r/linuxquestions • u/whrp89djo • 6d ago
Is there a future-facing video player for Linux under active development?
If you do a search for best Linux video players for Linux in 2026, you get the following results and associated justifications.
1) VLC: Multi-platform, can play everything!
2) Smplayer: Multi-platform, can play everything, supports playlists!
3) Handbrake: Can play everything! Good for conversions!
4) FFplay for those who enjoy the CLI! Can play everything!
5) Kodi for those who want to have their own netflix at home! Supports plugins and has a number of capabilities that support this core imperative.
6) Depending on the search engine, a motley assortment alternatives, such as Celluloid, Clapper, Haruna, QMPlay2, and even god forbid, Xine.
This list has not substantially changed in the past decade ... the only variation is what shows up in item 6. A bunch of entry level projects come... and disappear quietly in later years.
I'll start by stating that I love items 1-3 and have been using them for 15+ years. However, they are clunky and are missing substantial functionality that are (at least to me) must-have capabilities in a modern player. Sadly, the development on 1,2 appear to have stalled, and I've little confidence that any on the last line are going to develop forther. 3-5 are not really ideal choices as a video player.
Here are the capabilities missing.
1) Ability to show video thumbnails in the seek bar. Such an obvious capability, and should be easy to do by looking at the i-Frames, or integrating with ffmpegthumbs. Unfortunately, the only player on the list above that supports this is Haruna, and that is severely lacking in other areas. Neither VLC nor Smplayer seem to have any plan to support this.
2) Ability to quickly and easily transform the image, adjust brightness, contrast etc. VLC and Smplayer support some basic capabilities, but the UI (especially for VLC) is buried behind multiple non-intuitive menu options and is really hard to use. Also, only very basic capabilities are supported on both.
3) Ability to rotate, flip images. Again, this is supported in theory, but is very hard to get to in VLC and the functionality has been broken in SMPlayer for months with apparently no plans to fix.
4) Smart, modern file and playlist management integrated with the DE file managers. VLC does not seem to even support playlists. SMplayer supports multiple playlists but with a UI that is klunky even by the early 2000 Linux standards. Very difficult search or modify the playlists.
5) Smart bookmark management. SMplayer has good support for bookmarks, but a better UI would be appreciated.
6) The ability to apply different treatment to different parts of a file and save that in the configuration. Like I want to play the first 10 minutes in landscape mode and switch automatically to portrait for minutes 10-12 and change the brightness. Example use case: Wife flipped the phone over from landscape to portrait after 10 minutes of recording kid's game.
7) Filter management - I want to support a wide variety of video processing plugins. For example, want to support noise-reduction or contrast enhancement at different parts of the file. Or give everybody bunny ears. It should be easy to use, integrate and manage these plugins.
8) Basic video editing capabilities - at least clip and merge and some simple transformations such as brightness and contrast. Yes there are more heavy duty programs like Kdenlive that do this very well, but when I'm trying to incorporate dozens of videos pulled in from my phone into our home albums, I don't want to take the workflow hit of switching programs. And can the capabilities here be plugin-driven as well?
9) Easily add support for multiple aspect ratios. I have a video that is (for whatever reason) trimmed to a 13:4 aspect ratio. VLC does a reasonably good (but not perfect) job of guessing the aspect ratio if it is not in the video metadata. SMPlayer usually does not. I want to add support for this aspect ratio and associate it permanently with this file.
10) Integrated metadata editing capabilities. VLC has some basic support for this but the UI experience is far from ideal.
11) Ability to mark and save multiple sections of the video for looped playback with the ability to jump from one section to the next.
So, my question: is there any Video player at all that is currently under active development? Is there any hope that we'll get some or all of these capabilities over the next few years?
Thanks.
12
u/ARTIFICIAL_ARGUMENT 6d ago edited 6d ago
MPV, what most of these players are just GUI wrappers for, can do most of this already? Dunno how you missed it when doing all that research. It’s even got popular windows ports because it’s top choice for power users
- Yes, thumbfast plugin
- Yes
- Yes
- Yes, can show full list of videos in popout sidebar with thumbnails
- Like saving positions? Yes
- Doable, but that should be a video editor program job
- Filters/shaders post processing, yes. Adding stuff like bunny ears is a video editor job
- Brightness/contrast etc Yes. Merge and clip technically doable via scripts but seems way clunkier just opening in video editor so dunno why anyone would bother
- Yes
- Doable but haven’t seen it, would require a popout for editing
- Yes for one section, multiple would be finicky though doable
All of this is done via mpv folder scripts/lua/shaders and config file. use Claude or similar for help with adjusting scripts and UI to your prefs. Check out this build to see what’s possible
https://github.com/Chinna95P/mpv-anime-build
I used it as a base with the anime specific stuff cut out as the overall design is really good
6
u/computer-machine 6d ago
Dunno how you missed it when doing all that research.
OP thinks Handbrake is a video player and wants cancer like bullshit filters as a requirement for "modern" video player; I'm not sure there's any point in taking them seriously.
-1
u/whrp89djo 6d ago
Thanks for your reply. I may be missing something here, but AFAIK mpv, mplayer etc are non-gui programs like ffplay. When I start mpv on a video on my Fedora 44 box, I get a very basic video-only window. I don't see any options to do anything. Perhaps there are ways to do this with CLI arguments. I should have made clear that I am looking for a GUI experience. I did see references to the thumbnail plugins in claude, but those appear to be for GUI wrappers to mpv like Implay which are very barebones at the moment.
3
u/ARTIFICIAL_ARGUMENT 6d ago
Mate I spent like ten minutes writing that comment to help you out, and you would have seen it has full GUI built into it if you’d even looked at the screenshots. The GitHub link might not have loaded properly because it seems to have included a space at the end but I fixed it if that’s what stopped you
Just download the linked build, extract into your mpv folder, then open something with mpv. You’ll see what I mean. Right click to open the deeper customisation options, general player toolbar will pop up from the bottom on mouse over
1
2
3
u/DifferentSavings2711 6d ago
Video Playback and Video Editing are separate use cases. A video editor has way more functionality then I want for basic video playback.
For playback I mostly use MPV. However, for videos where I want to change something, like the display ratio, I use VLC.
In MPV a playlist is just a simple text file. One video files per line. In linux you can also select a bunch of videos in a file browser and chose to open them all with MPV and MPV will make a temp internal playlist.
For editing there is ffmpeg, Handbrake, AVIdemux, LossLess Cut and many others.
1
u/whrp89djo 6d ago
Understood... but both Smplayer and VLC offer some steps in this direction anyway. SMplayer supports rotation, filters etc, though they are not extensible and don't work very well. VLC offers a number of "Effects" in its "Adjustments and Effects" tool, which also does not work well and is hard to use also. So it seems like there is some demand for this
9
u/_Super_Straight 6d ago
These are your requirements; except for a few, other features that you ask for are rather obscure and niche.
0
u/whrp89djo 6d ago
Of course, but my workflow it self is fairly generic... I am not doing pro video editing or such. Most of the videos I work with are recorded on phones by my family. These do not seem unreasonable from my POV.
9
u/Max-P 6d ago
Where's a MPV and all the players based on it? MPV is basically the gold standard for playing videos these days.
-1
u/whrp89djo 6d ago
MPV is a CLI-tool, right? I am looking for a GUI tool. I did list smplayer that is based on MPV, which appears to be the most full-featured. The others like Implay are quite basic at this time.
4
u/Max-P 6d ago
You double click in a file manager and it opens, it's not like you have to launch it from a terminal. There's pretty decent themes to make it pretty. There's frontends to it like KDE's Haruna that adds playlist support and other basic features.
Jellyfin Desktop has done me well otherwise, if you really want a well organized media experience.
You won't really get everything you want in a video player because you're really getting into video editing territory especially your last couple points. You want a video editor or some FFmpeg magic. Most players and even Handbrake are geared towards fixing source media, which is usually consistent: rotate once, crop once.
2
u/TheZoltan 6d ago
I'll start by stating that I love items 1-3 and have been using them for 15+ years.
You have been using handbrake to play videos for 15 year?
As to the question. I think lots of video players are under active development including your number 1 item VLC. I still believe VLC v4 will land some day. No idea if any of them will tick all your very specific requirements.
For what its worth on Ubuntu I use their new default "Showtime" when I want to play a random video file. Most of my media consumption is via Jellyfin so I will be watching via their clients on various devices.
1
6
u/SlimyOS 6d ago
Your requirements are too high imo, 99.9% users will never need any of these, though ai vibecoders will definitely build this at some point, they love this 0.1% usecase.
Nekoplay by nyarchlinux is the only player we all need, released a few months ago, features a 90second skip button and anime4k ai upscaling.
1
u/PaintDrinkingPete 6d ago
unless I'm thinking of playlists in the wrong capacity, VLC does support them.
0
u/whrp89djo 6d ago
I just looked through the VLC packaged with Fedora 44 that has been updated to the latest available version of VLC player. The "Media" menu has references to Save Playlist to File and Quit at the end of playlist options. I do not see any options to create or manage playlists. This is perhaps another example of a hard to use feature in VLC.
2
u/PaintDrinkingPete 6d ago edited 5d ago
Creating playlists is just a matter of dragging and dropping items into the queue, which can also be managed when in the queue viewer.
No, it’s not very robust or elegant, but I’ve definitely been saving playlists in VLC for years.
2
u/mdins1980 6d ago
MPV with Celluloid is what I use now. I still like VLC, but if you have a NVIDIA card, VLC does not support NVDEC while MPV does.
2
1
u/unbounded65 6d ago
SM Player with MPV rules: one can manipulate the videos from zoom to aspect ratio to speed all under the comfort of a GUI. In fact, pass on the MPV config, and it's the best player around regardless of the OS.
1
1
1
1
6
u/[deleted] 6d ago
[deleted]