I have always felt a video player should know what it is playing — not just show buttons on top of a film, but actually feel the film. That is the idea I built AURA around.
When I watch a video, my eyes are on the picture, but the player knows things I cannot see: which quality is playing, how fast the stream is coming in, how much is buffered, how many frames were dropped. I wanted all of that to be visible — not hidden in a settings menu, but right there in the skin, alive. So I designed a telemetry deck inside the player: the real rendition and bitrate, the network estimate, the buffer ahead, and dropped frames, updating twice a second beside a live graph. Nothing there is decoration. Every number is the stream itself.
Then I asked: if the player knows the picture, why does it not react to it? I made the halo around the player take its colour from the frame that is actually playing. A dark forest scene gives a deep glow; a bright cut lights the room up. The player breathes with the scene.
I watch long films in chapters, so I built chapter cinema into the seek bar: the bar is split into the film's chapters, with a chapter menu, keyboard chapter-jumping, and a live frame preview while you scrub — so you can see where you are going before you land there.
Captions matter to me too. The demo film ships with no captions at all, so I wrote a descriptive captions track for it myself — the real sound beats of the film, like "[ Birds chirping ]" and "[ Crash — the trap springs shut ]" — and built a Caption Studio where you can change the size, colour and background while the captions are playing.
And one skin should fit every screen, so I made four contexts out of the same design: Cinema, Portrait (a real crop, not a squeezed frame), Audio, and TV. Full keyboard control throughout, with a shortcuts panel, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
AURA is not a costume for the player. It is the player, awake.
— Shaharukh Khan
Live demo: https://golden-naiad-70c020.netlify.app
0 likes · 5 views · Nov 12, 2026