After eleven months in development following its previous 0.8 release, Clapper, an open-source media player for Linux built on GTK4 and GStreamer, has just released version 0.10.
The main novelty is the migration of MPRIS, Server, and Discoverer functionality out of the core application and into enhancer plugins. These features are now deprecated as built-in components. Applications that bundle Clapper as part of containerized distributions are advised to disable these features at build time and instead ship them as plugins.
For Flatpak applications, the new implementations can be provided as runtime extensions, and Clapper will automatically prefer enhancer-based versions when both are present on the system.
On the application side, Clapper 0.10 introduces configurable enhancer plugins via a new Tweaks tab in the preferences window.
Several usability and stability improvements accompany this, including a slightly wider URI entry dialog, drag-and-drop support between lists across different windows, bundled custom speed icons, and fixes for crashes related to auto-resize behavior and drag-and-drop into an empty queue.
Moreover, an advanced frame (frame-step) function has been added, accessible via the “E” key, alongside an option in the info dialog to preview the active GStreamer pipeline. The build system now uses modern appstream validation instead of appstream-util, and deprecated Adwaita 1.6 APIs have been addressed.
Regarding Clapper core API, new functionality includes access to pipeline graph data, detailed message signaling from the player, and runtime version information for external applications. Enhancer plugins gain persistent configurable properties, caching support for extractable enhancers, event messaging between the app and playback reactables, and the ability to define expiration dates for harvested data.
Support for Lua-based enhancers has been added, and new interfaces enable custom playlist parsing and playback handling. Media handling is further improved with better tag and metadata extraction, including the initial population of tag lists for media items.
Changes also extend to the GTK API. Timeline markers in the seek bar can now use custom colors, and the ClapperGtkVideo widget has been split into a new ClapperGtkAv base class. A dedicated ClapperGtkAudio widget has been introduced for audio-focused players, along with example Python audio player implementations.
Additional fixes address sink property type checks in the video widget. Beyond these highlights, Clapper 0.10 includes numerous smaller bug fixes, cleanups, and documentation updates.
For more information, see the changelog.
