ANDHERA
A Quiet Dark Video & Audio Player
Media players have become ad-ridden, telemetry-heavy and cluttered. Andhera (Urdu for 'darkness') is the opposite — drag a file, it plays. No ads, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud.
Origin Story
I just wanted a beautiful, quiet player that respected my files and my privacy, and stopped trying to be a platform.
How It's Built
It shells out to bundled FFmpeg and FFprobe so it plays virtually anything, layered with a Web Audio EQ and visualiser, and an ambient glow that samples the playing frame and projects a soft aura behind the window.
Engineering Notes
FFmpeg does the heavy lifting
Andhera bundles LGPL FFmpeg and FFprobe and shells out to them for decode and probe, which is how it plays 40+ formats — MP4, MKV, WebM, FLAC, OGG and more — without reinventing a codec stack.
Ambient glow and visualiser
It samples the currently playing frame and projects a soft colour-matched aura behind the window, and routes audio through a Web Audio graph for an EQ and visualiser. No ads, no accounts, no telemetry — it does one thing beautifully and asks nothing of you.
Gallery
Andhera is a small act of resistance against bloatware — software that does one thing, beautifully, and asks nothing of you in return.
What It Does
40+ Formats
Anything FFmpeg reads — MP4, MKV, WebM, AVI, FLAC, OGG and more — via bundled LGPL FFmpeg.
Ambient Glow
Samples the currently playing frame and projects a soft, colour-matched aura behind the window.
Audio Visualiser
A Web Audio graph powers an EQ, a visualiser mode and live normalisation for music.
Zero Telemetry
No ads, no accounts, no cloud — the player asks nothing of you and phones nobody.
Where It Stands
Andhera is published to the Microsoft Store with macOS DMG and Linux builds, playing 40+ formats via bundled FFmpeg. It's deliberately scoped — the roadmap is refinement (subtitle handling, resume positions) rather than turning a clean player into a platform.
Andhera is Tauri 2 + React 19; FFmpeg and FFprobe are bundled (LGPL) and shelled out for decode and probe, with a Web Audio graph for EQ and visualisation and Framer Motion for the interface. It is featured in my CV alongside Naqsh.