News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
VLC, the popular free open-source media player, released new 3.0.23 version few days ago for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
This is a small release that fixed some bugs, updated the dark palette, and improved the compatibility for recent dependency libraries.
MPV, the popular free open-source media player, released new 0.40.0 version after half an year of development.
The new MPV release added NVIDIA RTX Video HDR support, which can be enabled by using --vf=d3d11vpp=nvidia-true-hdr option. And, HDR is now natively supported when using direct rendering (DRM) and dmabuf-wayland on Linux.
The release added new clipboard property with native backends for Windows, macOS, and Linux on Wayland, allowing for native clipboard access, which is useful for scripting.
The on-screen control now offers right-click menu options. User can now right-click on play/pause button to choose whether loop current playback or not, and right-click on volume icon to select audio device.
Right-click on volume icon to choose audio device
MPV 0.40.0 also introduced mpv:// protocol, which can be used to start mpv from web browser or anything that would trigger url handler for given protocol.
Other changes include Windows support in umpv helper script, support for HDR metadata, as well as:
--playlist-exts and --archive-extsMPV does not provide official packages. It however offers links to the source code, and unofficial Windows, macOS, and Linux packages in its website via the link below:
For Ubuntu 22.04 (without libmpv), Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 24.10, I’ve built the new release package into this unofficial PPA with amd64 (AMD/Intel) and arm64/armhf (e.g., RasPi) platforms support.
To add the PPA and install mpv 0.40 from it, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run commands below one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/mpv
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mpv
(Optionally) you may remove the PPA by using command:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/mpv
And remove the mpv package if you want via command:
sudo apt remove --autoremove mpv
MPV, the popular free open-source Linux media player, released version 0.39.0 last week. Here are the new features and Ubuntu PPA for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 users.
The new MPV 0.39.0 introduced Video Super Resolution scaling support with Intel and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It’s a technology that can use your GPU to upscale low resolution video to higher resolutions. For AMD GPUs, the feature will be integrated into the FFmpeg library.
According to the official release note, the feature is implemented through the d3d11va filter, meaning that it’s Windows only. To enable it, either use vf set d3d11vpp=scale=nvidia:scale-target in your mpv.conf file or see the official documentation for the command line options.
MPV media player
Celluloid, free open-source GTK4 GUI front-end for MPV, released new 0.27 version hours ago.
Celluloid, formerly GNOME MPV, is a media player interacts with mpv via the client API, allowing access to mpv’s powerful playback capabilities, while providing a modern user interface that looks native in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with GNOME Desktop.
The new 0.27 release introduced floating header-bar in the windowed mode. It can be enabled, along with floating controls, either in “Preference” dialog or by running gsettings command. They only appear when moving mouse cursor over the video, so user can watch video without distraction.
Floating header-bar & controls only appear on mouse hover
GNOME, the default desktop for Ubuntu, expects to replace its core Totem video player with ‘Showtime’, which is still in development stage.
Due to switch to GTK4, GNOME has replaced some of the core apps, including image viewer, text editor, camera app, and terminal emulator. And, Decibels is proposed as core app for playing audio files.
As the current Totem video player has not been maintained for nearly a year and sticks to GTK3, Showtime is submitted and accepted into the GNOME Incubator, which will be the core app if it reaches the required maturity.
MPV, the popular free open-source media player, announced new 0.38.0 release few days ago!
The release improved --deinterlace with auto value, and --deinterlace-field-parity to automatically turn on deinterlacing. It can improve the overall clarity, sharpness of the video, by converting interlaced video (commonly found in analog television, VHS, Laserdisc, digital television (HDTV)) into a progressive form.
Without using config file, users can now press and hold Ctrl key then use mouse wheel scrolling to zoom in or zoom out the video playback.
Ctrl + Mouse Wheel to zoom in/out
After more than a year of development, Kodi media player 21, code-name “Omega”, is finally released!
Kodi 21 is a new major release. It’s now based on FFmpeg 6.0, that features Radiance HDR image support, VAAPI decoding and QSV decoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9, MediaCodec decoder, and various other exciting new features, see ffmpeg.org for details.
For macOS, the release supports HiDPI (retina) displays using its native implementations for window displays. And, it fixed crash on speech recognition activation, improved window resizing when moving (or fallback when display disconnected) from one display to another, and implemented Hotkeycontroller for media keys.
Continue Reading…
QMPlay2, the free open-source Qt media player, released version 24.03.16 few days ago.
QMPlay2 is a Qt based media player that uses FFmpeg as backend for most video and audio codecs support. It also supports Audio CD, raw files, Rayman 2 music and chiptunes, as well as ALSA, PulseAudio or PipeWire sound servers. And, it has built-in a browser to search & play YouTube videos.
The most recent 24.03.16 release added better support for FFmpeg 6.1, and experimental Vulkan Video decoder support. So, since this release, the media player now supports hardware accelerated video playback through following APIs:
QMPlay2 YouTube browser
Parole, the lightweight media player for XFCE Desktop, released version 4.18.1 few days ago.
The new release updates the app icons with 32px, 64px, 96px sizes support, so it should have a cleaner look in system menus like App Finder, Whisker Menu.
The extensions icons have been updated using newer Xfce palette, and semi-transparent borders giving it a sharper look in dark themes.
The system tray icon now is disabled outside X11. And, it now supports middle click actions to control video playback:
Other changes in the release include:
At the moment of writing, there’s no binary package of Parole 4.18.1 for Ubuntu.
But it’s not hard to compile the package from the source (tested in XUbuntu 22.04):
sudo apt install debhelper-compat gtk-doc-tools intltool libclutter-1.0-dev libclutter-gtk-1.0-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libnotify-dev libtagc0-dev libxfce4ui-2-dev libxfconf-0-dev pkg-config xfce4-dev-tools
./configure
make -j4
sudo make install
NOTE: It by default installs the parole executable to /usr/local/bin without overriding the pre-installed one. Meaning you’ll have 2 versions of the media player installed in your system, while the app icon in menu will launch the newer 4.18.1 version.
(Uninstall) By opening the source folder in terminal, you may also uninstall the media player by running command:
sudo make uninstall
For VLC users who prefer installing the player via the classic .deb package, here’s an Ubuntu PPA contains the most recent (3.0.23 updated) for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 25.04/25.10, and Ubuntu 24.04.
VLC media player is available in Ubuntu system repository, but always old. For the most recent version, VideoLAN provides Snap package, which is however stuck at version 3.0.20 and runs in sandbox environment.
