Clapper can open playlist files. Playlist file is a standard text file with a .claps file extension. It should contain a single filepath per line. The filepath can be either absolute or relative. Playlist can even contain HTTP links instead of filepaths.

Here is an example how to easily create a playlist file inside your music directory:

ls *.mp3 > music.claps

Once you have a playlist, open it with Clapper like any other file. Since the playlist is a normal text file with filepaths only, you can always edit it later in any text editor or echo more media to it. Easy, right?

Hardware acceleration

Using hardware acceleration is highly recommended. As stated in GStreamer wiki:

In the case of OpenGL based elements, the buffers have the GstVideoGLTextureUploadMeta meta, which
efficiently copies the content of the VA-API surface into a GL texture.

Clapper uses OpenGL based sinks, so when VA-API is available, both CPU and RAM usage is much lower. Especially if you have gst-plugins-bad 1.18+ with new vah264dec decoder which shares a single GL context with Clapper and uses DRM connection. If you have an AMD/Intel GPU, I highly recommend this new decoder.

To use VA-API with H.264 videos, make sure you have gst-plugins-bad 1.18+. For other codecs additionally install gstreamer1-vaapi. Verify with:

gst-inspect-1.0 vah264dec
gst-inspect-1.0 vaapi

On some older GPUs you might need to export GST_VAAPI_ALL_DRIVERS=1 environment variable.

Other acceleration methods (supported by GStreamer) should also work, but I have not tested them due to lack of hardware.

Requirements

Clapper uses GTK4 along with GStreamer bindings from GI repository, so if your distro ships them as separate package, they must be installed first. Additionally Clapper requires these GStreamer elements:

Attention: gtk4glsink is my own port of current GStreamer gtkglsink to GTK4. The element is not part of GStreamer yet (pending review). Fedora package is available in my OBS repository. It will be installed along with Clapper if you add my repo to dnf package manager. Otherwise you might want to build it yourself from source code of my gstreamer GTK4 branch.

Other required plugins (codecs) depend on video format.

Recommended additional packages you should install manually via package manager:

gstreamer-libav - codecs required to play most videos
gstreamer-vaapi - hardware acceleration

Please note that packages naming varies by distro.

Packages

The pkgs folder in this repository contains build scripts for various package formats. You can use them to build package yourself or download one of pre-built packages:

Debian, Fedora, openSUSE & Ubuntu

Pre-built packages are available in my repo (see status)

Arch Linux

You can get Clapper from the AUR: clapper-git, or

cd pkgs/arch
makepkg -si

Installation from source code

Run in terminal:

meson builddir --prefix=/usr/local
sudo meson install -C builddir

GStreamer elements installation:

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt install \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-base \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
  gstreamer1.0-gl \
  gstreamer1.0-gtk4 \
  gstreamer1.0-libav \
  gstreamer-vaapi

Fedora

Enable RPM Fusion and run:

sudo dnf install \
  gstreamer1-plugins-base \
  gstreamer1-plugins-good \
  gstreamer1-plugins-good-gtk4 \
  gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free \
  gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-extras \
  gstreamer1-libav \
  gstreamer1-vaapi

openSUSE

sudo zypper install \
  gstreamer-plugins-base \
  gstreamer-plugins-good \
  gstreamer-plugins-good-gtk4 \
  gstreamer-plugins-bad \
  gstreamer-plugins-libav \
  gstreamer-plugins-vaapi

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S \
  gst-plugins-base \
  gst-plugins-good \
  gst-plugin-gtk4 \
  gst-plugins-bad-libs \
  gst-libav \
  gstreamer-vaapi

Special Thanks

Many thanks to sp1ritCS for creating and maintaining package build files.