In Operation
This is what you’ll see when starting GridPlayer.
If you right click on the window, you can add files and URLs, open a playlist, as well as access lots of settings. The software supports the following URL schemas: http, https, mms, mmsh, rtp, rtsp, and udp courtesy of streamlink and yt-dlp.
Here’s an image of 4 YouTube streams being played simultaneously. As GridPlayer uses VLC, there’s support for a huge range of video and audio formats. By default all videos are muted, but you can unmute one or all of the videos.
As the image below confirms, they are being played back with hardware decoding (see the Video Engine line). Our Intel NUC 13 Pro Mini PC with its Iris Xe onboard graphics plays the four streams without breaking a sweat.
Playing 9 streams simultaneously on the NUC increases Render/3D to 40% and Video to 24%. Playback remains flawless. Remember, this is just with onboard graphics.
The software offers a configurable grid layout. And you can swap videos all with drag-n-drop which is pretty cool.
You can control the video aspect, playback speed, zoom and much more. There are plenty of other customization options.
Summary
GridPlayer is pretty unique. It wraps some awesome open source software into something quite special. It certainly isn’t the finished article though.
We really recommend GridPlayer if you’re the type of person like Grandad from Only Fools and Horses (a hugely popular British tv programme where Grandad liked to watch multiple TVs at the same time).
GridPlayer is cross-platform software. Besides Linux, it runs under macOS and Windows.
Website: github.com/vzhd1701/gridplayer
Support:
Developer: Vlad
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
GridPlayer is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Give GridPlayer a whirl and let us know how you get on in the Comments section below.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Related Software
| Media Players | |
|---|---|
| VLC | Cross-platform multimedia player and framework |
| mpv | Media player for the command line. libmpv is used by many front-ends |
| QMPlay2 | Qt based video and audio player |
| MPlayer | Movie player which runs on many systems |
| SMPlayer | Qt based MPlayer front-end |
| GridPlayer | Play multiple videos simultaneously |
| Parole | Modern simple media player based on the GStreamer framework |
| MPC-QT | Clone of Media Player Classic |
| clapper | GNOME media player built using GJS with GTK4 toolkit |
| Totem | Movie player for the GNOME desktop based on GStreamer |
| Dragon Player | Multimedia player with a focus on simplicity rather than features |
| xine | Video player for playing CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. |
| Showtime | GNOME media player |
| Glide | Simple and minimalistic media player |
| Phantom Player | Simple video player |
| Daikhan | Media player for the modern desktop |
| QtAV | Cross-platform multimedia framework based on Qt and FFmpeg |
| Rage | Simple video and audio player |
| Kaffeine | Simple, easy to use, full featured media player |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
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