Were you excited by news GNOME plans to replace the Totem media player in its core software set with a new, modern, and actively maintained app called Showtime?
If so, you may be just as excited to hear that it’s now available to install from Flathub.
This means you no longer need to set-up the GNOME Nightly repo (and then tussle with endless updates to both app and the underlying runtimes it relies on) to try it out.
Better yet, the initial release of Showtime on Flathub is built against the GNOME 46 runtime. If you’ve installed any other GTK apps recently you likely already have that installed, making Showtime a small 1.85MB download.
“Play your favorite movies and video files without hassle. Showtime features simple playback controls that fade out of your way when you’re watching, fullscreen, adjustable playback speed, multiple language and subtitle tracks, and screenshots.”
Showtime Flathub description
It’s a stable, albeit early release. Expect some rough edges, edge-case bugs, and perhaps a few playback issues with uncommon formats, or containers filled with multiple angles, captions, and audio streams – I had an issue with some of my MKV Blu-Ray rips).
Oh, and I guess I should remind everyone of this too:
Showtime is aiming to be a GNOME Core app. This means the feature set will focus on core functionality above all else. For a video player, that’s: playback, control, accessibility (e.g., subtitles). For advanced, niche, or deep-cut features 3rd party video players exist.
Still, even for a first pass — video encoding pun, heh — it’s a solid enough release.
Between Showtime, Clapper, and Celluloid I can’t quite settle on an overall favourite GTK4 player just yet — I think I’ll go rewatch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in Showtime, y’know: for ‘research purposes’…
• Get Showtime on Flathub