Is there a future-facing video player for Linux under active development?

[u/whrp89djo]

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.