Gnome's new video player, Showtime, gets merged into the main branch. The new video player will replace Totem on Gnome 49.

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gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge…

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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.

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

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.

Thanks! This is probably the phenomenon i've been observing

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.

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.

Trademark suit from the premium cable channel in 5…4…

Weird, the cartoon doesn’t want to let me through. Something about an iPhone running lemmy pisses off anubus.

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

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.

I love VLC. I also love mpv.

I like to think that VLC is for window users for them to get a taste of what it's like to use Linux.

I mean, it is faster

Lol, what? Do people really care about the 'speed' of their video player in 2025?

You can still use older hardware in 2025. So, yes.

Yeah, but is the speed difference between the two really noticeable?

Yes it's quite noticeable, especially with the bigger file size. mpv is really light.

Are there any benchmarks to support this?

My laptop from 2014 significantly loads .ts video faster on MPV than VLC.

VLC even stuck on video seeking for a few seconds.

it literally has a lower CPU consumption, even when using hardware decoding. and even when playback is paused.

lower CPU consumption means more free resources for other programs, and lower power usage, which is more battery life.

it also seeks much smoother, I mean quicker with less delay

VLC the media player is using Qt. Unless you talk about libvlc, But why bother when Gstreamer itself is good.

Comments from other communities

Oh, nice. Will it fix the openGL initialisation problem?

I love the Showtime player

Just a bit thin on features...

But did they fix the crap ass dependencies that cause the video offloading to break? Seriously doubt it.

Let me be more explicit, they were using Cairo and within Cairo there’s a few lines of code to set which library to use for offloading of rendering. It breaks because they fucking hardcoded some shit up in there and when you use environment variables to offload they ignore them.

And yes, it was reported, and confirmed as a bug, in 2019.