Something that felt as easy to use as YouTube, while keeping the flexibility of a desktop media player.
Meet Simple YT Style Player — a lightweight media player inspired by YouTube's simplicity and VLC's versatility, now running on both Windows and Android.
The functionality is there, but the experience can feel unnecessarily complicated.
The idea was not to remove functionality — it was to make the functionality easier to reach.
MKV, MP4, WebM, AVI, MOV and other formats supported through FFmpeg Multiple audio-track selection Embedded subtitle support Playback speed from 0.25× to 2× Configurable skip interval Looping Resume playback Touch scrubbing Long-file hour-aware timestamps
16:9, 4:3 and source aspect ratio Video rotation Brightness adjustment Volume up to 200% Reactive audio visualiser with multiple themes Picture-in-picture mode
File associations Auto-hiding playback controls High-DPI support Keyboard shortcuts
One of the interesting parts of the project was making the same player work across Windows and Android.
The project uses Tauri 2 as the native shell and Rust for the core media operations.
It worked, but I wanted the next version to feel more like a real native application.
This gave me a shared application architecture that could target both desktop and mobile while keeping the core media logic in Rust.
But the WebView-based interface cannot simply treat that URI like a normal local file.
So the application resolves the selected file and serves it through a local HTTP connection.
Instead of trying to force the player to consume an Android content:// URI directly, the application exposes the local file through a loopback connection and lets the video engine request the parts of the file it needs.
Another feature I wanted was support for subtitles embedded directly inside media containers.
The player can inspect the container, expose the available subtitle tracks, and allow the user to switch between them without requiring separate .srt files.
During playback, the controls disappear rather than permanently occupying the screen.
Sometimes you don't actually want the video to stop just because you need to use another application.