Kino - GTK2 Media Player
This page was created 23/03/26
This page was last modified 23/03/26
There are no good GTK2 media players around for Linux. Up until now!
On my quest for a good GUI-based Linux video player, I found not a single one that fit the bill. There is MPlayer, which is supposedly GTK2, but has a very clunky and non customisable interface which does not match with the GTK theme. Then there is VLC, which is very feature rich but unfortunately relies on Qt, and is pretty bloated. The GNOME developers created the Celluloid player, however this is GTK4 only, is extremely bloated, looks terrible, and lacks important features. Other players like Haruna media player also did not fit my requirement because they are all Qt based, which is a bit of a shame (In case you are wondering, Qt trades blows with legacy GTK, but unfortunately has little customisation and theming capability).
So which media player could I use? All of them have their flaws for my use case, and I did not want to use any terminal based ones or something like barebones MPV.
In some cases there is just no reasonable choice when it comes to software, so you just have to make your own. And so, Kino was born. I am still deciding on the name, as an abandoned video editor named Kino also exists, however I will stick with it for now.
Kino supports everything that other media players do, and more. I have created a plugin system which means that you can write your own plugins to extend its support further!
Feel free to share ideas by contacting me.
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