GNOME 49 Finally to Use Showtime as Default Video Player

Due to GTK4 port, GNOME introduced some new core apps to replace the old ones. They include Loupe Image Viewer, Gnome Console, Gnome Camera, Decibels Audio Player, Gnome Text Editor.

Now, the developer team is going to replace the default video editor Totem with Showtime in the next 49 desktop release.

Showtime is a video player started in development more than a year ago. It features GStreamer plugins as backend for video and audio playback, GPU hardware acceleration support, and extensions through FFmpeg. And, it uses GTK4 + LibAdwaita toolkit for its modern user interface.

The video player was submitted into GNOME Incubator, the place holds projects that are considered for GNOME Core and GNOME Development tools. Now, it’s finally accepted as default according to this post:

Video Player (codenamed Showtime) is replacing Videos (Totem) as GNOME’s default video player.

It will be included in GNOME 49, but it can already be installed from Flathub.

If everything goes well, it will be the default video player for next GNOME Desktop 49, which is planned to be released on September 17, as default desktop for next Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43. Though, as you know Ubuntu MAY or MAY NOT take use new Gnome core apps as default.

How to Install Showtime Video Player in current Ubuntu releases

Showtime has been made into Ubuntu universe repository as optional player since 25.04. User may either search & install it in App Center (filter by Debian package), or press Ctrl+Alt+T to terminal and run command to install:

sudo apt install showtime

NOTE: Like Totem, Showtime package in Ubuntu lacks some codecs due to legal reason! If you got “Missing Plugin” issue when trying to play a video, run command below to manually install the codecs:

sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

For current Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10, and most other Linux, the player is available to install as Flatpak package that runs in sandbox environment.

• First, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to enable Flatpak support:

  sudo apt install flatpak

• Then, install the Flatpak package via command:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Showtime.flatpakref

After installed the video player, either start it from GNOME Overview (log out and back in if app icon is not visible) or run the command below to launch from terminal:

flatpak run org.gnome.Showtime

And, use the command below to check updates:

flatpak update org.gnome.Showtime

Uninstall Showtime

To uninstall the video player installed from system repository, use command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove showtime

To uninstall the Flatpak package, run:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.gnome.Showtime

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.

Source: UbuntuHandbook