Watching video on computers running Linux is commonplace. Most Linux distros ship at least one media player.
One of the most popular open source video players is VLC. In our opinion, VLC and mpv are the finest free and open source video players. But there are lots of high quality alternatives out there. Both VLC and mpv are laden with features. Maybe you’re looking for something that offers only basic functionality?
Glide is designed to be a simple media player. It doesn’t have a ton of features. That’s by design. It’s cross-platform, free and open source software.
Installation
For software written in Rust, you’ll need to have Rust or rustup installed on your system. We already have an existing installation of Rust, so we skipped installing rustup (the command below).
$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
As we’re using Ubuntu 23.10 we install the program’s dependencies using apt.
$ sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-{base,good,bad} libgstreamer-plugins-{bad,base}1.0-dev
$ sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev gstreamer1.0-gl libadwaita-1-dev
You may have some or all of these packages already installed on your system.
Next, we install Glide with cargo, Rust’s package manager.
$ cargo install glide
However, the developer recommends that Glide is installed with Flatpak rather than using cargo.
$ flatpak install net.baseart.Glide
Let’s check out what Glide offers.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Not sure I see the benefit of another video player.
This one is written in Rust.
It seems odd that people still quote VLC, as opposed to MPV, as the first option.
Comparing this with MPV would be more productive – there’s a reason MPV is far more popular (i.e. VLC’s complicated menus).
This does have the nice ‘Goom’ visualisation for playing an audio track – though I generally prefer just the cover art view in MPV.
Many issues, however – for example there’s no ‘quit’ so it won’t remember your choice of visualisation etc… the only way to close this is to close the window or kill it.
No audiophile is interested in graphic frippery like visualisation.
For listening to audio, I wouldn’t recommend either VLC or mpv, they are really only good for video playback.
While no one disputes that VLC offers a labyrinth of options, the point being made is that it’s hugely popular. If users want a simple media player they can still use VLC without delving into all the options; just drag a video from a file manager into its window…
Linux doesn’t have any decent media players. At least not free ones.
Have you read The Sea of Trolls?