Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Is Ditching VLC for GNOME MPV (omgubuntu.co.uk) 186
GNOME MPV (now known as Celluloid) will be the default media player in Ubuntu MATE 19.10. From a report: The app supplants the versatile VLC meda player, which the MATE desktop-toting distro has shipped with following the results of a community poll back in 2017. So why the change now? Better desktop integration. That's according to Ubuntu MATE's Martin Wimpress who revealed news of the swap in the latest Ubuntu MATE monthly update on Patreon: "We will be dropping VLC from the pre-installed applications and shipping GNOME MPV instead. GNOME MPV will soon be renamed to Celluloid. The reasons for switching to GNOME MPV are similar to swapping out Thunderbird for Evolution; better desktop integration." Size is another factor. GNOME MPV takes up a comparatively svelte 27MB on the ISO image, whereas Qt5-based VLC requires closer to 70MB.
Re: 5th most popular Linux distro? (Score:1)
Let me guess .... liberal arts major?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: 5th most popular Linux distro? (Score:2)
There is a whole wide world out there in tech that never touches Windows. I've never worked for a startup that used Windows for anything but the sales and marketing teams. Executives are always on a Mac. Most techies are too. A few techies might use Linux or Windows, but that's abnormal. Lots of places I've interviewed with tell you straight up they expect you to take a Mac.
Re: 5th most popular Linux distro? (Score:1)
My last three employers have been almost exclusively Linux. And what do you think AWS et all are running??
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:2, Insightful)
Sacrificing the users, as per usual. Ideological purity above all. Luckily, there are repos for people not savvy enough to just get rid of Ubuntu altogether.
Re: (Score:1)
MPV sounds like the name of a virus, and it seems to spread in a similar manner - people who’ve “caught” it are transmitting it to others without their consent.
Re:Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:5, Interesting)
MPV is a fork of MPlayer, which is a serious piece of software in the history and present of opensource media players. They are command-line programs for users who know what they want and prefer to look at the video instead of windows and GUIs. Gnome MPV is simply a GUI wrapper around MPV.
One thing mpv can do over many other players is VAAPI, which means hardware video decoding on Intel HD integrated GPUs on Linux. It also has better HW encoding on Nvidia than the bog-standard VDPAU used by many players. This is why I use mpv myself and recommend it to my Linux-using friends.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the thing. I originally used the mplayer2 fork on windows because VLC just wouldn't play stuff properly without tearing or bad frameskipping. mplayer2 was discontinued so I use mpv.io, which is another fork of mpv.
I had the same problems with VLC having choppy playback, and video tearing. Mplayer and MPV allow a wide range of customization of the playback method, so if you have a very slow machine you can force hard-dropping of frames either at the output stage or the pre-rendering stage, or both. Yo
Re: (Score:2)
MPV sounds like the name of a virus,
But it's okay, you can only catch it from your GIMP.
people who’ve “caught” it are transmitting it to others without their consent.
That is one of the most retarded things you have ever said about any subject ever. And I include your dabbles in the amateur trolling in the data set.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I have no idea what desktop integration mean, but I'm on kubuntu and VLC has been going down the drain in the last few years. 90% of videos have very to extremely heavy pixelation and artifacts. Hours of fiddling with options, numerous searches and bug reports later, lead me to give up and use other video players: MPV, Dragon or SMPlayer, they might not have as many options but they all work better.
Have not had any such issues with VLC. Are you sure it's not from your hours of fiddling?
Re: (Score:2)
They have *more* options, they just don't have the options exposed in drop-down menus, so you need to read the help pages.
Re: Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:2)
The vast majority of media players built for GTK use Gstreamer which provides a simple mechanism for dealing with "impure" codecs. If VNC isn't taking advantage of some comparable library, then that's a poor choice on the part of the VNC folks. It has nothing to do with GNOME. It might have to do with your distro's choices, though.
Re: Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:3)
VLC, sorry.
Re: (Score:3)
Sacrificing the users, as per usual. Ideological purity above all.
Yeah because preferencing interoperability and integration with the desktop while still providing a drop dead easy method to install the old application is soooooo "sacrificing users". *overly exaggerated roll-eye to indicate sarcasm so extreme I actually think the parent is a complete moron*
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly what "interoperability", what "integration"? The ONLY thing listed which matches that criteria is "uses the inferior ayatollah toolkit for its graphics".
Then I suggest you start here: www.dictionary.com and then go through the list again.
For now. Expect that to change, since the objective is to get rid of any alternative.
On a Linux system that uses apt/ppa... Fuck me does your carer know you escaped the room made of pillows? Nurse nurse! The nutters are out again!
Re: Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:3)
I choose to use Ubuntu in our infrastructure for two reasons, one of which is unique to Ubuntu and the other typical of Debian systems. By no means am I unable to switch, but here's why I don't:
A) Ubuntu is the most widely used and best community supported brand of Debian. Finding the right packages without resorting to risky third party repos, finding qualified support, and finding online documentation for most problems is simply easier with Ubuntu. If you're not big enough to be getting a RedHat support c
Re: Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:2)
Sure. But the reality is Ubuntu is just as secure at RHEL, so that's essentially an argument based on marketing rather than for any technical reason.
In fact, I've found far more packages on CentOS that are installed with insecure defaults than Ubuntu. I don't know how that translates to the wider Fedora ecosystem, but the security bona fides there is pretty wanting.
Re: Another example of the "Gnome Religion" (Score:2)
Also, it's not like you can't check the vendor box for your client with a support agreement from Canonical.
Re: (Score:2)
Agree, but you can also use mpv directly (without the thin gnome-mpv in front of it).
vlc is not ideal either (relatively big and heavy), personally I only use it for dvd's.
Re: (Score:2)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fuck is "better desktop integration" mean anyway?
I've run a distro of Linux (in one form or another) dating back to the 90s, and never had an issues with VLC conflicting anywhere.
There is more to this story, or I've just been very lucky...
Re: What? (Score:1)
Maybe it's because VLC does not require systemd dependencies ?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, no, no... we can't have that now, can we? [omgubuntu.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
Which skin causes the playback to magically integrate with the OS's notification bar?
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
On my Mate desktop install, it's painfully obvious which things are borrowed from the Gnome desktop under Mate, such as the firewall manager, network manager, etc, as they all have the horrible headerbar which doesn't fit it at all. Likewise, the Gnome MPV (which despite its name is not part of the Gnome project) uses the awful HeaderBar instead of a proper, decorated window. I don't see how this fits the Mate Desktop at all. If UI integration is the factor, this is a strange choice.
KDE and Qt apps actually integrate very well under Mate Desktop. They pick up my chosen GTK theme (which I will choose, thank you very much Gnome app developers) quite nicely.
That said, this is all a non-story, really. Must be a slow news day. Who cares what installs by default? Just apt-get remove this Gnome MPV/Celluloid package and drop in VLC.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think KDE has a much freer acceptance of other software than GNOME. Yes, they make their own versions of a lot of applications, but so does everyone. KDE doesn't try to force them upon you however, you're welcome to use what you like.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're using the term "UX" wrong.
If your user interface is an experience, for which the user would create an emotional response, then either:
* The user interface is the point of the whole application. The reason for its existence, or:
* The user interface gets in the way for the user. (i.e. you have failed)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, I haven't found KDE to eschew interoperability at all. I just decided to try setting up KDE connect on my phone, and was surprised when I was watching VLC and player controls appeared on my notifications. And when it rang, VLC automatically paused.
Every player I've tried Gnome or KDE or other has automagically worked this way.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, "better desktop integration" meant "Doesn't use that Qt stuff!"
GNOME's had a hate-on for Qt since the 90's.
It is literally why Gnome exists! (Score:2, Informative)
Doesn't anyone remember that Gnome was created *specifically* because Qt had non-open license?
Which itself was not a bad decision, mind you.
So yeah, disliking Qt is the cornerstone of Gnome.
The bad decisions came later. After Qt became open source.
Re: (Score:2)
The fuck is "better desktop integration" mean anyway?
desktop: basically the OS component that faces the user.
integration: the act of combining two things to form a whole.
Maybe read up on the project to understand why this is nothing like VLC and how you can "integrate" it to other things. Or you could click the link for a summarised list of "integrated features". But posting is cooler than educating ones self so I understand why you had to be quick to write.
and never had an issues with VLC conflicting anywhere.
And neither has anyone else which is why I am wondering why you're the only person talking about confli
It's About Time! (Score:5, Funny)
I was just thinking that VLC has become totally annoying. What with it's just fucking works with every-fucking-thing on every-fucking-platform, I'm just over its old musty ass.
Thank goodness Ubuntu is throwing it out in favor of some good old fashioned ultra-beta, never works right, we'll get it in the next release, open source dreck. Fail fast, fail often, as they say.
Re: (Score:2)
and thank goodness this new thing will have perfect desktop integration by the standards of those brought us Unity to make our PC act like a big goddamned cell phone
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting assumptions. MPV is based on MPlayer which actually supports even more formats than VLC does, and generallly is much more stable as well (VLC crashes easily when confronted with things like a network drive disappearing or the computer sleeping during playback).
Re: (Score:2)
Clueless about Linux, are we? (Score:1, Interesting)
Linux has one big media library. That is ffmpeg.
libav is a fork and attempt to rewrite ffmpeg to be cleaner. Advantage: (Still) cleaner. Disadvantage: Lacks all the functionality that those quirks provided. Turns out they were there for a reason. Pick your poison.
VLC is just a media player that uses those libraries. Like every other player.
mplayer being the default one.
And mpv is just the fork of mplayer, to use libav instead of ffmpeg.
VLC is only special in that on other OSes, it comes with ffmpeg & co
Re: (Score:2)
Still, how things are packaged clearly makes a big difference. On windows, VLC is about 80MB, mpv.io is about 25MB. I can also tune mpv.io to run videos on much lower-spec machines reliably. That's not really possible with VLC. Sure, many underlying libraries may be the same, that doesn't means the pros and cons are the same or the experience will be the same.
Goddamn it Ubuntu (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ubuntu, why do you have to keep doing this shit? You could have been the anti-Red Hat; the anti-GNOME.
Yeah but why would they want to? Imagine the business proposal: "We're going to be a company that is completely anti-most-successful-company-in-the-specified-industry. Please invest in us!
Re: (Score:2)
So, you're arguing that Redhat's success is because of GNOME? LOL. What a joke. Are you for real?
Maybe reread the OP's post, put a bit of emphasis on the word immediately before "Red Hat" and try to be a moron next time instead of a compete and utter stupid moron.
VLC is very popular (Score:1)
There must be a back story here. I predict some unhappy people.
Re: (Score:2)
VLC also runs like shit on a lot of configurations. As in, video tearing and artifacts. mplayer or mpv suffer many less of these, or have options to workaround things that VLC's drop-down menu system don't expose.
43Mb??!! (Score:2)
Celluloid? (Score:2)
No thanks. I'm not a fan of using trendy English words as branding. It's hard enough to find the damn library I need for my job when shit is named Supernova or Kudos or Monkey.
Name your software what it is or what it does. If it's a video player for the GNOME project, call it GNOME Video Player or something along those lines.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe your parents know Yaakov about Hebrew?
Name "Jack" in Hebrew: Yaakov.
Re: (Score:2)
A well written and clearly informative response that doesn't attack anyone.
What in the world are you doing on slashdot?
Anyway, thank you.
I had relied on google for the Jack translation... So it must be true...
Missing the point ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of using Ubuntu Mate is to get away from Gnome 3 frameworks and applications.
GNOME 3 apps are banned from my Ubuntu Mate system, thank you very much.
If I'd care for "desktop integration"... (Score:3)
... I could have chosen standard Ubuntu with Gnome 3 in the first place. I didn't, and for a reason, and that was why I had Ubuntu MATE running on all my computers, but MATE stopped perfoming well enough on three of my older machines (two netbooks and a laptop) after I upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04. I suspect this "desktop integration" criterion for choosing the media player is something along exactly those lines which led to 18.04 becoming slower and more resource intensive.
Too bad, because then it was either choose a decidedly lightweight distro like Xfce or LXDE even for every machine, or say goodbye to the concept of one distro for all my machines, even though it had obviously been possible until lately. As it is, I'm using Mint now – Cinnamon edition on the better machines, Xfce on the slower ones, and thanks to Mint's excellent theming they look and feel similar enough so that I don't feel changing to a different OS when I move from desktop to netbook.
Stil I'm sad, because I was a real fan of MATE. I am no more.
Good lord, CALM DOWN (Score:1)
apt remove --purge gnome-mpv
apt install -y vlc
Good god, I get that gnome isn't everyone's thing, but sheesh, relax, people.
Re: (Score:2)
assuming they maintain vlc to continue to work well
assuming a person isn't installing in a bandwidth limited situation
Re: (Score:2)
don't get outside much? we have the $1.50 movie vending machines at grocery stores
Re: (Score:2)
and silly me, I forgot the local library has thousands of DVD and Blu-ray titles for rent for $0
wow, you really don't get out much, do you
Why one or the other? (Score:3)
This just strikes me as a single-ended decision made to further a cause. Not one that works in the end-users best interest.
No way I'm giving up vlc (Score:2)
Ran 19.04 for a short time before downgrading to 18.04 to run AMDGPU Pro drivers for OpenCL. Anyway, I like Ubuntu but there's no way I'm giving up VLC. Just like I'm not giving up useful tools developed for KDE. Like KXStudio. Which runs just fine on Ubuntu under Gnome. VLC does some useful stuff. It has live video transforms, such as frame rotation. And it can quickly cut snippets out of a video stream. Sometimes you don't want to import an hour plus of footage into a NLE when all you need is a few minute
Re: (Score:2)
Re:No way I'm giving up vlc (Score:4, Funny)
If only there were an easy way to download the application of your choice.
If you need your distributor to make such decision (Score:2)
I for one like mpv (the command line original) best, and I totally do not care what media player the makers of some distribution fancy - just install whatever player you like best, and if you insist on not being able to do that, then better avoid Linux.
at least it is only mate (Score:2)
since it look like it is only the mate version of Ubuntu then it will not be an issue for most. Now if they start doing it for the full version of Ubuntu and its offshoots, then it only means I would have to manually install it. no big deal.
Why not Xplayer? (Score:2)
Why do we even have MATE for there to be an Ubuntu MATE edition? Because the Linux Mint project forked GNOME 2.x to make MATE.
What media player does Linux Mint MATE edition ship? One they developed, called Xplayer [github.com].
I use Linux Mint MATE edition on all my Linux computers, and as a result I've been using Xplayer for a long time now. I didn't even really realize that it was a new thing. Xplayer meets the "Just Works" standard (at least IMHO).
I just researched why they made it, and it is part of the "X-Apps"
What is the big deal ? (Score:2)
How is this news worthy ?
It is just a choice of some default software. Keep cool, VLC is still in the repos ! You will just install it manually. I have three multimedia players on my xubuntu 18.04 and i am happy with that.
Amazed they bundled VLC in the first place (Score:2)
Anyway I don't see a major fuss here. GNOME has a powerful streaming media framework (GStreamer) and a media player front end. If it or the default codecs are not sufficient for people they can always install extra codecs and/or VLC instead. Far more im
simple solution (Score:2)
for all the peeps going apeshit about this, remember VLC is just a command away to get installed on your system again.
and the same is true for removing Gnome MPV.
Does Ubuntu prevent you from installing VLC? (Score:1)
It is a systemd/Linux OS. So yeah. (Score:1)
Not a GNU OS of any kind.
Let alone Unix.
The damn logs are in binary! Cumbersome, slow, retarded, ... Poettering.
Re: It is a systemd/Linux OS. So yeah. (Score:3)
Did you know systemd logs are configurable? Or that there's a syslog-ng package that sends systemd journal to a plain text file? Or that you can easily override it on a service by service basis with a single line?
Re: It is a systemd/Linux OS. So Butyeah. (Score:2)
Re: It is a systemd/Linux OS. So Butyeah. (Score:2)
"but... but... you can't just change out the logging; systemd is MONOLITHIC!"
Investment?? (Score:1)
Dude, there is SMplayer *right there*!
Or the many others in your distro's repository!
Most of them based on ffmpeg/libav, like mplayer/mpv, by the way!
Re: (Score:2)
"works better at playing the damn video" better. Lots of people report image-tearing and visual artifacts in VLC. It's why I originally switched to mplayer2 and then mpv. Frustration at VLC not allowing me to fix the video issues. mplayer and mpv just work better to play the damn video.