Supported Formats & Codecs

Zuno includes its own built-in playback engine, so it plays a very wide range of containers and codecs directly, exactly as they are, without relying on your server to convert them first. Where your device has hardware decoding for a format, Zuno uses it; where it doesn’t, it falls back to software decoding automatically, so unusual files still play.

Because the engine is built in, format support is broadly the same across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac. What differs between devices is mostly hardware acceleration and the display and audio hardware attached.

Containers

Zuno plays the common containers you’ll find in a media library, including:

MKV (Matroska)
MP4 / M4V
MOV
AVI
TS and M2TS
WebM

The container is just the wrapper. What matters for playback is the video and audio codecs inside it.

Video codecs

Common video codecs play directly, including:

H.264 / AVC
HEVC / H.265, including 10-bit
AV1
VP9
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and other older codecs via software decoding

Modern codecs like HEVC and AV1 are hardware-accelerated on devices that support them, for smooth playback and lower power use. Older or unusual codecs fall back to software decoding.

Audio codecs

Zuno handles standard and high-end audio, including:

AAC, MP3, AC-3 (Dolby Digital), and E-AC-3 (Dolby Digital Plus)
Dolby Atmos (object-based, requires Zuno Pro and compatible hardware)
Lossless and premium surround (requires Zuno Pro and compatible hardware)
FLAC, PCM, Opus, and Vorbis

Immersive and lossless formats are delivered to your TV or receiver when the whole chain supports them. Otherwise Zuno plays a standard surround or stereo track. See Advanced Formats.

HDR and Dolby Vision

On a compatible display, Zuno supports:

SDR (standard dynamic range) for everything else
HDR10
HDR10+ (dynamic metadata)
Dolby Vision (advanced, scene-by-scene HDR, requires Zuno Pro)

On the free tier, advanced-HDR titles fall back to their standard-HDR base layer. A small number of files have no base layer and need Zuno Pro to play in colour. See Advanced Formats.

When a file can’t play directly

If a device genuinely can’t decode something, or your connection can’t carry the original, your server can transcode it to a compatible format instead. This keeps playback working, but reduces quality and drops Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos on that stream. You control this behaviour in Streaming & Quality.

To see exactly what’s playing at any moment, including the container, codecs, dynamic range, and channel layout, open Stats for Nerds from the player.