Gnome's new video player, Showtime, gets merged into the main branch. The new video player will replace Totem on Gnome 49.
Move Showtime to Core and remove Totem from Core (!3727) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-build-meta · GitLab
Gnome seems to swap out default apps pretty often. Are the old apps getting abandoned? Or are they always jumping to the next cool new thing?
Here's what I found.
Why does Totem need to be replaced?
Totem is still a GTK3 app and is unmaintained (in part due to a crusty codebase), seeing no major development in years. Replacing it with a modern GTK4/libadwaita app designed to use modern technologies and meet modern needs has been a “high priority” for GNOME.
Thanks!
In this case it's more of a switch away from the last cool new thing. Totem (like Music) was built around a media library navigated from within the app. By default Totem doesn't even support opening videos from the file manager, which is something you would probably expect of a video player. It also crashed for me when I tried using it as intended so I'm not surprised to see it replaced by an app that really is just a video player.
That said many apps get replaced not for feature reasons but just by being GTK3, and they tend to get replaced by their own forks to GTK4 (such as the upcoming replacement of Evince). Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.
Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.
I forget the exact details but iirc Evince was a special case because rendering PDFs in GTK4 was so different that they essentially just had to rewrite the whole application. I think Gnome Papers still doesn't support the full feature set that Evince supported (although it works well for most use cases now). This is why its still not the default for Gnome, although I think Ubuntu has decided to adopt it a little early.
Thanks! This is probably the phenomenon i've been observing
I don’t think they’re usually abandoned. At least not right away. But they rarely still get feature updates. Mostly just bug fixes. Not sure if it’s just different developers not wanting to stick to the same project of someone else’s code or what.
GNOME mostly abandons their old apps. However, in some cases, the Xapps project has taken over these older code bases.
https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html
Weird, the cartoon doesn’t want to let me through. Something about an iPhone running lemmy pisses off anubus.
cartoon? Anubis? What?
(I've never used an iPhone in my life)
Websites are getting hammered by AI bots stealing content and jacking up their bandwidth usage. So they use a piece of software called Anubis which, for some reason, has a cartoon nurse that will grant or deny you access based on if she thinks you are human or AI. For some reason, she thinks I am AI so I can’t access the article.
To be fair, the link's just to git comments, so the headline captures the main point.
I'm having the same issue on Android. For me, switching to desktop mode to load the Anubis check then back to mobile mode so the website is usable again worked.
works fine on android wih firefox webview
That’s weird. Works for me both through the embedded browser in Voyager and Safari directly (with adblocker enabled)
Trademark suit from the premium cable channel in 5…4…
I'm enjoying the dedication to great defaults, by the Gnome team.
How come they don't just use VLC?
In my opinion, MPV is even better. I mean, it is faster and has better codec support. On the other hand, VLC has a better user interface with a lot of preferences. As for Showtime, oh boy, it's a clear beauty!
For now I'm staying with MPV, because ffmpeg > gstreamer.
Doesn't feel gnomey enough.
VLC the media player is using Qt. Unless you talk about libvlc, But why bother when Gstreamer itself is good.
I want to know only one thing: is it based on mpv?
Looks to be using GStreamer:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/06/test-gnome-showtime-new-video-player
Can someone explain pros and cons of MPV vs gstreamer?
It seems to be based on GstPlay/GStreamer: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/showtime/-/blob/main/showtime/play.py