Gnome-Vlc is a new project designed to provide a simple GTK frontend to the popular Vlc player.
Still in its infancy, the project was borne “…out of frustration with other players that failed to tick all the boxes.”
KISS – Keep It Severely Simple
Simplicity is the keyword to keep in mind here. GNOME-VLC is not a full GTK+ port of VLC. It aims to provide a native UI for playing videos. VLC is incredibly powerful and offers reams of configuration options. GNOME-Vlc by comparison aims simply to offer the user options they would use to simply play videos. “Less options – more play” is a cheesy slogan that perhaps fits the bill.
Features
Lets talk features; the current feature-set consists of: –
- A GNOME/GTK interface
- Double-click to view fullscreen
- Can use mouse scroll wheel
- Uses libvlc
- No horrible UI artefacts during playback
- Looping playlist
- No volume control (Wait, what?!)
- Middle mouse button pause
Thoughts
It’s hard to be – and wouldn’t be fair to be – overly critical of a project that is still so young. The fact I’m highlighting it/came across it shows it has something to it.
I am sure that to many people the sight of yet another media player will seem excessive. Perhaps so. In this case I feel GNOME-Vlc serves a function; providing a “simple” native GTK+ interface to VLC is a worthwhile endeavour, though in usage GNOME-Vlc feels very similar to Totem, both in looks and layout.
I’ll be watching this project intensely over the coming week to see how it matures.
Install
Whilst there is no release as of yet, you can try out GNOME-Vlc via Launchpad: –
- bzr branch lp:gnome-vlc
There were one or two dependencies you may need to install. Annoyingly I can’t remember them off of the top of my head, so if you try it out let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly!