GTK is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK is used from small one-off tools to complete application suites.
GTK 4.0 was released in December 2020 with components that rely on GTK4 following promptly. The GNOME desktop is built on the GTK toolkit. GNOME 40 released in March 2021 supports GTK4. Many distros include GNOME 40 such as Ubuntu 21.10, Arch, Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo to name a few.
We’ve showcased many media players. There’s definitely a great range of open source media players available. Open source software and technologies helps prevent barriers of entry. This promotes healthy competition. And it’s this competition that keeps open source software push out boundaries. Clapper is software that imbibes this spirit.
Clapper is a GNOME media player. It’s built using GJS (GNOME JavaScript bindings) with the GTK4 toolkit so you’ll see some of the new GTK4 features in action. The media player uses GStreamer as a media backend and renders everything via OpenGL.
Installation
Clapper is in an early stage of development so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to install the program from your distro’s repositories. But the developer of Clapper provides convenient packages for many distros. Alternative you can install the software with Flatpak.
If you’re never used Flatpaks before, you’ll first need to install the flatpak package. Using Ubuntu, at a shell type:
$ sudo apt install flatpak
We can install Clapper with the command:
$ flatpak install flathub com.github.rafostar.Clapper
Run Clapper with the command:
$ flatpak run com.github.rafostar.Clapper
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
I’ve got so accustomed to Firefox’s picture in picture feature that I started to dislike window decorations on video playback.
Clapper’s floating mode is brilliant. Overall the video player is pretty basic when it comes to functionality but from brief experiments it’ll definitely stay on my system. I haven’t yet tried using it as an audio player.
Forgot to mention that it only runs under Linux, the developer doesn’t intend to port the software to Windows or macOS which is a shame. I run all 3 operating systems and prefer to use the same software on each environment.
In the long term Clapper will probably be my main media player. It’s already awesome.
Was the RAM usage tested on X11 or Wayland? I ask cause Clapper seems to perform better and uses less resources on Wayland session.
RAM usage was tested under X11