Celluloid
Version: 0.16 Web: https://github. com/celluloid-player/celluloid
Celluloid is the new name for GNOME MPV,A movie player beloved by a fair few Linux users. So why the change of name? Well, celluloid is a transparent flammable plastic once used for making cinematographic film. Also, the new name better fits the GNOME desktop guidelines, in which each app takes a related noun for its name.
Celluloid is a front-end to MPV, which seems a viable alternative to VLC. In brief, MPV is a fork of a fork of
Mplayer, and it supports nearly everything that people usually demand from VLC. This includes a great variety of supported media formats (via Ffmpeg), VDPAU and VAAPI video acceleration and a full-featured CLI mode.
Celluloid provides a simple and clean UI for MPV: there are no switchers, levers or toggles to get in your way, all you see is your video content with a thin playback control bar below and a standard GTK3 header bar above. The playlist area is hidden by default but you can reveal it by choosing the respective item in
Celluloid’s hamburger menu. The player can also save and load playlists in the same way. If you previously
used the command-line version of MPV with a set of custom arguments, you can transfer it to Celluloid by accessing the Options > Other menu and pasting arguments into the dedicated text field.
We liked Celluloid for its ability to open and play almost everything, from local AVI/MKV files to internet radio and various streams – yet the player was almost invisible and non-distracting. In full-screen mode,
Celluloid offers a nice semi-transparent OSD, with playback controls appearing when you wiggle your mouse around when something is playing.
Use Celluloid with MPV 0.29 or newer. The player requires a basic set of GTK3 build dependencies and implies using Meson and Ninja for compilation. Use it like this:
$ meson build && cd build && ninja && sudo ninja install
Alternatively, grab the Flatpak package from Flathub.