changed (usually a few hundred KB), restarts into the new version and shows what's new in it.
You need the .NET 10 SDK. Packaging needs Velopack (dotnet tool install -g vpk); Inno Setup 6 builds the small bridge that moves 1.0–1.2 installs over.
dotnet run --project Pylon # run from source
.\build.ps1 # dist\releases\: installer, portable zip, update packages
.\build.ps1 -Version 1.1.0Releases are built by GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml). Every push to main is also build-checked by ci.yml.
- Commit your changes to
main. - Tag the version and push the tag:
git tag v1.1.0 git push origin v1.1.0
- The workflow builds the installer, the portable zip and the full and delta update packages, and publishes the GitHub release. The release notes are this version's section of CHANGELOG.md, so write it before tagging.
- Installed copies see the update the next time they start, or right away through Check for Updates….
The version number comes from the tag; you don't need to edit Pylon.csproj.
Keep the checkout in a short path, such as D:\Projects\Pylon. libVLC 3 can't load plugins from paths longer than 260 characters, and you would lose sound.
Icons come from Phosphor. To add one, use its name in code and run python Pylon/tools/sync-icons.py <path-to-@phosphor-icons/core/assets>.
Pylon is translated on Weblate, right in the browser: no GitHub account or
tools needed. Pick a language, translate or vote on suggestions, and Weblate sends the result here as a pull request.
Each language is one JSON file in Pylon/lang (how it works).
- VLC / libVLC and LibVLCSharp by VideoLAN and contributors.
- The interface follows the VLC Redesign Figma file by Juxtopposed (see below).
- Phosphor Icons, SharpVectors, and radio-browser.info.
Pylon exists because Juxtopposed redesigned VLC and shared the whole design openly. Watch how it was made — I Redesigned VLC After 25 Years — and see the original VLC Redesign Figma file. Thank you, Juxtopposed, for the thoughtful design and for making it free to build on! 💛
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Team roles:
- Committers and reviewers: MeowKusTrue
- Approvers: MeowKusTrue
Only binaries built by GitHub Actions from this repository's source (.github/workflows/release.yml) are signed. Third-party components shipped with Pylon (libVLC, the .NET runtime and other libraries listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md) are not signed with this certificate.
Pylon has no telemetry, analytics, ads or accounts of its own. It doesn't send your files, your library or your history anywhere; they stay in %AppData%\Pylon on your computer. It goes online only for the features below, and only with the data each one needs:
- Updates: GitHub (github.com, api.github.com), checked at startup to find and download new versions. Turn off in Settings → General.
- Lyrics (on by default, Settings → Interface → Lyrics): the track's artist, title, album and length go to LRCLIB, ListenBrainz (to find the Spotify id) and Spicy Lyrics. Only if you add your own Spotify app keys: the Spotify Web API and Deezer, for the same lookup.
- Titles and cover art (off by default, Settings → Privacy): artist and album or title go to the iTunes Search API for missing covers, and libVLC runs its own metadata lookups. Songs without any tags are recognized by an audio fingerprint (not the audio itself) through AcoustID, with covers from the Cover Art Archive; the fingerprint tool fpcalc is downloaded from GitHub once.
- Spotify: an import reads the public Spotify page of the link you paste; songs not in your library are searched on YouTube by artist and title. Lyrics for Spotify read what the Spotify app plays from Windows' media session on this computer.
- What you open: network streams, radio (the radio-browser.info directory), podcasts you add, and web pages played through yt-dlp, which talks to the site of that page.
- Sign in to websites with cookies from a browser (off by default, Settings → Network): only when you pick a browser, yt-dlp reads that browser's cookies on this computer and uses them for the page you're playing, to get past "confirm you're not a bot" and age checks. Pylon doesn't store, copy or send those cookies anywhere else.
- Tools downloaded only after Pylon asks you: yt-dlp (github.com/yt-dlp), ffmpeg for joining files (github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds) and the Icaros previews installer (github.com/Xanashi/Icaros).
- Only if you turn them on or use them: Last.fm scrobbling (artist, title, album, time; you sign in on the Last.fm website, Pylon never sees your password), OpenSubtitles search (the file's name and hash), and Discord status (the track or video name, passed to the Discord app running on your computer).
- Local network, only while you use them: Phone Remote, Stream to TV / Phone and Watch Together listen on your local network; their addresses carry a random key. Looking for Chromecast devices on the local network is on by default (Settings → Recording → Discover cast devices); other local-network discovery runs when you open Network → Local Network.
Pylon is free and stays free. If you enjoy it and would like to say thanks, you can leave a donation. It's a gift: it doesn't unlock features, priority support or any bonuses, and the player is the same for everyone either way.
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Thank you for any support, and just as much for bug reports and ideas.
GPL-3.0. libVLC and LibVLCSharp are LGPL-2.1.
VLC and the VLC cone are trademarks of VideoLAN. Pylon is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by VideoLAN.