haruna

What Haruna is

Haruna is an open source media player built with the Qt/QML interface toolkit and the libmpv playback backend. The project positions itself as a lean alternative to heavier desktop players, and it is developed under the KDE umbrella. The README describes it plainly as a media player that relies on libmpv for decoding and rendering while using QML for the user interface. Because it sits on top of mpv, it inherits that project's broad format support and hardware acceleration paths without reimplementing a decoder stack of its own. The interface is declarative QML, which keeps the UI layer separate from the playback engine and makes the layout easy to theme. Users who already know mpv will recognise the behaviour, since Haruna exposes a great deal of mpv's surface area through its settings. The application is distributed as a Flatpak, which is the install path the README foregrounds, and it targets Linux desktops. The screenshots referenced in the documentation show a conventional player window with a playlist panel and a seek bar. Haruna is not a streaming service and not a media library manager in the sense of a full music organiser. It is a player first, with conveniences layered on top of the core mpv engine. The project encourages users to read its bug and feature request guidance before filing issues, which signals a small maintainer team that prefers triage discipline. Taken together, the tool is best understood as a focused, configurable frontend for mpv rather than a general purpose media hub.

Features that set it apart

The README lists a set of features that distinguish Haruna from other players. One is a video preview on the seek bar, so moving the mouse along the progress bar shows a thumbnail of the frame at that position rather than just a time label. Another is the ability to play online videos through youtube-dl, which means a URL can be opened directly without first downloading the file. The playlist can be toggled with a mouse-over and it overlays the video instead of taking a separate pane, keeping the window uncluttered when the list is hidden. There is an auto skip option for chapters whose titles contain certain words, which is handy for recaps or filler segments. Shortcuts and mouse buttons are configurable, so common actions can be mapped to whatever input the user prefers. A middle click on the progress bar jumps quickly to the next chapter, and custom mpv commands can be registered to run at startup or on a keyboard shortcut. These are mostly thin wrappers over mpv capabilities, but Haruna makes them discoverable through the GUI rather than requiring hand edited configuration files. The documentation is careful to call this list partial, so the shipped feature set may be broader than what is written down. For someone who wants mpv power without editing text configs, these options are the main reason to choose Haruna over running mpv directly.

Building from source

The README documents a CMake based build for developers who want to compile Haruna themselves. The first step is to clone the repository from the KDE source host rather than the GitHub mirror, since the canonical tree lives at invent.kde.org. After cloning, the build uses CMake with the Ninja generator, following the familiar configure, build, install sequence: create a build directory, run cmake to configure, run cmake to build, then install. The README notes that dependencies are printed by CMake when building, so the exact package list is resolved at configure time rather than pinned in the document. This is typical for KDE projects, where the concrete dependency names vary by distribution. Flatpak is the recommended install route for end users, and the README links both a Flathub badge and the Flatpak setup guide for people who have not enabled Flatpak on their system. The GitHub repository mirrors the KDE tree, and the homepage points back to the KDE instance as the source of truth. There is no separate contribution section in the excerpt, but the presence of a donate line for the maintainer suggests the project is sustained by a single primary author with community bug reports. Anyone packaging Haruna for a distribution should follow the KDE build conventions and expect the usual Qt and KF framework dependencies to be pulled in by CMake during configuration.

Editorial conclusion

Haruna is written in C++ and built on Qt/QML with libmpv, and its source lives at the KDE Haruna repository on GitHub.