Movie Monad is a simple GTK video player for Linux.
Admittedly you probably aren’t on the hunt for a new video player (what with there being plenty of players already available) but it never hurts to be aware of options.
And Movie Monad, which is written in Haskell and uses GTK and Gstreamer, ticks the deliciously simple box that I, if no-one else, look for. The app can play local video files and remote video files with ease.
Now, I should make clear that the app was created as part of a blog post on developing with Haskell. It is not trying to rival Totem, VLC or MPV and does not cater to advanced video playback needs.
The player can go full-screen for immersive movie viewing. It has a toolbar, seek bar, app-specific volume, support for opening videos from the command-line.
One particularly neat feature is the video size selector which lets you resize the player to fit a variety of common video sizes. Admittedly most other video players can resize to the width of a video automatically (and let you freely resize too) but I like being able to force a width/height.
Finally, Movie Monad has a raft of easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts. These make it easy to use the player without needing to jiggle your mouse:
- Mute/unmute –
m - Fullscreen/Windowed –
f - Show Controls –
c - Volume Up/Down
arrowkeys - Play/Pause –
space
Download Movie Monad for Linux
Although not particularly original (other than being built with Haskell) Movie Monad is a perfectly capable video player for basic use.
If you like the sound of the app you can download the latest release from Github as an AppImage, which should run on any modern Linux distribution.
Remember that to run an AppImage you first need to right-click on it, head to properties > permissions, and allow it to run as a program.
