Top 5 Video Players in Linux

Good video players are a must for a desktop system. Good games still have not come to Linux – watching videos are the only time pass available for us ;-). So, I decided to make a list of the Top 5 Video players in Linux.

Linux users have a great advantage in this area. Earlier, Windows used to dominate this field – but with the advent of Vista, Windows is trying to self-destruct. The content played there is locked by DRM. We don’t have any such problems.

5. Totem

Totem

Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on xine-lib or GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation.

I never liked totem – it almost never works in my system.

4. Kaffeine

Kaffeine

Kaffeine is a full featured Multimedia-Player for KDE. By default it uses xine as backend.

3. Xine

xine

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and some of the most uncommon formats, too.

2. MPlayer

MPlayer

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies..

Make sure you install gmplayer along with MPlayer

1. VLC Media Player

VLC

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

The best video player in Linux. I use this almost exclusively.

Other Options…

My conclusion is supported by 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Poll. The order is a bit different – but still.

This post is a part of the ‘Top 5’ group writing project.

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