Big Multimedia

The BigLinux media players: a video player and a music player, built in Rust with GTK 4, libadwaita and mpv.

Video Player · Audio Player · Install · Build · Architecture · Contributing

---

Overview

Big Multimedia is the workspace behind the two media players of BigLinux. Both share one playback engine (big-media-runtime: mpv playback, casting, media probing) and one set of interface components, so they look, sound and behave alike.

Application	Desktop ID	What it is for
Big Video Player	br.com.biglinux.VideoPlayer	Movies, series, streams and TV channels, with hardware decoding
Big Audio Player	br.com.biglinux.AudioPlayer	A music library, playlists, internet radio and podcasts

Big Video Player

A hardware-accelerated video player that keeps the picture edge to edge and the controls out of the way.

• Hardware decoding through VAAPI, VDPAU and NVDEC, on a GL render path with a software fallback.
• Every common format: MP4, MKV, WebM, MOV, AVI and anything else mpv plays, plus DVD and Blu-ray discs, ISO images and folders.
• Subtitles with a secondary track, delay control, styling, and loading of external files.
• Picture and sound: brightness, contrast and colour, zoom, crop and rotation, HDR tone mapping, an equalizer, and upscaling shaders (FSR, CAS, RAVU and Anime4K).
• Streams and TV: online video, IPTV playlists and Xtream providers, and playback on a TV on the same network.
• Library at hand: a folder browser and a play queue in a side panel, thumbnail previews on the seek bar, and chapters.
• Cut and convert: mark the parts to keep and hand them to Big Video Converter, or extract the audio track.
• Desktop integration: MPRIS for media keys and the desktop's player controls, a sleep timer, screenshots, and configurable keyboard shortcuts.

Big Audio Player

A music player built around a fast, searchable library.

• Library of the music folders you choose, scanned in the background and searchable as you type, grouped by song, album, artist or genre.
• Formats: MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, Opus, AAC, WAV and more.
• Playlists and queue, with undo, import of M3U/PLS playlists and smart playlists.
• Internet radio with recording, and podcasts with subscriptions.
• Lyrics, a tag editor and album art.
• Listening: gapless playback, crossfade, ReplayGain, an equalizer, speed and pitch control, and a sleep timer.
• Desktop integration: MPRIS for media keys and the desktop's player controls, playback on a TV, and ListenBrainz scrobbling.

Neither player converts media on its own. Cut, Convert and Extract Audio open big-video-converter-gui or big-audio-converter-gui with the file and any marked cuts (--segments=START-END,...), through big_media_runtime::shared::converter_handoff.

Installation

On BigLinux the players come from the official repositories:

sudo pacman -S big-video-player big-audio-player

Packages are built from pkgbuild/PKGBUILD, a single split recipe that produces both players. A push to a testing-* or stable-* branch sends the build request to the BigLinux package builder.

Building from source

Requirements

Dependency	Version
Rust toolchain	1.98.1, pinned in rust-toolchain.toml
GTK	4.22 or newer
libadwaita	1.9 or newer
libmpv	development files
SQLite	development files
gettext, pkgconf	for translations and native libraries

Build and run

cargo build --workspace --locked
cargo run --locked -p big-video-player
cargo run --locked -p big-audio-player

Either player accepts files on the command line:

cargo run --locked -p big-video-player -- ~/Videos/movie.mkv

Checks

cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace --locked --all-features
scripts/check-media-surface-imports.sh

Tests that create widgets need a Wayland display. Run them in an isolated, headless compositor so that no window reaches your desktop; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Architecture

crates/
├── big-video-player/        Video player (binary)
├── big-audio-player/        Audio player (binary)
├── media-runtime/           big-media-runtime: mpv engine, casting, probing, settings, translations
├── foundation/              big-os-kit, big-audio-effects, big-media-engines, big-mpv-render, big-media-data
├── app/                     big-app-kit, big-app-kit-core: actions, MPRIS, dialogs, shortcuts
└── ui/
    ├── generic/big-relm4-components     Reusable Relm4/libadwaita components
    └── media/big-media-components       Media chrome, transport, metadata dialogs
        media/big-player-ui              Panels shared by the players
third_party/relm4/           Relm4 with a lifetime patch

• Each player keeps its own resources/ (desktop file, AppStream metadata, icon), application-assets/ (GResource CSS) and build.rs.
• The only external BigLinux dependency is big-gtk-kit, the shared GTK building blocks.
• The workspace Cargo.toml, clippy.toml, deny.toml, rust-toolchain.toml and LICENSE live at the root. clippy.toml bans GTK and libadwaita calls that leak or misbehave in the pinned versions; docs/native-library-limits.md explains why.

Translations

Both players share one translation catalog in crates/media-runtime/po. Regenerate the template after changing user-facing text:

crates/media-runtime/po/regen-pot.sh

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. Before sending a change, read CONTRIBUTING.md. It covers the build and test commands and the resource-lifetime rules every widget must follow: closed widgets must finalize, and every GLib source they arm must be removed.

License

The component crates are MIT. The repository as a whole is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, because the players link the GPL playback engine.

Credits

Built by the BigLinux community, on the shoulders of mpv, GTK, libadwaita and Relm4.

The video screenshot shows the trailer of Sintel, © Blender Foundation, licensed under CC BY 3.0. The music in the audio screenshot is a generated demo library.