Developer Sean M. Davis announced this past weekend the availability of a new stable release of his open-source and popular Parole Media Player, which is usually found pre-installed along with the light Xfce desktop environment.
Parole Media Player 0.9.0 has been in development for more than a year, and it adds a handful of new features and improvements that some of you might found interesting. For example, there’s now a new “mini mode” that can be enabled from the right-click context menu if you don’t want to see the entire window of the player.
This release also re-enables the double buffering support for the X11 and XV video outputs, though it looks like Ubuntu users have already had the patch for a while now. Additionally, new play and replay icons have been implemented in the player content area to allow users to easily play and replay video or audio streams.
Users can now load plugins by name
Another interesting feature implemented in the Parole Media Player 0.9.0 release is the ability to load plugins by name instead of the full path (e.g. plugin-name.so). Furthermore, the new version replaces or drops some of the most deprecated API (Application Programming Interface) calls.
“Most deprecated API calls have been dropped or replaced. We’re not dropping GtkStatusIcon yet, the notification area lives on in Xfce,” said Sean M. Davis in the release announcement. “The window title and content title are now set to the playing filename if no ID3 tags are found.”
Last but not least, Parole Media Player 0.9.0 updates both the desktop file and related AppStream file to comply with the new “reverse-DNS” standard (e.g. org.xfce.Parole). You can download the source tarball right now from our website if you plan on compiling the software on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.
