Clapper – A New Gnome Media Player for Linux

Clapper is a free and open-source media player. It was built for GNOME using GJS with the GTK4 toolkit. For its media backend, Clapper uses GStreamer, and it renders everything via OpenGL. The app is built with memory friendliness in mind.

It ships with all the features you expect in a basic media player and more. This includes windowed, floating, and full-screen viewing modes. Other features include using playlists from a file, floating mode, and hardware acceleration.

Note that working with playlists is feature-limited in Flatpak version to contents of user “Videos” directory by default. Clapper can only open playlist files with the .claps file extension. There should be a single file path per line which can be either relative or absolute. Playlists can also contain HTTP links instead of file paths.

For example,

$ ls *.mp4 > video.claps

Once you have a playlist, you can open it with clapper like any other file and they can be edited later.

Clapper’s floating mode is a borderless window without a header and fewer player controls. To enter this mode, simply press a button with arrow points down on the header bar (next to the fullscreen button).

When in this mode, you can move around and resize the video widget with a mouse. Control the volume to scroll and right-click to toggle playback. To enter fullscreen from this mode, simply double-click.

The floating window automatically stays above all other windows and can be set to show in all workspaces in the player preferences.

Features in Clapper

  • Free and open-source. Source code available on GitHub.
  • Clean, clutter-free user interface.
  • Hardware acceleration.
  • Floating mode.
  • Adaptive user interface.
  • Use playlist from a file.
  • Chapters on the progress bar.
  • MPRIS support.

Install Clapper on Linux

The Flatpak package has all the dependencies and codes required coupled with several patches added to enable Clapper to work better. Until the updates are added upstream, Flathub is the recommended download source and you can download Clapper from Flathub.

There are pre-built packages available for Fedora and OpenSUSE in the developer’s GitHub repo. They are automatically built on each git commit and are thus considered unstable. Use with caution.

For Arch Linux, Clapper is available to download from the AUR.

Is this your first time hearing about Clapper? Which lightweight video media player have you been using? Are you satisfied with it? Get in the comments section to share your experience with us.

Divine Okoi is a cybersecurity postgrad with a passion for the open-source community. With 700+ articles covering different topics in IT, you can always trust him to inform you about the coolest tech.

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3 thoughts on “Clapper – A New Gnome Media Player for Linux”

  1. Been using it for a while now as my default video/movie player. Works extremely well. Just one issue, the Dev needs to update as the gnome 33 platform runtime has been hit with the end of support hammer.

    Reply
    • @Daniel,

      Thank you for your feedback! We’re glad to hear that you’ve been enjoying Clapper as your go-to video/movie player. We appreciate you bringing the GNOME 33 platform runtime support issue to our attention.

      We understand the importance of keeping software updated and compatible with the latest platforms. Rest assured, we’ll pass this to development team for consideration in upcoming updates.

      Thanks for being a valued member of our community!

      Reply

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