Videos in GNOME 3.38

This is going to be a short post, as changes to Videos have been few and far between in the past couple of releases.

The major change to the latest release is that we've gained Tracker 3 support through a grilo plugin (which meant very few changes to our own code). But the Tracker 3 libraries are incompatible with the Tracker 2 daemon that's usually shipped in distributions, including on this author's development system.

So we made use of the ability of Tracker to run inside a Flatpak sandbox along with the video player, removing the need to have Tracker installed by the distribution, on the host. This should also make it easier to give users control of the directories they want to use to store their movies, in the future.

The release candidate for GNOME 3.38 is available right now as the stable version on Flathub.

New Totem feature(s)

Totem got a few new features recently, courtesy of new contributors (which is a nice thing to see).

The first one to get committed was the tracker-powered video search sidebar, by Javier Goday. Unfortunately, I don't have any nice screenshots as tracker seems to want to index everything but my videos directory.

The other one is a long standing feature request, with the patch provided by Kamil Pawlowski, adding a menu item to select a text subtitle for video files. This means you can get subtitles for your legally downloaded video files, with the typos free of charge.


Update: Everybody loves screenshots. Here's one for the video search feature: