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Fastiplayer logo on a dark background

Fastiplayer

A fast, good-looking media player for Linux, written in Rust.
Scrub through video like in an editor. Speed it up without chipmunk voices. Tune the picture while it plays.

▶ Watch the 72-second trailer · Try it · Roadmap · Vision

CI Toolchain policy License: MIT

Watch Fastiplayer: live scrubbing, speed and real-time color — 72-second trailer

Real application footage, 1080p60 with the player's own sound. Film: Sintel © copyright Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0 · timecodes and screenshots · capture details

Early alpha. Fastiplayer already plays local files and network streams every day, but it is young: Linux only, built from source, and parts of the interface are still in Russian. If you like trying things early and telling the author what breaks, you are exactly who it is for.

Why Fastiplayer

Fastiplayer playing Sintel in a maximized window: a hand reaching for a young dragon against a golden sky, with the timeline and playback controls below

Scrubbing that feels like an editor. Grab the timeline and drag in either direction: the main picture follows your hand, not a tiny thumbnail. Let go and playback continues from there.

Speed without chipmunks. Go from 1.0× to 1.5× and back: voices keep their pitch, and the change is instant.

Live picture controls. Brightness, contrast, saturation, and per-channel color change on the running video, with instant preview and one-click reset.

Hardware-accelerated and light on memory. VA-API decoding on supported GPUs, Vulkan rendering through WGPU, and GPU HDR-to-SDR tone mapping. In a recorded test, Fastiplayer held under 90 MiB of RAM on 1080p60 and 4K60, where VLC used 127–300 MiB (details).

Plays what you throw at it. Drop files, folders, playlists, or links into the window. Local media, HTTP(S)/FTP(S), HLS and DASH (VOD, live, and DVR), internet radio, and — with optional yt-dlp — web pages.

Subtitles that just work, and look right. Fastiplayer has its own subtitle engine, written from scratch in Rust and drawn on the GPU.

  • Formats: SRT and WebVTT; styled ASS/SSA rendered to match libass, with karaoke, animations, rotations and fonts packed into the MKV; Blu-ray PGS pictures.
  • YouTube: manual captions, automatic captions and auto-translations, plus dubbed audio languages.
  • Streams: subtitle tracks inside HLS and DASH.
  • Your files: subtitles next to the video are found automatically, and you can drop a file onto the window.
  • Control: press C to toggle them, Z/X to fix the sync, and drag them where you like right on the video.

Fastiplayer remembers your choice for every video.

Fastiplayer in fullscreen playing Sintel: a close-up of Sintel's face with the English subtitle “A dragon.” on a dark box above the playback controls
Film: Sintel © copyright Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0 · subtitle compatibility matrix · subtitle guide

A queue that remembers. M3U/M3U8, XSPF, and CUE playlists, import and export, and playback resumes where you stopped.

What works today

Fastiplayer playing Sintel with the queue panel open beside the video, listing the Sintel Trailer and Big Buck Bunny
Films: Sintel and Big Buck Bunny © copyright Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0 · capture details

  • Playback: local video and audio, seeking, audio/video stream selection, pitch-preserving speed, live scrubbing.
  • Hardware decoding: VA-API where the GPU and driver support it, FFmpeg software decoding otherwise; WGPU/Vulkan rendering; HDR-to-SDR tone mapping, including AV1 10-bit.
  • Network: progressive HTTP(S)/FTP(S), HLS and DASH VOD/live/DVR, audio-only HLS radio, static Smooth Streaming and HDS; web pages through optional system yt-dlp.
  • Subtitles: a native Rust engine with its own GPU pass. It plays SRT, WebVTT, ASS/SSA (libass-parity rendering, fonts attached to MKV), PGS and MP4 mov_text, YouTube manual and automatic captions, and HLS/DASH text tracks. Files next to the video are found automatically, and you can drop a file onto the window. A CC button, hotkeys and on-video appearance editing are included, and track and delay choices are remembered per video. See the subtitle matrix and user guide.
  • Drag-and-drop and "Open with": drop on the panel to append to the queue, drop on the video to start a new queue; opening a file while the player runs hands it to the existing window.
  • Queue: playlist import/export (including legacy Windows-1251 .m3u/.cue), position restore, broken items skipped with a clear reason.
  • Control: mouse-wheel and arrow-key volume, speed hotkeys, Ctrl+O, timeline time hints; volume and mute are remembered.
  • Runtime settings with live preview and Apply/rollback.

Exact supported containers, codecs, and protocols are listed in the compatibility matrix. Subtitle formats and sources have their own subtitle compatibility matrix.

Try it

You need Linux x86_64, a GPU with a working Vulkan driver, and rustup — the repository pins Rust 1.99.0 in rust-toolchain.toml.

Arch Linux / CachyOS / Manjaro

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git clang pkgconf curl meson nasm alsa-lib libdrm mesa libva vulkan-icd-loader rustup

Ubuntu 24.04 / Debian-based

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential git clang libclang-dev pkg-config \
  curl meson nasm ninja-build \
  libasound2-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libva-dev \
  libvulkan1 mesa-vulkan-drivers

Fedora / RHEL-based

sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ make git clang clang-devel pkgconf-pkg-config \
  curl meson nasm ninja-build \
  alsa-lib-devel libdrm-devel mesa-libgbm-devel libva-devel \
  vulkan-loader mesa-vulkan-drivers rustup
rustup-init   # Fedora ships rustup as a package; this installs the toolchain manager

Build and play

git clone https://github.com/Bogdan7c/fastiplayer.git
cd fastiplayer
cargo build -p app-egui --release --locked
./target/release/fastiplayer /path/to/video.mp4

The software decoder does not depend on the FFmpeg installed on your system. The first build downloads FFmpeg 8.1.3 and dav1d 1.5.4, checks them against pinned SHA-256 sums, and builds a minimal LGPL copy in about a minute. It goes to target/release/lib/ next to the player, so if you copy the player somewhere else, copy lib/ along with it. This copy also gives you AV1 software decoding through dav1d.

  • Offline build: download the two archives yourself and set FASTIPLAYER_FFMPEG_ARCHIVE and FASTIPLAYER_DAV1D_ARCHIVE to their absolute paths. The sums are still checked.
  • Distribution packagers: cargo build -p app-egui --release --locked --no-default-features --features system-ffmpeg links the system FFmpeg instead (8.1 or newer).

Add to the app menu (optional)

scripts/install-desktop-entry.sh             # uses ./target/release/fastiplayer
scripts/install-desktop-entry.sh --uninstall

This puts a .desktop file and icons into ~/.local/share. On Wayland the taskbar shows the Fastiplayer logo only when this file is installed.

Also install the Vulkan and VA-API drivers for your GPU (for example vulkan-radeon, vulkan-intel, or the NVIDIA driver on Arch). For web pages, install yt-dlp; the accepted extractor profile uses version 2026.07.04. Direct media links do not need it.

Good to know

  • Linux only for now. Windows is on the roadmap before 1.0; macOS may come later, without a promise.
  • Vulkan is required, even for software decoding. Hardware decoding depends on your GPU, driver, and codec.
  • Subtitles ship since v0.2.0. Some formats are not supported, among them VobSub, DVB and .sup files; the subtitle matrix lists the limits.
  • Native HDR output is not implemented; HDR is tone-mapped to SDR.
  • The interface is unfinished and partly in Russian. A full redesign and translations are planned.
  • Not supported: DRM, RTSP/RTP/MMS, RTMP. Web-page playback depends on yt-dlp and the site.

The compatibility matrix and known limitations have the exact details.

Roadmap to 1.0

The order is fixed in milestone 1.0. These are planned, not shipped:

  1. Native Rust subtitle engine with a published text/styled/bitmap format matrix — done in v0.2.0; see the subtitle matrix.
  2. Browser media handoff bridge and extension — next up.
  3. Cohesive application redesign, including new settings.
  4. Fully configurable colors and appearance.
  5. Localization and first translations.
  6. OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer for older Linux hardware.
  7. Drag-and-drop for local files and URLs — done in v0.2.0.
  8. Native Windows support.

NVDEC, native HDR output, and macOS are possible later directions without dates. See the vision for where the project is heading.

Performance

Fastiplayer aims to be lighter than the established players, and it publishes measurements even where it is not there yet. In the 2026-09-05 ThinkPad T480s comparison with VLC 3.0.23 (hardware decoding, fullscreen, five scored runs):

Workload Memory (RSS): Fastiplayer Memory (RSS): VLC CPU: Fastiplayer CPU: VLC
H.264 1080p60 87 MiB 127 MiB 16.9% 4.8%
HEVC 4K60 88 MiB 300 MiB 30.4% 5.8%

Fastiplayer used up to 3.4× less memory, while VLC still uses less CPU. Closing that gap is tracked in #10. The numbers describe revision 9165200c and synthetic test files; the full report has the methodology, raw data, and limitations, and the benchmark guide covers other experiments.

Media tests check that video actually reaches rendered frames and audio produces real samples. CI runs workspace tests, strict Clippy/rustdoc, formatting, architecture boundaries, locked dependencies, and the toolchain policy — see CI.

Feedback and contributing

The most useful thing you can do right now is build it, play your media, and say what happened.

The project is also open to support with development tools and test hardware — start a thread in Discussions.

Bogdan Korolyov (Bogdan7c) is the sole core maintainer and makes the product and architecture decisions. Development is AI-assisted, with human decisions, review, and hands-on verification — read how development works and the public session plans.

License

First-party code is MIT licensed. The nine patched upstream crates keep their own licenses: BSD-3-Clause for cros-codecs/cros-libva, MPL-2.0 for the four Symphonia patches, MIT for wayland-scanner, Apache-2.0 for winit, and WTFPL for ffmpeg-sys-next. The FFmpeg the build bundles is LGPL-2.1-or-later and dav1d is BSD-2-Clause; their license texts are copied into target/<profile>/lib/ next to the libraries, and both libraries can be replaced with your own build. Changelog · Releases.