anirpc

Discord Rich Presence for ani-cli
_{Live anime title, episode, sub/dub, a real playback countdown, and cover art —
with no wrapper command and ani-cli left unpatched.}

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Quick start

1. Download the latest anirpc-windows-x64.zip from Releases and extract it anywhere without spaces in the path.

2. Double-click anirpc.exe. It sets one environment variable and exits.

3. Open a new terminal and run ani-cli as usual.

That's it. Nothing to launch, no wrapper command, no Discord account setup, no token. Presence appears the moment playback starts.

Note

Windows will likely warn you on first run — "Windows protected your PC". The exe is unsigned (code-signing certificates cost money), so SmartScreen flags it until it earns download reputation. Click More info → Run anyway. If you'd rather not, use the script install instead — it does exactly the same thing and is three lines of readable PowerShell.

To undo everything: anirpc.exe --uninstall

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Requirements

The exe bundles Python, but it cannot bundle the rest — ani-cli is itself a bash script, so a Unix shell is a hard requirement either way:

Need	Why
ani-cli 5.x	The thing this attaches to
mpv	The player ani-cli drives
Git for Windows (git-bash / MSYS2)	ani-cli already needs it; anirpc's shim runs under it
Discord desktop app	Rich Presence does not exist in the browser
Python 3.8+	Only for source installs — the exe needs none

Windows only. The daemon talks to mpv and Discord over Windows named pipes. A Linux port is in progress on the linux-port branch and is not released yet — see Linux.

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What it shows

Field	Where it comes from
Anime title, episode	--force-media-title, which ani-cli passes to mpv
Sub / Dub	mpv's audio track language, falling back to --dub in ani-cli's argv
Countdown	mpv's live time-pos + duration
Resolution	mpv's video-params/h
Cover art, episode total, AniList link	AniList GraphQL, cached locally

Sub/dub is deduced because ani-cli keeps $mode to itself and never tells the player. The audio track's language tag is the ground truth for what is actually playing; reading --dub out of ani-cli's command line is the fallback.

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How it works

ani-cli picks its player from ANI_CLI_PLAYER (ani-cli:405). The installer points that at bin/anirpc-mpv, a shim that starts the daemon and then hands off to the real mpv. ani-cli itself is never modified — which matters, because ani-cli -U self-updates with patch and would conflict with a patched script.

ani-cli ──ANI_CLI_PLAYER──> bin/anirpc-mpv ──exec──> mpv.exe
                                  │                    │
                          run/session.json      private IPC pipe
                                  └──────> anirpc.exe <┘
                                               │
                                               └──> Discord IPC pipe

The shim's name must keep mpv in it: ani-cli branches on case "$player_function" in *mpv*) (ani-cli:316), and only that branch passes --force-media-title — which is where the title and episode come from.

Cover art is the AniList image URL, not an uploaded Discord asset, so there is nothing to configure on the Discord application itself.

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Configuration

Everything lives in config.json, next to the exe. It ships working, so this is all optional.

Key	Default	Meaning
client_id	(shipped)	Discord Application ID — also sets the header text
activity_type	3	3 = Watching, 2 = Listening, 0 = Playing
timestamp_mode	"remaining"	remaining = "18:22 left"; elapsed counts up
show_cover_art	true	AniList cover as the large image
show_anilist_button	true	"View on AniList" button
detect_dub_from_audio_track	true	Trust the audio language tag over argv
idle_exit_seconds	300	Daemon self-exits after this long idle
debug	false	Also log to stderr

activity_type must stay 2 or 3 for timestamp_mode: "remaining" — Discord rejects an end timestamp on other types. With 0 (Playing), use "elapsed".

Changing the header

The bold line above the title is the Discord application's name, not something this tool sets. The shipped ID belongs to an app named Anime, so profiles read "Watching Anime". To change it, make your own app — Developer Portal → New Application, name it whatever you want the header to say, copy the Application ID from General Information, and put it in config.json:

{ "client_id": "1234567890123456789" }

No bot, no OAuth, no token. An Application ID is a public identifier, not a secret — which is exactly why one can ship in this repo — and anirpc never asks for your Discord credentials.

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Install from source

If the exe is quarantined, or you'd rather read what you run:

git clone https://github.com/KernelSpecter/anicli-rpc
cd anicli-rpc
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install.ps1

Uninstall with -Uninstall. This path needs Python 3.8+ on PATH — standard library only, nothing to pip install. The shim prefers anirpc.exe when it's present and falls back to the interpreter, so both installs work side by side.

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Troubleshooting

Check run/anirpc.log first. A healthy session shows one presence: line per actual change, not a steady stream:

11:06:30 daemon: start
11:06:30 mpv: connected \\.\pipe\anirpc-mpv-1868-1786599389
11:06:31 discord: connected via \\.\pipe\discord-ipc-0
11:06:31 presence: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End | Episode 4 of 28 · Sub

Nothing shows up at all

Discord must be the desktop app (not a browser tab) and already running before playback starts. Then check Settings → Activity Privacy → Share your detected activities is on.

discord: pipe closed during handshake in the log

Discord wasn't running, or was mid-restart, when the daemon tried to connect. Start Discord, then start the next episode.

"Program ... not found" when starting ani-cli

The shim lost its exec bit — zip extraction drops it. Re-run anirpc.exe, which chmods and verifies it. Or do it by hand in git-bash:

chmod +x ./bin/anirpc-mpv

Buttons don't appear

Discord does not render activity buttons on your own profile. Other people see them.

Wrong sub/dub

Some streams carry no audio language tag. Set "detect_dub_from_audio_track": false to trust ani-cli's --dub flag instead.

See what would be published, without Discord

anirpc.exe --dry-run

Prints each activity payload as it changes, and runs alongside the real daemon. Note it never contacts Discord, so it cannot confirm your client_id or the connection — only what the payload would be.

Moving the folder

Re-run anirpc.exe to repoint ANI_CLI_PLAYER. The new path must still contain no spaces: ani-cli launches the player unquoted (ani-cli:318), so a space breaks it.

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Linux

Not released yet, and deliberately so. The daemon's transport is Windows named pipes; on Linux both the mpv and Discord IPC endpoints are Unix domain sockets, which need a genuinely different implementation (open() on a socket fails with ENXIO). The port lives on linux-port.

It is written but unverified — it has never run against a real Linux Discord client. If you're on Linux and want to help, testing that branch is the single most useful contribution right now. Please report back in an issue.

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Acknowledgements

ani-cli by pystardust, which this hooks into without touching. Metadata from AniList.

MIT licensed — see LICENSE.