Thoughts on Media Players for the Librem 5

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.

:woozy_face:

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.

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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 :pray: backporting Gstreamer to v20 also Pulseaudio v15 for LDAC support for Librem 5.

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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.

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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.

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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?