COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates

[phoronix]

Phoronix: COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates

Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-5-Released

[Quackdoc]

Cosmic player uses iced video player which in turn uses gstreamer. The pipeline it uses is playbin, but cosmic-player could supply it's own pipeline, This is important because it means cosmic-player can only handle two tracks at once which becomes a bit of a sucky situation if you want to use yt-dlp.

Currently you can use cosmic-player $(yt-dlp --format mp4 --get-url URL-HERE) to play videos. If you want better quality, we *can* abuse playbin's external subtitle feature to force it to load a second track, in this cause audio to get yt-dlp working with a higher quality. However cosmic-player does not currently expose suburi, which really should just be called auxuri or something.

EDIT: also for those who do want to use this, or really any other gstreamer based video player, use gst-plugin-va instead of gstreamer-vaapi. Far better performance and reliability. no idea what distro may call it, this is for arch specifically.

[Daktyl198]

Not using libmpv for a media player is certainly a choice.

And as much as I like the concept of COSMIC, I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive them for copying the libadwaita style. At least libadwaita looks good, even if they're the black sheep of Linux toolkits. I can't say the same about the extremely simplistic libcosmic style.

libadwaita is already being seen by non-Linux people as the "Linux GUI toolkit" simply due to how many newbie distros default to Gnome. The only defense against it is that "it's the only one out of dozens that does that!". Once COSMIC is released and inevitably becomes very popular, we're all just going to have to live with every Linux app having fat CSD headerbars.

[Quackdoc]

Not using libmpv for a media player is certainly a choice.

And as much as I like the concept of COSMIC, I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive them for copying the libadwaita style. At least libadwaita looks good, even if they're the black sheep of Linux toolkits. I can't say the same about the extremely simplistic libcosmic style.

libadwaita is already being seen by non-Linux people as the "Linux GUI toolkit" simply due to how many newbie distros default to Gnome. The only defense against it is that "it's the only one out of dozens that does that!". Once COSMIC is released and inevitably becomes very popular, we're all just going to have to live with every Linux app having fat CSD headerbars.

libmpv is not a great option, or even a good option currently. libmpv's render api is limited to the old pipeline and is more or less vo-gpu. This means you are limited to opengl rendering and I don't think you can even do most libplacebo things outside of some janky vf= hacks.

It's really not a great experience, you are limited to ffmpeg's support which for some things can be mediocre at best vs gstreamers plugin system, which yes can be janky, but it beats the snot out of a lot of ffmpeg things a lot of the time. If this was a while ago when we were stuck with the old vaapi plugins I would agree. but the new ones are legitimately good and while not as high quality as libmpv, it wins in other aspects

[rmfx]

The development slowed down quite drastically. What's happening? Even their community and communication involvement dropped to an almost zero level.
It's still looking like the most promising desktop environment, but that energy feels weak compared to their prior mojo.

Is that a drop in motivation when facing the remaining work there is in front of them, or is there a valid explanation (other than you're wrong, it's going very well, you are just too ignorant, even if we are closing 40x fewer issues per month compared to 5 months ago, nothing is slower) ? Like, is the pop-os distro is getting too old, and they are released a 911 cosmic-gnome last version to content customers, shifting focus away from cosmic-epoch ?

It still feels like a clunky level of polish, still missing many features in settings, still very basic apps, except cosmic-terminal because it's relies on alacrity and cosmic-store that is pretty great.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer a late, very high quality DE rather than a half-baked crap made too fast because of deadlines duty, but please communicate about it a bit more.

[sophisticles]

COSMIC Alpha 5 is now shipping the COSMIC Media Player as their new default media player. COSMIC Media Player supports the Vulkan API for rendering and VA-API GPU-accelerated video decoding. COSMIC Media Player doesn't yet support audio playback.

What?!?

This player supports GPU accelerated video decoding but not (software) audio playback?

Are they kidding?

Talk about half-assed.

[Quackdoc]

What?!?

This player supports GPU accelerated video decoding but not (software) audio playback?

Are they kidding?

Talk about half-assed.

99% sure they mean "only audio", if you play a movie in cosmic-player it works fine video and audio, but if you just play a music file it's a black screen, music still plays, but you do have a big black screen

[Lech]

I was surprised it didn't allow mp3 playback. Kinda missing the point of media player to play just videos.

[Quackdoc]

The development slowed down quite drastically. What's happening? Even their community and communication involvement dropped to an almost zero level.
It's still looking like the most promising desktop environment, but that energy feels weak compared to their prior mojo.

Is that a drop in motivation when facing the remaining work there is in front of them, or is there a valid explanation (other than you're wrong, it's going very well, you are just too ignorant, even if we are closing 40x fewer issues per month compared to 5 months ago, nothing is slower) ? Like, is the pop-os distro is getting too old, and they are released a 911 cosmic-gnome last version to content customers, shifting focus away from cosmic-epoch ?

It still feels like a clunky level of polish, still missing many features in settings, still very basic apps, except cosmic-terminal because it's relies on alacrity and cosmic-store that is pretty great.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer a late, very high quality DE rather than a half-baked crap made too fast because of deadlines duty, but please communicate about it a bit more.

in terms of what? it's still very active across the various cosmic projects, smithay and iced. If you go to the github pages of the devs, all of them are still very active.

[Quackdoc]

I was surprised it didn't allow mp3 playback. Kinda missing the point of media player to play just videos.

it does, you just get a big black screen.