SMPlayer

The QT application SMPlayer is – even if its design looks dated – the most luxurious front end for the video codec omnivore Mplayer. To use mpv as the base software instead of MPlayer, it must be configured under Settings > General > Multimedia module. To use hardware acceleration, you should also select the best output driver for your hardware under General > Video. For Nvidia CPUs this is VDPau, for Intel VAApi.

The SMPlayer developers have added SMTube to their software, which enables the playback of YouTube streams entirely without a web browser. If YouTube access should ever be “broken”, the developers quickly endeavor to make adjustments, which can be installed with a mouse click independently of Ubuntu’s package management. Thanks to mpv’s connection to the youtube-dl command line program, this also works with many other streaming video websites.

Installation

SMPlayer may be installed easily from Ubuntu’s Universe repository:

sudo apt install smplayer smtube

For Ubuntu, the project homepage recommends a PPA, but it has updates only for Ubuntu versions up to 22.04 LTS:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer
sudo apt-get update

Alternativen

Celluloid (previously known as Gnome-mpv) is a lightweight GTK frontend für mpv. Haruna does the same for KDE and more, because it can play YouTube videos.