Celluloid, GTK4 GUI for MPV, Adds Floating Header-bar, Faster Loading

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.

The release also improved mpv scripts support. It now supports for loading script-opts files, and loading scripts in directories (e.g., sub-folders in $HOME/.config/celluloid/scripts). As well, the plugin manager can now detect and delete plugins in directories.

According to the Github releases page, Celluloid 0.27 also speed up the main window loading time, though I cannot feel the difference in my test in Ubuntu laptop. It also added Alt + Arrow Keys to pan video left, right, up, or down, Alt + Plus/Minus to zoom in/out video, and Alt + Space to reset to default.

For watching online videos, the media player now is more friendly by displaying “Loading” screen instead of blank, during initialization and buffering.

Other changes in Celluloid include:

• Set --slang=auto by default,
• Remove support for the mpv property “border”,
• Hide playlist button in full-screen mode,
• Remove colon from labels,
• Fix getting stuck on load screen when opening subtitle files,
• Change the icon of “Interface” in Preference dialog.

How to Install Celluloid 0.27

Besides building from source code, Celluloid is available to install via following ways.

Option 1: Ubuntu PPA that contains the .deb package for Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04. Just press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, and run the commands below one by one to add PPA & install the media player:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xuzhen666/gnome-mpv

sudo apt update

sudo apt install celluloid

Option 2: All current Ubuntu releases can install the media player as Snap package (though NOT updated to 0.27 at the moment of writing), which runs in sandbox environment. Just search for and install it in Ubuntu Software or App Center.

Option 3: For all Linux, the player is also available to install as Flatpak package that runs in sandbox. And, Ubuntu users can run the 2 commands below one by one to install the package:

sudo apt install flatpak

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/io.github.celluloid_player.Celluloid.flatpakref

Uninstall Celluloid

To uninstall the media player deb package, open terminal and run command:

sudo apt remove celluloid

Also remove the PPA via command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:xuzhen666/gnome-mpv

For the Snap package, use either App Center (Ubuntu Software) or run command:

snap remove --purge celluloid

To uninstall the Flatpak package, use command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data io.github.celluloid_player.Celluloid

Also, run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time dependency libraries.