Alternatives to Clapper
A GNOME media player built on GStreamer and GTK4, designed for simplicity and ease of use. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Clapper
A GNOME media player built on GStreamer and GTK4, designed for simplicity and ease of use.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Clapper.
Showtime
GNOME's video player, with simple playback controls, subtitles, multiple audio tracks and screenshots.
Showtime is GNOME's own GPL-3.0 video player with fading controls, subtitles, audio tracks and speed control, and it offers deliberately few advanced options.
Celluloid
A simple GTK front end for the mpv video player on Linux.
Celluloid is a GTK front end for mpv on Linux, so playback uses mpv instead of GStreamer and existing mpv configuration and keybindings work unchanged.
VLC media player
A free player that opens almost any video or audio file, disc or stream without installing a codec pack.
VLC media player runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS and plays a wide codec list itself, without depending on installed GStreamer plugins.
Haruna
An open-source KDE video player built on libmpv with automatic playlists and configurable shortcuts.
Haruna is an open-source libmpv player designed for KDE rather than GNOME, with automatic playlists, configurable shortcuts and online video through yt-dlp.
Parole
A lightweight GStreamer-based media player written to fit the Xfce desktop.
Parole is also GStreamer-based but built for Xfce, playing local files, DVDs, CDs and streams, and it is extensible through plugins.
Dragon Player
A simple KDE video player that plays video files and streams with minimal controls.
Dragon Player is a simple KDE video player with mouse shortcuts and track selection, released monthly with KDE Gear instead of fitting the GNOME desktop.
mpv
A minimal, scriptable media player with high quality video output and no real interface to get in the way.
mpv offers scripting, hardware decoding and high quality video output on several desktops, but replaces the GTK4 interface with an on-screen controller and hand-edited config files.
SMPlayer
A front end for mpv and MPlayer that remembers where you stopped in every file you have ever opened.
SMPlayer uses mpv and MPlayer engines on Windows, macOS and Linux, remembers playback position per file, and downloads subtitles, though its Qt interface looks dated.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Decibels
A minimal GNOME audio player that opens and plays individual audio files without a music library.
Amberol
A simple GNOME music player for local files that plays music and nothing else.
Hypnotix
An IPTV streaming application from Linux Mint for live TV, movies and series.
Syncplay
Keep video playback synchronized across a group.
MPC-QT
A reimplementation of Media Player Classic built with Qt and libmpv.
IINA
The mpv engine wrapped in a macOS app that actually looks and behaves like a macOS app.
