Fedora weighs dropping Showtime over Flatpak-only bugs

Fedora Workstation may replace Showtime as its default video player after GNOME developer Michael Catanzaro argued the project’s Flatpak-only bug-report policy makes it unfit to ship as a core app.

Users on Fedora have reported that Showtime can enter a broken state when opening certain videos, including HEVC/x265 files and some phone-recorded MP4s. After a missing-codec prompt or sometimes with no prompt at all, the player shows no window, keeps running as a background process, and blocks every subsequent attempt to open video until the process is killed by hand. Totem, the previous default, at least surfaced a visible warning for missing codecs instead of failing silently.

Catanzaro said filing the problem in Red Hat Bugzilla is effectively useless because Showtime developers will not see those reports. Upstream documentation states the project accepts bugs only for Flatpak installs. He told the GNOME release team that core apps exist precisely so distributions can package them, and an upstream that refuses distro reports should not remain in GNOME core or as Fedora’s default. His preference is that Showtime reverse the policy; otherwise Fedora should switch to another player.

Other participants noted that some failures may be packaging or codec-format edge cases rather than pure upstream defects, and several users still prefer Showtime to Totem. Catanzaro rejected the packaging distinction as the usual case, saying most such bugs live in upstream code and that an app nobody will investigate for Fedora leaves Workstation users without recourse.