Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Is Ditching VLC for GNOME MPV

'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.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/06/06/1840240 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

My two cents on mpv / Gnome mpv / Celluloid...
From wikipedia: mpv was forked in 2012 from mplayer2, which was forked in 2010 from MPlayer.
Development of mplayer2 and MPlayer appears to be coming to an end with mpv as the command line media player receiving the ongoing development. The version of mpv currently in the ubuntu 18.04 repository is: 0.27.2. The current latest stable release from the mpv web-site<https://mpv.io/> is 0.29.1 which was released in Oct 2018. With mpv installed the command $ mpv --list-options displays a total of 761 options. These options differ from the options with MPlayer and mplayer2. So if you have bash files that call mplayer and you want to convert them to call mpv, then options associated with the call are likely to need to be changed as well. If you don't feel inclined to read through and learn all 761 options then installing Gnome mpv may be the way to go and you can then just use your mouse to click your way through a reduced set of options. Gnome mpv uses the GTK3+ (other names: GTK, GTK3, Gimp-ToolKit) graphical toolkit to provide the GUI front-end for mpv. In the next few months GTK4+ will be released but it will just be called GTK. Gnome mpv is also install-able from the ubuntu 18.04 repository... $ sudo apt install gnome-mpv The version installed is 0.13, while the latest version available from the web-site<https://github.com/celluloid-player/celluloid/releases> is v0.16 which was released in Jan 2019. Gnome mpv is now called Celluloid so expect installation from repositories in the future to be... $ sudo apt install celluloid I find the name change to Celluloid to be a nuisance as its already a noun that's been in use for over 100 years, so internet searches for Celluloid are going to lead you to a lot of things you are not interested in. cheers, Ian.

On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 05:59:30 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
I find the name change to Celluloid to be a nuisance as its already a noun that's been in use for over 100 years, so internet searches for Celluloid are going to lead you to a lot of things you are not interested in.
I wonder about the connotations of naming it after a material that is notoriously flammable, and prone to degrading and becoming even more dangerous after a few years...
participants (3)
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Ian Stewart
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann