Khua Player

Khua Player is a lightweight, native video player built for modern macOS and Apple silicon.

Get smoother motion with frame interpolation, generate and translate subtitles on your Mac, and keep watching the playable parts of damaged or unfinished files.

Designed from the ground up for fast, responsive, and efficient playback.

Download for macOS · Website · Release history · Build from source

Apple silicon · macOS 14 or later · Open source

Download the DMG, open it, and drag Khua to Applications. The official download is Developer ID signed, notarized, and stapled; no extra codec packs or Homebrew installation are needed to use it.

More than playback

• Smoother motion with Motion+. Adaptive frame interpolation makes movement smoother. Hold C to compare the original and enhanced video side by side.
• Subtitles, made on your Mac. Generate subtitles from video audio, translate generated or existing text subtitles, and save the results as SRT. Processing stays on your Mac. Requires macOS 26; macOS may download a language model first.
• Playback for imperfect files. Khua attempts to recover playable content from damaged or partially downloaded files, marks problem areas on the timeline, and leaves the original file unchanged. Recovery is best-effort; not every damaged or incomplete file can be played.
• More from your display. Watch HDR video, use tone mapping on SDR displays, or give everyday SDR video extra brightness with Brightness+ on compatible displays.
• A timeline drawn from your video. Particle Star Trail takes its colors from the video itself. Liquid and Classic styles are also available.
• Preview right in Finder. Select a supported video and press Space for Quick Look playback, including MKV. Set Khua as the default player by file format.

Motion+ requires macOS 26 and a supported Mac. See Requirements for feature availability.

Everyday essentials

• Broad format support: MKV, MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI, MPEG-TS, FLV, WMV, and common audio formats, with hardware decoding where supported and a bundled fallback.
• Subtitles that travel with your video: embedded and external text subtitles, including subtitle files in the same folder. Khua does not search for or download subtitles.
• Natural-sounding speed control: hold Space for Turbo playback, then release to return to normal speed. Voices keep their pitch.
• Native multichannel audio: 5.1 and 7.1 output on supported audio devices.
• A familiar Mac experience: playback resume, frame stepping, screenshots, multiple playback windows, and an interface available in 17 languages.
• Private by design: no account, ads, or playback analytics. Your media and playback history stay on your Mac. See the privacy policy.

Requirements

Intel Macs are not supported. iPhone and iPad support is planned, but only the Mac app is currently available.

Build from source

Building requires an Apple silicon Mac and Xcode with the macOS 26.4 SDK or later. You do not need the build tools to use the official download.

Install the build tools once:

brew install xcodegen meson ninja cmake pkg-config

Build the application:

./Apps/Mac/Scripts/build.sh          # Debug
./Apps/Mac/Scripts/build.sh Release  # optimized local build

Run these commands from the repository root. Scripts/build.sh remains a compatibility entry point with the same arguments and environment settings. The Mac project definition is Apps/Mac/project.yml; the build generates Apps/Mac/KhuaPlayer.xcodeproj. Edit the definition, not the generated Xcode project.

The first build downloads checksum-pinned dependency source archives, builds them with the macOS SDK toolchain, generates the Xcode project, packages the runtime libraries, signs the app ad hoc, and verifies its Mach-O dependency closure. Subsequent builds reuse validated dependency stamps.

Run the app, optionally opening a local media file through the macOS document open event:

./Scripts/run.sh
./Scripts/run.sh /path/to/video.mkv

The generated app is located at .build/Build/Products/<configuration>/Khua.app. Release builds also deploy the verified app to Khua.app at the repository root; Debug builds leave that copy unchanged. Both locations are ignored by Git. Local Release builds are still ad-hoc signed, not distribution-ready artifacts.

Repository scope

This repository contains the shipping application source and the reproducible build and packaging recipes. Large media fixtures, benchmark suites, internal experiments, generated Xcode projects, dependency build trees, and caches are intentionally excluded.

Editable Icon Composer source and the deterministic static AppIcon export live in Design/AppIcon.

The directory layout separates the Mac product, reusable-source candidates, and platform implementations. See REPOSITORY_LAYOUT.md for ownership and build entry points. iPhone and iPad support is planned; only the Mac product currently builds, and no mobile app target is included.

Distribution

Local builds use ad-hoc signing. Developer ID releases and App Store archives use separate, fail-closed signing configurations; see RELEASING.md. Release identity, version, bundle identifier, and Apple Developer Team values must be supplied explicitly by the distributor. The primary direct download is a signed, notarized, and stapled DMG with an Applications shortcut. Generated apps, DMGs, ZIPs, archives, and symbols stay outside Git history and are published through the release host.

Direct-distribution builds contain configuration-gated Sparkle support. Without both KHUA_SPARKLE_FEED_URL and KHUA_SPARKLE_PUBLIC_ED_KEY, the updater does not load, create a menu item, or make a network request. App Store builds omit Sparkle and its configuration entirely. Configured direct builds check automatically by default and expose an App-menu toggle to disable that behavior.

Privacy and licensing

The application does not collect or transmit playback data. See PRIVACY.md for the current behavior.

Khua's own source code is available under the MIT License. Third-party components retain their own licenses; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and ThirdParty/Licenses. Distributors are responsible for satisfying all third-party license obligations.