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MPV is also a very capable player. There is even an GTK frontend which obeys GNOME HIG and which is called gnome-mpv[0]. Maybe it would be a nice pick for the default video player.

[0] https://github.com/gnome-mpv/gnome-mpv

MPV also has the benefit of having a _really good_ command line API, which is in fact the main way I use it:

   mpv --no-border --autofit-larger=320x200 --loop=inf --volume=60 foo.mp4

It also has built-in support for youtube-dl so that you can do things like `mpv [youtube url]`.

(It's possible that VLC lets you do both of these, of course.)

I never really understood this thing about integration into the desktop environment. It stops at the window manager level for me and the overall style of widgets. I don't notice the difference between QT and GTK applications. The only important thing is that they work.

What I see instead is desktop environments reinventing the wheels to have their own versions of applications that often somebody else did better and work across DEs anyway. Either they have too many developers or they can't make them focus on the core. I understand that it's difficult to make people do things they dont want if they're working for free, but are they?

I checked this list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Core_Applications and I think I never used any application in the conversation and world categories since I've been using Gnome (2009). Not many of the others too. They are just inferior to other native applications or web services or my phone.

MPV is incredible.

The subtitle syncing hotkeys alone are a godsend. It blows all over players out of the water when playing streams under non perfect network conditions. Not to mention the best fast forward / rewind experience, something I only had experienced with the original XBMC.

IIRC, mpv already has native Wayland support, whereas VLC's was lacking. gnome-mpv is pretty nice, though.

I'd rather have the superior player than the superior aesthetics, IMHO.

I think? VLC is the only Qt dependency on there. That means you pull in all of Qt just to run VLC.

If you are making a default install, it is best to only include one or the other toolkit for a lot of reasons:

* Consistency. Gnome and Qt apps, even when themed the same, have different UI metaphors, especially modern GTK3 apps and Qt Quick apps vs everything else.

* Performance and memory. Central to making a fast, responsive, low resource using OS is sharing libraries. Having all your software using the same hot toolkit rendering code paths means - optimally - better cache coherency and - generally - lower ram usage from not having to pull two toolkits into resident memory at the same time.

* Install image size / hard drive disk usage. Full Qt (including webengine) takes up at least 400MB of space. That is both on the iso and in the final install. That isn't a problem for average use cases, but there exist both bandwidth limited and storage limited scenarios where you can still run a modern desktop to consider.

Packaging media players like VLC, mpv, mplayer etc. may result in patent violations. And thus it would be hard to package those in Ubuntu iso images. The safer one might be Totem with gstreamer plugins.

similarly, but: Browser: chromium Video & music player: vlc Ide: atom

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