In Operation
Here’s Glide in action.
Glide plays any multimedia format supported by GStreamer, locally or remotely hosted. We tested a number of different formats without issues.
What other features does Glide offer?
- Playback – increase or decrease playback speed.
- Video frame stepping, allowing to seek frame by frame.
- Subtitles support.
- Select audio track.
- Proper video aspect-ratio handling.
- Full screen mode.
- Drag and drop playback.
- Track synchronization – audio and subtitle track synchronization.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
Hardware acceleration works out of the box. We tested Glide using an Intel NUC 13 Pro, a mini PC which only offers onboard graphics albeit the capable Iris Xe.
Here’s the output from intel-gpu-top with a video being played on Glide. As you can see, processing of the video is aided by the Video engine.
Summary
Glide is a basic media player but it might be all you need. While many consider VLC to bamboozle users with its plethora of options, the converse is true with Glide.
Even for minimalists, there is useful functionality we’d like addded such as image adjustment, a file chooser interface, and support for remote videos.
Website: philn.github.io/glide
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Philippe Normand
License: MIT License
Glide is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials
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?