Clapper

A GNOME media player build using GJS with GTK4 toolkit. The media player is using GStreamer as a media backend and renders everything via OpenGL.

Windowed Mode

Fullscreen Mode

Floating Mode

Features:

• Hardware acceleration
• Floating mode
• Adaptive UI
• Playlist from file
• Chapters on progress bar
• MPRIS support

Installation from Flatpak

The Flatpak package includes all required dependencies and codecs. Additionally it also has a few patches, thus some functionalities work better (or are only available) in Flatpak version (until my changes are accepted upstream). List of patches used in this version can be found here.

Important: If you have been using the flatpak package from my custom 3rd party repo, please remove it and replace your installation with version from Flathub. That repository will not be maintained any longer. Thank you for understanding.

Packages

The pkgs folder in this repository contains build scripts for various package formats. You can use them to build package yourself or download one of pre-built packages:

Debian, Fedora & openSUSE

Pre-built packages are available in my repo (see status).
Those are automatically build on each git commit, thus are considered unstable.

Arch Linux

You can get Clapper from the AUR:

• clapper (stable version)
• clapper-git

Installation from source code

meson builddir --prefix=/usr/local
sudo meson install -C builddir

Q&A

Q: Does using GJS negatively impact video performance?
A: Absolutely not. GJS here is used to put together the GUI during startup. It has nothing to do with video rendering. All used GTK4 and GStreamer libraries are in C. Even the custom video widget that I prepared for this player (based on original GTK3 implementation) is a compiled C code. All these libs are acting "on their own" and no function calls from GJS related to video decoding and rendering are performed during playback.

Q: What settings should I set to maximize performance?
A: As of now, player works best on Wayland session. Wayland users can try enabling highly experimental vah264dec plugin for improved performance (this plugin does not work on Xorg right now) for standard (8-bit) H.264 videos. It can be enabled from inside player preferences dialog inside Advanced -> GStreamer tab using customizable Plugin Ranking feature. Since the whole app is rendered using your GPU, users of VERY weak GPUs might want to disable the "render window shadows" option to have more GPU power available for non-fullscreen video rendering.

Other Questions?

Feel free to ask me any questions. Come and talk on Matrix: #clapper-player:matrix.org

Special Thanks

Many thanks to sp1ritCS for creating and maintaining package build files.

Thanks a lot to all the people who are supporting the development with their anonymous donations through Liberapay. I ❤️ U.