Support
Questions, answered.
The short answers. For a walk through a part of the app — connecting a server, what every setting changes, why a title will not play — the guides go into it properly.
Photon is free with your own media servers — as many as you run, all merged into one library — and it stays free. It is not a trial that runs out. That gets you the whole app: Home, Search, downloads, offline, Siri, Spotlight and Handoff, for anything below 4K that is not an MKV and whose soundtrack is AAC or Dolby Digital. Photon Pro adds 4K and MKV playback, Dolby TrueHD and DTS soundtracks, cloud drives, Live TV and syncing between your devices. It is £1.99 a month, £14.99 a year or £49.99 once, and the first one week is free. Before you decide anything, you get five free plays of the Pro formats.
A way to find out whether you need Pro at all on your own library. The first five times you play something that needs Pro — a 4K file, an MKV, a Dolby TrueHD or DTS soundtrack — it just plays, in full, with nothing held back. They are five plays in total.
Your servers and your drives stay exactly where they are, and everything the free app covers keeps working — we do not reach into your own library and remove things because a card expired. Live TV is the exception: it is a paid feature in whole, so the guide and the channels stop until you start again. Your subscription is not deleted, and it is still there in Settings.
Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and Silo — as many of each as you like, all connected at the same time, and that costs nothing. None of them is treated as the main one.
Yes. On the Mac, open a video from Finder or press ⌘O and it plays. Set Photon as your default video player and it will handle everything, including the files QuickTime refuses. On iPhone and iPad you can open videos from the Files app the same way. Everything you have opened is listed under Open Recent and remembers where you got to.
No. There is no sign-up and nothing of ours between you and your films. You sign in to your own servers, and that is it.
No, wherever it can be avoided. Photon asks for the file as it is and plays it as it is, including formats Apple’s own player will not open on its own. Nothing gets re-encoded, so nothing is lost — and your server is not left grinding through a transcode.
Because it only appears when you are genuinely playing that format.
Yes. Download a title on your iPhone, iPad or Mac and it keeps its audio tracks and subtitles, and looks and sounds the same offline as it does at home. Your Lock Screen shows how the download is getting on, and you can keep downloads to Wi-Fi.
It works with Xtream Codes subscriptions, and needs Pro. They get a proper TV guide: the schedule beside its categories on Apple TV and the Mac, and favourites and channel groups on iPhone. A subscription’s films and shows can join the rest of your library or be kept out of it.
With Pro, yes. Your list of servers goes through your own iCloud, with the addresses encrypted, and so do the settings that describe you - your languages, how you have arranged Home. Settings about a particular device, like whether it downloads over mobile data, stay on that device whatever you are on.
In your keychain. They are never written anywhere else and never sent anywhere except to the server they belong to.
Yes, including for files that photon has to do some work to play. If your device cannot hand a particular title to a receiver properly, it stays on screen rather than being sent over in a worse state than it started.
iOS, iPadOS, tvOS or macOS on version 26 or newer. It is one app across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac, and Pro is bought once for all four rather than once per device.