firelet Get Firelet

Every format.
Every place a
video can live.

Firelet is a video player for Windows. A file on your disk, a share on the NAS, a magnet link, an IPTV subscription, the camera at your front gate, an address other players will not even resolve — all of it opens in the same window, with the same controls.

Download for Windows Soon Read the overview
81 ms
to a visible window
177 MB
while playing 1080p
350 KB
the player itself
0
ads, trackers, paid tiers

Pick where the video is coming from. The window is the real one, rebuilt in your browser.

● Firelet — Arrival.2016.2160p.HDR.DV.mkv
hevc · 1920×1080 · 25 fps
Hardware decode · d3d11va
SFTP · vault.lan · 18.4 MiB/s
Bridge · 127.0.0.1:47821
Finding peers
18 s · 3 seeds · 27 peers · 1.4 MiB/s
h264 · 1280×720 · 50 fps
HTTPS · cdn.example.org · 6.20 Mbps
FRONT GATE · 2026-08-05 21:14:07
av1 · 1920×1080 · 24 fps
Tor · SOCKS5h 127.0.0.1:9050 · names resolved by the proxy
41:18 / 1:56:32

A file opens the folder with it. Its siblings become the playlist, in episode order.

no key — it puts itself on screen

Nothing spins forever

A magnet has to find peers before it knows what is even in the torrent. A stream has to be connected and probed. A portal or a camera is several round trips away. All of that used to look identical to a crash: a window that never changed.

Anything that cannot play yet puts a card on screen saying what is being waited for, how long it has been going, and whatever real numbers exist — seeds, peers, rate. Past about twelve seconds it volunteers why it might be slow. A mid-playback stall gets the same card labelled Buffering, with the player's own figure as a real progress bar.

When something fails it says what happened, including which host it was trying to reach, and stays until you dismiss it instead of flashing past in a toast.

● Firelet — magnet:?xt=urn:btih:…
Finding peers
4 s · 0 seeds · 2 peers
00:00 / --:--

I

Measured, not claimed

Every figure on this page came off a stopwatch or a profiler, and the awkward one is here too: the installed runtime is around 150 MB, nearly all of it a statically linked FFmpeg. It compresses to about 32 MB, so the installer lands near 45 MB. Shrinking what sits on disk needs a feature-trimmed build, and that work is not done yet.

Press I while something is playing and the panel below is what you get — over the picture, in the corner, with live numbers for whatever is feeding playback.

● Firelet — Arrival.2016.2160p.HDR.DV.mkv
Cold start · 81 ms to a visible window
Hardware decode · d3d11va
Memory · 177 MB while playing
firelet.exe · 350 KB
Installer · ~45 MB, per-user, no admin prompt
Installed runtime · ~150 MB, nearly all of it FFmpeg
41:18 / 1:56:32

Ctrl+U

Opens what you point it at

Eight ways in, one set of controls. Whatever it is, it lands in the same playlist, gets remembered in the same history, and answers to the same keys.

Local & USB

Any file on any disk. Open one and the folder around it becomes the playlist, in episode order.

file://

NAS & Windows shares

A UNC path is just a path — no mapping a drive letter, no copying the file down first.

smb:// · \\host\share

SFTP · FTPS · WebDAV

Saved servers with optional credentials, stored DPAPI-encrypted. They stream through a loopback bridge that makes any provider seekable.

sftp:// ftps:// dav://

Links & live streams

Paste it and it plays. What comes back decides the format, never the extension on the end.

http(s):// hls dash rtsp ftp

Torrents

Opt-in and off by default. Streams sequentially with piece deadlines steered by where you are watching — and only the file you are watching is downloaded.

magnet: · .torrent

TV portals & IPTV

Your own subscription: an M3U list, Xtream Codes, or a Stalker/MAG portal, with the XMLTV guide beside it.

m3u · xtream · stalker

Cameras

ONVIF cameras found on the network for you, RTSP with vendor path templates, MJPEG doorbells, and the webcam on this PC.

onvif · rtsp:// · mjpeg

Privacy networks

Hidden-service addresses reach the Tor, I2P, Lokinet or Freenet client you already run. Firelet ships none of them and starts none of them.

.onion .i2p .loki freenet:

Firelet ships no channel lists, no catalogue, no directory of anybody's cameras and no anonymity software. It opens what you point it at — that line is the design, not a disclaimer.

T

A hundred thousand channels, and a search box

Open an M3U, M3U8, PLS, XSPF, ASX or WPL — a file or a URL — and it becomes the playlist.

Content decides, not the extension

An HLS stream and an IPTV channel list share .m3u8, and only the #EXT-X- tags tell them apart. HLS goes straight to the player; a channel list is parsed here.

The attributes are kept

group-title becomes the category, tvg-logo and tvg-id link the guide, and #EXTVLCOPT reaches the player as per-file options — without the user-agent and referrer a list names, a great many streams answer 403.

Built for the big list

Parsing 100,000 entries takes about 280 ms, and the view builds only the rows you can see. Past a dozen entries the panel grows a search box, a category filter and a sort — defaulting to list order, because a curated list's order means something.

Start screen → TV portals… saves your own subscriptions
KindWhat you enterNotes
M3U list a URL Gzipped lists handled. A url-tvg in the header loads the guide automatically.
Xtream Codes server, username, password Live and VOD with the panel’s own categories; the guide comes from xmltv.php on the same account.
Stalker / MAG portal URL and MAC Firelet identifies itself as the MAG box your account is bound to. It does not invent a MAC — the portal authenticates that MAC, so a made-up one is simply rejected.

XMLTV guides load when a list names one, and each channel shows what is on now. Only a window around the present — six hours back, forty-eight forward — is kept, so a national guide costs a few megabytes instead of the hundred it is on disk.

Ctrl+Shift+C

The cameras on your network, and nothing else

CCTV and IP cameras, the channels of a recorder, and the camera plugged into this PC. Everything a camera offers becomes the playlist, so its streams and a recorder's channels switch exactly like anything else in a list.

● Cameras on this network

Asking the cameras on this network to introduce themselves. Only ONVIF cameras answer, and only on this subnet — anything missing can be added by address.

Hikvision DS-2CD2143G2 ONVIF · 2 streams 192.168.1.64
Dahua IPC-HDW3849H ONVIF · 2 streams 192.168.1.71
Reolink RLC-810A ONVIF · 2 streams 192.168.1.88
Uniview NVR301-08X ONVIF · 8 channels 192.168.1.20
Probing every interface — 4 answered so far
4 cameras answered. Pick one to add — you will still need its login. Cancel Add…

Three things a camera needs that a file does not

Low latency
Buffering is the right thing to do to a file and the wrong thing to do to a camera. Live feeds play with low-latency settings and rtsp-transport=tcp — UDP loses packets and does not survive NAT. The settings go back for the next ordinary file.
Reconnection
A feed dropping out is ordinary: a wireless link, a nightly reboot, the switch to night mode. The same camera is reconnected three times before the playlist is allowed to move on, because playing a different camera is never the right answer to it.
No history
Cameras are deliberately kept out of Continue watching. The address carries the password to a live picture of your home, and the thumbnail would be a still of the room it points at. Neither belongs in a file that outlives the session.

Two details decide whether a camera works at all, and are invisible when they are wrong. An ONVIF login is a digest over a timestamp, so the camera's own clock is read first — a camera that has never reached an NTP server is out by months and rejects every correctly-formed login. And the address a camera reports is often the one it had when it was installed, so its host is replaced with the one it actually answered on.

Settings → Privacy networks

Addresses other players won't resolve

Paste an .onion, .i2p, .loki or Freenet address — with or without an http:// on the front — and it plays.

AddressReached throughDefault endpoint
*.onion your Tor client’s SOCKS port socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050
*.i2p your I2P router’s HTTP proxy http://127.0.0.1:4444
*.loki nothing — Lokinet routes and resolves .loki itself —
freenet: · CHK@ · USK@ your Freenet/Hyphanet node’s gateway http://127.0.0.1:8888

Names never touch your DNS

Proxied addresses are fetched by Firelet's own provider and served to the demuxer through the loopback bridge, because a demuxer speaks no SOCKS. Resolution happens at the proxy — socks5h — so a hidden-service name never leaves through your resolver.

The switch that stays off

There is a route-everything-through-Tor option, and a separate one for torrent traffic that is off with a warning on it: the peer protocol still hands your address to the swarm, and the Tor Project asks people not to push bulk transfers through it.

Ctrl+.

Where you left off

Streams, servers and torrents are remembered like files. The URL or magnet you opened lands in Continue watching with the position you stopped at, and a frame grabbed while it played becomes its thumbnail. Leave in the middle of episode four of a season pack and it comes back to episode four.

Where downloads go is a setting, not a hidden cache path: the folder, its current size, and buttons to change it or open it. Forgetting all of it is one button on the start screen — not something buried in a settings page.

● Firelet
Firelet
Drop a video here, or open one from anywhere it lives.
Open file… Open URL… Network sources… TV portals… Cameras…
HISTORY
Arrival.2016.2160p.mkv
41 min in · yesterday
Blue Planet II — S01E04
12 min in · today
Eurosport 1 HD
live · 2 days ago
holiday-2025.mp4
finished · last week

the rest of it

The bits you'd otherwise go looking for

Subtitles that match your release

Three keyless providers, ranked by how many release tokens they share with your file — an exact S01E02.1080p.WEB-DL match beats a popular mismatch. Off until you accept it once, and the dialog says exactly what is sent.

Ctrl+F

Seek thumbnails

The frame you are about to land on, rendered while you drag.

hover the bar

Mini player

A small always-on-top window for the second monitor you do not have.

Ctrl+M

Screenshots, with or without subtitles

Two keys, because which one you want depends entirely on why you are taking it.

S · Ctrl+S

A–B loop

Mark A, mark B, clear. The three presses are the same key.

L

Audio that comes back

If sound stops while video keeps playing — a device change, a driver hiccup — Firelet says so and offers to reconnect instead of leaving you to guess.

audio menu

Light and dark

Follows the Windows app theme by default, and switches on one click when it should not.

title bar

Hardware decode

d3d11va, verified on H.264. The 4K HEVC target is still being measured on an iGPU laptop — when it is, the number goes here.

automatic

every key

It's all on the keyboard

Media keys work too — play/pause, next, previous, and Stop, which stops everything and goes back to the start screen.

  • Space / K Play or pause
  • F / double-click Fullscreen
  • ← / → Seek 5 seconds
  • Shift + ← / → Seek 60 seconds
  • ↑ / ↓ / wheel Volume
  • M Mute
  • , / . Frame step
  • [ / ] Speed down or up
  • N / P Next or previous
  • T Playlist panel
  • Ctrl + . Stop everything, back to the start
  • Home Restart this one
  • Z / X Subtitle delay
  • Ctrl + O Open a file
  • Ctrl + U Open a URL or network source
  • Ctrl + Shift + U Saved sources
  • Ctrl + Shift + C Cameras
  • Ctrl + F Search subtitles online
  • Ctrl + M Mini player
  • Ctrl + , Settings
  • S / Ctrl + S Screenshot with or without subtitles
  • L A–B loop
  • PgUp / PgDn Previous or next chapter
  • D Cycle deinterlace
  • V Picture size: fit, fill, stretch, original
  • I Playback info
  • Ctrl + 1 / 2 / 3 Default window, cinema, fullscreen
  • Esc Back to the default window

coming soon

Not quite yet

The Windows build is in test. When it is ready this page gets a real download link, the Store listing goes live, and the two Android apps follow. Nothing here is a waitlist — there is nothing to sign up to.

Windows installer

Per-user install, no admin prompt, and it leaves your settings alone when it uninstalls. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.

Download Soon

Microsoft Store

The same build, updated by the Store, for people who would rather not download an installer from a website.

Get from Store Soon

Android — video and audio

Two apps on Google Play: a video player that speaks the same sources as the desktop one, and an audio player for the same library.

Google Play Soon

Firelet is free software, funded the way VLC is: donations and consulting. No ads, no telemetry, no account, no paid tier, nothing held back for a pro version. If it ever plays something it should not, the source is there to check. The app is GPL-2.0-or-later and the embeddable layer LGPL-2.1-or-later; the binary we ship combines Qt and Apache-2.0 components, which makes it GPLv3-effective — the exact split is on the overview.