Personally, I’m not a fan of Lollypop. At first, I thought the Librem 5 wasn’t reading my el cheapo SD card, because Lollypop didn’t show any of the files on it. It turns out that Lollypop’s interface is just not intuitive and playback has been unreliable. My Linux media player of choice is VLC, but it doesn’t play well with a touchscreen. So far, Totem (aka Gnome Videos) has been working well for me.
The best Phosh Media player for Librem 5 is: Clapper, Livi(video) and Amberol(Music).
Remember que Phosh is GTK mean you need GTK-Libhandy-2 apps.
2 Likes
A stupid question - how do I install Livi?
I checked if flatpak is installed.
Then I had to install flatpak-builder.
Then I did git clone of the source and then from the livi folder I used the command from the following page:
But now I get an error that I don’t have gnome SDK version 40.
Is there a list what one needs in order to install Livi on a fresh L5?
flatpak install flathub org.sigxcpu.Livi
It will be possible install it from Meson, but gstreamer v20 it missing on Pure System, i hope that Purism Team @dos 
backporting Gstreamer to v20 also Pulseaudio v15 for LDAC support for Librem 5.
1 Like
Thanks for the suggestion. For me, though, the winner is Celluloid (Gnome MPV). It works well with the touchscreen and plays all of my files (audio and video). Of course, one of the benefits of Linux is that you can try a bunch of different programs and decide what works best for you.
2 Likes
It has Hardware accelerated Celluloid for L5?
If not it will spending a lot of battery and temp.
I tried Clapper and wow. It works much better on Librem 5 compared to VLC that I used up until today.
Thank you very much for the hint.
2 Likes
According to documentation on GitHub for Celluloid, "Yes, you can enable hardware acceleration using the mpv option --hwdec. You can set this option either by using an mpv config file or putting the option in Extra MPV Options .
I will check if Celluloid is true to Hard Accel to L5 because there are many hardware acceleration ways, and that precisely is not compatible with the acceleration of the L5.
This worked.
Another stupid question. How do I start it from the terminal?
Livi or livi result in Command not found.
Honestly I feel that the choice of the name muPlayer using special Greek character is not particularly wise. This only reduce the usability and confuses the users with no real benefit.
Try flatpak run org.sigxcpu.Livi
I just reflashed my Librem 5 and now Clapper and Livi work worse than before the reflash. Can it be that there is somewhere a HW acceleration setting that is now missing?
Adding the following to ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf makes the bottom video controls bigger, before it was harder to play and pause.
script-opts=osc-scalewindowed=2,osc-scalefullscreen=2
Also touble tap toggles full screen. With these and pipiline from flathub, watching Youtube or Peertube videos are somewhat ok. It only allow you to subscribe to channels and not search, but still better than no app. It uses piped api for better privacy as well.
3 Likes
To play videos hardware accelerated (Video4Linux2), it must be a gstreamer based video player.
The gstreamer v1.18 included in PureOS 10 (Byzantium) only plays a few CODECs in harware.
Starting with gstreamer version >1.2 almost all CODECs are efficiently decoded in HW.
So with Crimson it should get much better!
Until then, a gstremaer-based video player in a container like flatpak, which comes with its own current gstreamer version, is recommended.
Unfortunately, HW acceleration does not work with FFMPEG at the moment, no matter in which version.
That’s a real pitty, because more and also “better” video players are based on FFMPEG.
Surely Purism will fix that,… and at some point we can use VLC, MPV, Kodi, … without burning our fingers ;).
1 Like
Clapper is gstreamer based and works really well (I can feel less heating compared to celluloid). Chaining it with pipeline makes for a good native youtube player.
Clapper does not function for me: I can open the app and attempt to play a MP4 video, but nothing happens.
I also installed some Flatpaks (Clapper, uPlayer,…) from the PureOS store.
Nothing worked!
Try installing Flatpaks from flathub.org.
There are no problems here!
Instead of installing third-party software, I’d prefer to get it from purism.
Maybe it will get better with Crimson?!
1 Like
I know Lollypop works well from the PureOS Store, as I currently use that.
1 Like