Qt6-based VLC/MPV alternatives?

ExecutorElassus · Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2025 1:13 pm Post subject: Qt6-based VLC/MPV alternatives?

So, the ebuilds for smplayer and VLC both refer explicitly to Qt5, which I'm doing my best to eliminate. I'd like alternatives to both, but really all I'm looking for is a lightweight video player that's built (optimally) against Qt6 libraries, or otherwise has minimal UI dependencies. What alternatives are out there for an MPV frontend, or to use VLC's engine?

Cheers,

EE

eeckwrk99 · Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2025 10:12 pm Post subject:

Haruna maybe?

Ionen · Developer Joined: 06 Dec 2018 Posts: 2891

fwiw vlc already supports Qt6 (see vlc-9999.ebuild), we may just not see the release of vlc4 in our lifetime (has become bit of a running gag like gimp3 for how long it's taking, albeit gimp3 is becoming real now). If you opt to use 9999, note that it'll most likely break packages that depend on vlc (like phonon-vlc, which would be a problem if you're using Plasma), but if used standalone then that doesn't matter.

I use mpv myself, but without a frontend, so I don't know if there is anything to recommend there

CooSee · Veteran Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 1507 Location: Earth

using mpv with mpv-plugin/uosc, works great

without sometimes annoying QT upgrade / blocking issues

no QT at all on my Hyprland / Hyde dotfiles system.

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ExecutorElassus · Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2025 8:35 am Post subject:

Amazing tips, thanks everybody. Haruna looks nice, but it also seems to need a bunch of extra KDE stuff installed on my system, so I think I'll avoid that. I'll add vlc-9999 to my accept_keywords file to update that for a standalone player, but I think uosc looks really nice and simple for just directly playing video files from my file manager.

For what it's worth, the dev for smplayer did say that he figured he'd "probably" have to get around to Qt6 "eventually," so i guess it'll get there at some point. But for now, I'm happy with just a simple GUI added to mpv directly.

Cheers,

EE

eeckwrk99 · Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2025 9:02 am Post subject:

ExecutorElassus · Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2025 9:54 am Post subject:

also, it turns out that vlc-9999 is now segfaulting with an error in libQt6Quick.so.6.8.1, and I have no idea why. So I guess it's mpv for now.

Really weird. I had it running initially, then remerged it with USE="opus", but also removed phonon, phonon-vlc, and phonon-gstreamer from my system. qtdeclarative, the owner of libQt6Quick, doesn't depend on any of those, so I'm not sure that's the source.

But in any case, uosc works great and is suitably lightweight, so I'm happy with that. Thanks again for the help.

Now if I could just get all my programs to use the same theme/style engine. I have GTK3, GTK4, Qt5, Qt6, and a bunch of apps (mostly webbrowsers) that use their own custom ones. But that's a different post …

Thanks again.