When we think of video players, chances are most of us instantly think of VLC, the popular and, frankly, awesome video player.

However, what if you want something different? Thankfully, there are tons of good video players for Linux out there, one of which is Haruna Video Player (or simply Haruna).

The question is, why might one pick Haruna over other more popular video player apps?

Haruna Video Player is a free and open-source, Qt-based video player that acts as a frontend to mpv, a very popular and efficient, open-source command-line-based media player. In fact, mpv is so popular that it's the default engine for a wide range of open-source video players (MPV Player is just one other example).

Besides mpv, Haruna also provides you with the ability to watch YouTube videos. This is thanks to youtube-dl, another open-source, command-line program (also included in mpv) that allows you to download videos from YouTube, as well as other sources.

In short, Haruna is one of the few video players out there that allow you to play local videos alongside YouTube content (directly by using the URL).

To be honest, there are very few chances that Haruna will impress you in terms of looks. Still, its feature set is quite extensive. Haruna provides you with various UI tweaks (you can increase the subtitle font size, themes, and many others), the ability to control the playback speed, the ability to auto skip chapters based on the chapter title, as well as the ability to add primary and secondary subtitles.

The feature set is complete by a hefty list of both mouse and keyboard shortcuts (macros), lots of color adjustment options, support for hardware decoding, support for taking screenshots from the videos, and support for playlists.

To conclude, Haruna Video Player is not the most advanced, nor the most stunning to look at video player out there. Nevertheless, it does offer pretty much everything the average user needs, plus the ability to watch YouTube videos alongside local files and formats.