I recently blogged about my love affair (of sorts) with mpv, the nimble, open-source media player based on mplayer.
Stock mpv is, for those used to all-singing and all-dancing video players, a little… austere. GNOME MPV is an attractive GTK+ front-end to mpv.
If you find mpv too minimal, gnome-mpv is sure to help.
gnome-mpv
“GNOME MPV interacts with mpv via the client API exported by libmpv, allowing access to mpv’s powerful playback capabilities,” reads the website’s promo blurb.
But don’t be fooled by its appearance. There’s more to gnome-mpg than some fancy window chrome and a smattering of player buttons. It surfaces many of mpv’s more advanced features and capabilities through a GUI.
Appearance
By default the app uses client-side decoration (aka ‘header bars’), but you can turn this off if you tend to prefer a more traditional appearance (plus have HUD support, locally integrated menus, etc):
No matter which mode you run it in the app has a player toolbar (versus mpv’s OSD) for controlling playback, seeking, controlling volume and entering full-screen.
A healthy set of preferences are also included, accessible via the “Preferences” menu item (Edit > Preferences when traditional menus are enabled).
For a more bespoke playback experience the app will happily load a custom mpv.conf directly, with no edits or changes required. Better still, the app won’t write to this file, so you can continue to use it with MPV and/or other MPV clients.
If a full config files sounds too much you can also pass CLI options to the app through the “Extra MPV Options” text box in Preferences.
GNOME MPV is free, open-source software. It’s available to install from Ubuntu Software on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and above.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users wishing to use a more recent release of the app can download and install the ~xenial build from the GNOME MPV PPA.