The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 20:01 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (13 responses)

Odd that MPlayer didn't make the list—I've been a happy MPlayer user for years now.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 20:04 UTC (Mon) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (7 responses)

Thinking exactly the same thing. I actually only use mplayer, but I guess folks out there don't like command line (I know, it has a GUI also, but I never use it anyway).

Plus, it was one of the first players out there - and an highly optimized one.

Alvie

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 21:08 UTC (Mon) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

there's a GNOME mplayer frontend, for the cli-averse.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 21:35 UTC (Mon) by loevborg (guest, #51779) [Link] (5 responses)

In my opinion, the pick of the pack for Linux is SMplayer. It's an exquisite mplayer frontend, which combines all the beloved features of that old workhorse with the ease of use of a well thought-out GUI. (For example: easy jumping back and forth in subtitles; drag and drop of subtitles files to a running movie; it remembers the position in the movie where you left off the last time.) Best of all, it's actively developed (in contrast to mplayer's home-brew GUI, which has long been abandoned). Give it a try!

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 22:11 UTC (Mon) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (4 responses)

I agree, SMplayer(thus MPlayer) is definitely the best video player for Linux out there. After that comes Totem+Gstreamer. After that, the void. VLC, quite frankly, sucks!

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 22:13 UTC (Mon) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link]

Ah, I forgot, I'd place Gnome-Mplayer too before Totem.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:30 UTC (Mon) by maro (guest, #34315) [Link] (2 responses)

As much as I dislike VLC, I've found that it's the only player that allows
me to play DVD's, which is something I do on a daily basis. I realize there
are legal problems with DVD playback, but it is truly sad that all-but-one
open source players in 2010 are still not able to do this when the other
platforms has had numerous applications for this in well over a decade. I
can imagine that for people new to Linux, this is quite a big WTF.

I'd love to be proven wrong or hear of any alternatives though.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 0:00 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

Anything that uses GStreamer (e.g., totem) has had decent DVD support for quite some time.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 0:08 UTC (Tue) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link]

...and Xine, and MPlayer, and...

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 20:15 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (2 responses)

I agree. Mplayer is the most reliable player I've tried, in the sense that
it handles the widest range of input/output options. But it doesn't have
a spiffy GUI, and so far as I know cannot deal with DVD menus. After that
I would place the totem/gstreamer player in second place - another curious
omission from the list. I've never had any luck with xine, with or
without wrapping it in Kaffeine. As to VLC, I quote from the
article: "VLC is a bit more complex to get started with...", with which I
can only concur.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:31 UTC (Mon) by codebeard (guest, #63144) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, mplayer does support DVD menus: mplayer dvdnav:///

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 18:21 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I've had to use mplayer's support for dvd navigation to rip dvds occasionally.

Sony/BMG likes to put bogus chapter information and physical defects into their DVDs and the only way to properly play some of them is from the DVD menu. I had the newest Batman movie that I got for a present and I wanted to have a copy for my phone. Using mplayer/mencoder support for dvdnav stuff I was able to get the movie ripped quite easily were more naive tools would of failed.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 20:48 UTC (Mon) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link]

indeed still a superior choice imo, certainly top5 over all the bloatware

me too

Posted Feb 22, 2010 21:58 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Yup. mplayer gets my vote.

Playing audio files (such as lectures) at faster than normal without raising the pitch is great:

mplayer -af scaletempo=scale=1.5 the_file.ogg

And I often find that trying to skip forward or backwards in other players leads to the play returning to some fixed point, but with mplayer it skips reliably.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 20:40 UTC (Mon) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (10 responses)

All media players use ffmpeg libraries for video decoding, etc. The best
players are those using GStreamer, because GStreamer is modular, and
provides an ffmpeg plugin.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 21:27 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (8 responses)

I wish I could find one that used gstreamer, supported a decent
full-screen mode with keybindings for smaller and larger
fast-forward/rewind (like mplayer and xine do), and were vaguely sane to
compile. Maybe banshee is, but I've been steering clear of the C# monster
so I haven't tried it yet. I haven't found anything else yet.

(It's amazing how many GUIish video players don't support a fullscreen
mode without controls and other GUI elements cluttering the screen. vlc
does. Any others?)

(disclaimer: it's a couple of years since I last hunted for a decent video
player.)

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 21:49 UTC (Mon) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link] (5 responses)

Have you tried Totem yet? It's the default GNOME video player.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:01 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Totem, hm, just tried it for the first time in months. This time it
doesn't crash, unlike last time I tried, but the sound is so juddery it's
unusable. It seems to be using pulseaudio directly (the lethal juddering
is normally a sign of using the pulseaudio alsa plugin).

I don't seem to be having much luck with PA and video players right now.
If they don't freeze solid on first fast-forward, they judder :/ I guess
PA (and fast-forward/rewind) is the only common factor.

I noted the freeze (the only class of failure I'd then noticed) on the PA
list an hour ago. I'm sure it'll get fixed soon enough... there's
definitely a bug here. Paging Lennart, you're our only hope!

(well, OK, I'll try to track the bug down myself, but it's 11pm here, so
not tonight.)

totem packaging

Posted Feb 23, 2010 3:56 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Totem was crashing at startup here, too, for a few weeks until I fixed it with "apt-get install totem-common". Turned out that recently packaged versions depend on a similarly recent version of totem-common, but don't list the dependency in the package metadata. To be precise, totem 2.28.5 crashes when run with totem-common 2.28.1, at least on vanilla Debian unstable.

I suppose we still need an occasional reminder why it's called "unstable".

For a long time Gstreamer-derived programs failed frequently, but not for the last two years. Now Xine is the least reliable video player, and mplayer often fails where totem succeeds. I do not often need to try VLC.

totem packaging

Posted Feb 23, 2010 13:41 UTC (Tue) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

Please report the bug to the Debian BTS, if you haven't done so already.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:11 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

I use Totem and Mplayer.

And Totem does not clutter the screen with GUI elements in full screen mode. If you move the
mouse then controls will come up, but you just have to not move your mouse around for a bit
and they'll go away again.

I use Totem because it's simple to use and gstreamer is quite effective nowadays. It supports
easy playlist building so if I have a bunch of little videos I want to watch in a row or a music
directory I want to play then it's nice.

A nice thing about Totem also is it's plugins. It has a DNLA browser (uPNP media client
support) as well as Totem plugins and a few other things. If I find a nice proxy in Great Britian
then I expect that it would be handy for watching BBC stuff. Even though the plugins are
kinda half-baked right now (buggy) they are quite nice when they work. I really wish they'd
work better then that would easily catapault Totem to the top of the list.

Oh... SIMPLE UI == KICK_ASS. It's something that is soooo hard to get right, but when
somebody is actually able to pull it off then it leads to a very pleasent user experience.

I use Mplayer for 2 things...
A) for simple music player. I have a few small scripts for launching mplayer to listen to online
streams and whatnot. I like it for that.
B) I use it for 'serious' movie watching due to it's advanced support of _EVERYTHING_, it's high
performance, and it's reliability.

VLC is cool, but it's UI is totally overkill for my personal tastes. It takes 3-4 times as long to do
anything in VLC compared to Totem and everything is much more confusing... if I don't care
about something I don't want to see it. I don't care about 99% of the options other then 'Play
Video' or 'Play DVD'. It is very nice for advanced media users that don't like the command
line, but I like the command line and thus mplayer is more handy for my personal use.

VLC does rule in the fact that it's cross-platform and is just about the best that OS X and
Windows users have to look forward to using... and VLC belongs on everybody's system due to
it's ability to stream video and support capture hardware. VERY nice.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 13:33 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

VLC isn't the only portable player. I carry a copy of a win32 build of mplayer around on my flash drive. It always amazes people when I can pop in the flash drive and play stuff while their WMP10 is still searching for codecs...

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 22:06 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

(It's amazing how many GUIish video players don't support a fullscreen mode without controls and other GUI elements cluttering the screen. vlc does. Any others?)

I don't think I have ever seen a GUI video player that didn't?

Some will show controls when you move the mouse, but all (that I can remember) will hide them when you don't, if the pointer is not hovering above them.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:04 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The last but one time I tried totem, it had a fullscreen button that did
nothing visible other than spray Gtk warnings. The last time I tried it,
it crashed within seconds of startup.

I don't think I have much luck with video players. (I also hardly ever
watch videos, so I don't much care if they don't work. My own damn fault
for never debugging them, I suppose.)

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 24, 2010 17:59 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

No, the best mediaplayers are those which support any backend instead of locking themselves in to a single one, esp a crappy unstable one like gstreamer. I'm quite happy with the VLC ppl having created a Phonon backend, as that means VLC quality & stability in Dragonplayer usability :D

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 22, 2010 23:24 UTC (Mon) by davem (guest, #4154) [Link] (1 responses)

I still use mplayer above all others these days.

It's the only one which allows efficient skipping around in a video
file. I just tap the arrow keys on my keyboard and it's instantaneous
and it just works.

In VLC if you try to skip forward 5 seconds at a time in a very complicated
H.264 encoded video it takes nearly 5 seconds to do the skip forward, making
it essentially useless.

Who knows, maybe mplayer goes only to P-frames and VLC tries to sub-encode
between P-frames to get the skipping time perfect. That's just a guess.
If this is the case, I definitely prefer the "P-frame only" behavior.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 19:58 UTC (Tue) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link]

Do you mean I-Frame? Those are the complete image. The P-frames are the partial updates to the previous state. (For a better explanation -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types)

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 4:49 UTC (Tue) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link]

mplayer makes it easier to get the particular codec you need: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/codecs-status.html

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 13:29 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

The list omits mplayer.

The list includes miro.

This is not a serious article. Anyone seriously writing about video on Linux will mention MPlayer, VLC, Xine and GStreamer... and not much else. If it's okay to omit one of these then the one to omit is Xine, not MPlayer, because xine is less widely used, is less stable, and cannot claim UI superiority to any of the others. The other possible omission is GStreamer, because it isn't by itself a video player, but in such a case you would still include a GStreamer front end.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 14:56 UTC (Tue) by rilder (guest, #59804) [Link] (1 responses)

Banshee, Kaffeine,Miro(really?) -- these video players hardly belong to the list.
Of course, omitting mplayer is huge mistake. It also has a GUI with all bells and whistles.
VLC comes next(even though it quite heavy compared to mplayer). But the three mentioned above are a joke to be added to that list.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 23, 2010 17:44 UTC (Tue) by SiB (subscriber, #4048) [Link]

I'm a long time happy xine user, and recently discovered kaffeine, using it mostly for DVB-T. I'm impressed by the DVB support of kaffeine.

And I am equally happy to have all the other video players installed, for those cases with some troublesome content, that plays better, if at all, on the one or the other player.

Banshee requires mono - I'll pass

Posted Feb 23, 2010 19:55 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

When I went to install it, my system said mono packages were required. I can live without.

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 24, 2010 12:56 UTC (Wed) by ikt (guest, #61292) [Link] (1 responses)

Playing video and music on linux is a big disappointment compared to the big
players like winamp, wmp, foobar and others on windows.

lol @ media players with a vertical volume bar. :/

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 24, 2010 18:04 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

well, WMP is by far the biggest embarashment to the concept of media players I've ever seen, and winamp, well,, it's so behind it's not even funny.

Linux users have Amarok, what on the win platform can come close to that? But that's only audio. For video, I want something with a play/pause button, a progress button and maybe a volume/mute button. Anything else is overkill (OK, support for automatic loading of subtitles is nice). Dragonplayer does fine - it's barebones but good enough. Sometimes, yes, VLC is nicer but the feature creep in that app is painful...

The Five Best Linux Video Players (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 24, 2010 19:39 UTC (Wed) by chaneau (guest, #6674) [Link]

I certainly have no definitive opinion about which is the best player

I use VLC for two reasons, the first one is it plays anything I throw at it,
and I never had to install any "extra codecs"

The second is it's ability to play DVD copied as iso files (no need to rip
just dd them) and to stream them, so I connect to my server where all those
files are located, select one and the film is streamed to my TV.