Linux isn’t short of choices when it comes to media players but, and don’t tell VLC I said this, I think I’ve found a new favourite.
It’s called Clapper and it’s a superbly designed GTK app billed as a “simple and modern GNOME media player” — and that it most certainly is, my friends.
Of course, VLC remains the big cheese on the open source video player scene for good reason. No other player comes close in performance, versatility, reliability, features, and so on — plus it’s one of the best known bits of FOSS software as it’s cross-platform.
But let’s face it: on Linux VLC isn’t the most attractive app. While there are ways you can make VLC look better on Ubuntu you may find it less effort to simply use a Linux media app that looks nicer from the get go.
And Clapper suits that role perfectly.
Clapper Media Player for Linux
Clapper is a GNOME media player built using GJS and GTK4. GStreamer is the media backend and video content is rendered using OpenGL. Clapper works with both Xorg and Wayland, and supports VA-API on AMD/Intel GPUs for hardware-accelerated decoding.
Unlike say Totem, also GTK, Clapper doesn’t use a traditional header bar or window title. Instead, the window controls are implemented as floating OSD overlaid on top of the video content itself. These fade in as you mouse over or interact with the app, and fade out a few second after.
The player has 3 distinct modes:
- “Windowed Mode” – progress bar, window controls, etc show
- “Floating Mode” – displays video on top of all other windows, hides controls
- “Fullscreen Mode” – UI elements bigger, animate in/out
Clapper look fantastic on my Fedora install with GNOME 40 and every-bit as good on my Ubuntu 21.04 install with GNOME 3.38. It certainly looks more modern (and thus more appealing) than Videos (aka Totem, the video player both distros ship by default).
Oh, I know: I’m a superficial fool! A media player is meant to be more about the media being played than the window dressing around it, right?
But I do have a thing for apps that look and feel like they’re part of my system, which Clapper does. Plus, I tend to watch short videos in windowed mode which means all of that window dressing is on show, so to speak.
Clapper features include:
- Window, full-screen, and PIP modes
- MPRIS support
- Repeat options
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Subtitles support (including font settings)
- Adjust audio offset
- Can play network streams
- Supports YouTube
I will ‘fess up that, in my testing of the app, Clapper crashed twice. If the odd quirk flips you out stick with something tried and trusted like VLC or Celluloid.
There are also a few behaviours I don’t like: video previews don’t seek when you scrub (though you can adjust some seeking preferences within the app); and you can’t exit fullscreen mode by pressing esc.
But I’m willing to overlook the occasional flaws given that a) they’ll likely be fixed in future updates, and b) the rest of what’s on offer is so good.
So if you want a modern, slick media player then give Clapper a go.
• Install Clapper from Flathub