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 no lie: I came away incredibly impressed by its design, its feature-set, and its user-friendliness.
Fancy GTK media players like Clapper and Celluloid are no stranger to this site. But Qt apps? Well, those I cover less often. And yet Haruna, an open source video player built using Qt/QML and libmpv, is every bit a match for those (and many others).
Haruna looks frickin’ great on the modern KDE Plasma desktop:
Caring about the look of a video player is a bit strange, granted.
After all, most of the time a video player is in use the UI is hidden so that the content is full-screen.
However, if you’re prone to watching clips in a floating window — I do — it’s perfectly normal to want all of your open apps to look a) nice, and b) like they belong to the same desktop environment.
And Haruna 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 be displayed beside the playing video, or overlaid on top (see below). The playlist, which can be revealed using your mouse, or by hitting the p key when Haruna in focus, has 3 display styles: normal, thumbnail, and compact.
Keyboard shortcuts can be used to trigger most actions in Haruna (and these are fully assignable), and a few 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 keywords which …I guess is handy?
Subtitle support is fleshed out in Haruna.
External subtitle files can be loaded, and the app can display embedded subtitles. Subtitle font size can be increased/decreased, and placement on screen adjusted.
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, be from a specific link or by passing it a YouTube playlist. If a YouTube video has chapters these are also displayed in Haruna’s progress bar, which is great.
In summary, Haruna is an essential app for anyone 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.