Open it
Open the disk image, drag Sialk Player to Applications, double-click. It is signed and notarised by Apple, so macOS asks nothing. Apple silicon for now; an Intel build comes with 1.0.
Beta · macOS · free
Get Sialk Player.
You have a room, a projector, and a film or a folder of stills to put on the wall. Sialk Player is the laptop end of that: add the files, put them in order, press Play. Nothing but the picture reaches the wall, no desktop, no cursor, no window. It keeps opening hours, so the room starts itself in the morning and goes dark at night, and a phone on the same wifi can change what is showing without anyone walking to the laptop.
For galleries, artist-run spaces, installations, degree shows, the back room of a venue. One machine, one wall, one thing to press.
Your first wall
Plug the projector in and the wall goes black on it. Add files, click a row to cue it in Preview, press Take to put it on the wall. Space plays and pauses. Settings holds the opening hours, the slate the wall shows when nothing is playing, and the phone remote.
If something breaks
Write to hello@sialk.net with what you saw and what was on the wall. You are one of the first rooms, and what breaks in yours is what the next build fixes.
What it plays
H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9 and AV1, up to 4K, in MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV; JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF stills; subtitles from a file beside the video. ProRes and DNxHD do not play, and the card says so before the file reaches the wall. What plays, and what to do with a file that does not.
Free
Free, in beta: three playlists of three files each, no watermark, no time limit, no account. Bought once, when 1.0 lands, Sialk Player has no limit; the price is not set yet.