A new release of Clapper, a GTK4-based video player for the Linux desktop, has been announced. This represents the first major update of the software in almost two years.
The first time I mentioned Clapper was in a post from 2021. I was instantly attracted by its sleek user interface, even though this can be considered a shallow reason to favor a media player. Additionally, I was impressed by its use of GStreamer, and how it offered a concise set of features without unnecessary extras.
Later updates further developed and broadened these appealing qualities, making the player my favorite in spite of its lack of significant updates since 2022.
The application is now back, and the changelog suggests that the wait for its return has been worthwhile.
Clapper 0.6: What’s New? 🍿
Clapper’s code has been rewritten and split out into pair of new libraries (clapper, a playback library; clapperGTK, a GTK integration library), with a GUI on top.
The developer says this approach makes future development easier and enables others to leverage Clapper’s libraries in their own apps.
The playback operation in the application has gone through some foundational changes, adopting a “media queue” support system. As part of this change, multiple queue mode behaviors such as No progression, Consecutive, Repeat item, Carousel, and Shuffle have been added.
The queue list takes advantage of the requisite APIs to display proper media titles for each item in the queue. This is considerably better as compared to other players that usually display raw file name or stream URLs. In addition, the Clapper also supports local video/music files.
The newly integrated media queue in Clapper 0.6 is now more effective with MPRIS. This upgrade has led to improved functionality where the prev/next actions can be triggered using keyboard media keys, which has turned out to be of great convenience.
There’s an option to get detailed information about the media files being played. The new info-dot icon, found at the top of the screen, can be clicked to open a pop-over presenting numerous attributes, including codec, encoding, resolution bitrate and whether hardware acceleration is being employed and many more.
The changes in Clapper 0.6 include:
- Enhanced user-interface
- Player functions using a playback queue
- Multiple new status/info overlays
- An updated video buffering animation
- Notifications for missing GStreamer plugins
- Video chapters displayed in seek bar on hover
- Improved MPRIS support
- Extended WebSocket server functionality
- Volume amplification limit raised to 200%
- Speed and queue progression modes preserved on launch
Visit the Github release notes for more extensive details on this release.
Otherwise, to install Clapper 0.6 on Ubuntu (as well as most other Linux distributions) to try out the changes firsthand, yeet yourself in the direction of Flathub.
• Get Clapper on Flathub
Thanks Scotty_Trees