Video player UI will be improved when time allows. Other improvements have a higher priority, and the video player is currently slow to load (not a buffering issue, since the second video in a playlist loads quickly enough), so it might need a complete reworking anyway. There's no point in improving the UI, only to have to start again. You don't have to use the on-screen controls. You can control the video player using the keyboard (details in the manual: About --> Manual ). I have also thought about the possibility of a widget, and I want to do it. I need to fix the remaining bugs in the main application first. In the meantime, I have uploaded a new build to extras-devel. Changelog: Improved loading of video results. Should be faster. Some tweaks to the fetching of video feeds. Improved error handling. I'm hoping that I have resolved the issue with favourites not loading, but I can't be certain. I experienced the issue myself last night, and it turned out to be due to one of my favourited videos being restricted by YouTube. So, if anyone still has that problem, you might want to check and make sure that you can still view the videos that are in your favourites.