VLC is powerful. It plays everything, handles edge cases, and has been around forever. But it also looks like it was designed in 2005 — cluttered, button-heavy, and full of things you'll never touch. We wanted a video player that was private, open source, and brutally minimal. Something that plays your videos and gets out of the way.
That's Glucose. A zero-UI video player. Just 4MB installed.
Keyboard First
Glucose is designed so you never have to reach for the mouse. Space to play, arrows to seek, number keys to jump to percentages, / for a command overlay. Once you get used to it, you notice how much friction other players were adding for no reason.
Low cognitive load was the goal. No menus to navigate, no settings panels to dig through. The interface disappears when you're watching and reappears when you need it.
Svelte + Rust + Tauri
We built Glucose with the same stack as LeedPDF: SvelteKit for the UI, Rust for video decoding and local file handling, and Tauri to package it into a native desktop app. Electron would have made the build ten times heavier. Flutter wasn't the right fit for a desktop-first media player.
Svelte handles reactivity and keeps the interface smooth. Rust handles the heavy lifting — decoding, file access, media control. Communication between them runs through Tauri's command bridge. The result is an app that launches almost instantly and stays responsive.
Private by Default
No telemetry. No tracking. No analytics. Everything Glucose does stays on your device. It runs entirely offline — no network calls, no phoning home, no surprises.
The source is on GitHub under the MPL license. Download it at glucose.media.