Are you a KDE Plasma user looking for a flashy yet featured video player? If so, check out Haruna.
I tried it this week and came away impressed by its design, its feature-set, and its ease of use.
I’ve written about fancy GTK media players like Clapper and Celluloid a few times the past, but Qt apps? Those, not so much. And yet Haruna, an open source video player built using Qt/QML and libmpv, is every inch a match for those (and other) players.
And naturally it looks frickin’ great on the KDE Plasma desktop:
Obviously I’m aware that caring what a video player looks like is a bit strange. Most of the time a video player is being used the actual UI is hidden and content full-screen. However, when you’re watching clips windowed it’s perfectly normal to want all open apps to look like they belong to the same desktop environment, and this does.
Haruna features include an automatic playlist that gets populated with other video files located in the same folder as the one that’s playing. The auto playlist can appear beside a playing video, or overlaid on top. It can be revealed with a mouse, or by pressing the p key with Haruna in focus, with 3 display styles: normal, thumbnail, or compact.
Most actions in Haruna can be triggered with keyboard shortcuts (fully assignable), and some using mouse buttons. A middle click on the progress bar jumps to the next chapter of a video, and you can tell the app to skip chapters containing specific keywords which …Er, I guess is handy?
Subtitle support is fleshed out in Haruna. You can load external subtitle files or display built-in ones; you can adjust the size of subtitle font; and fine-tune subtitle placement. A toolbar menu makes it easy to switch audio track, and there are ample settings to control video zoom, placement, brightness, and playback speed.
Another part of this particular player’s appeal is that it can play YouTube videos, either from a specific link or from a YouTube playlist. If a YouTube video has chapters they are displayed in Haruna’s progress bar, which is neat.
In summary, Haruna is an absolute essential for those in need of a fully-featured, stable, and well-integrated on any Linux desktop, but especially those on KDE Plasma.
You can learn more about it on the Haruna website, find source code on the KDE Git, or install latest release of Haruna from Flathub, which should work on a wide range of Linux distributions.
An older version of the app is available to install from the Ubuntu repos in 22.04 LTS and above. Search it out in the Software app by name or run sudo apt install haruna from the command line.