What Media Players Are there?

Question

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What media (music and video) players are there?

Please list one piece of software per answer, as per this meta post.

Answer 1

Yes, VLC Media Player [

I was using it the other day to play back 3 720p videos simultaneously on a 1 1/2 year old HP notebook. Performance was flawless.

Very advanced customizations/settings.

Separate window that includes playlist, file browser, external devices and local network access, internet features (radios, postacasts, Freebox TV channels for registered users)

(Using skins reduces the easy access to some of these features.)

VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files. (from Wikipedia)

It can use extensions, plugins and skins - to be downloaded from addons.videolan.org.

Among these, some that can find movie subtitles. (More answers on this: here and here.)

Answer 2

VLC - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

or

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

VLC supports many audio and video formats, and can do other tasks such as trans-coding videos and audio, and recording and streaming. It can even play BluRay videos.

Answer 3

Clementine Music Player - http://www.clementine-player.org/

Clementine is a multiplatform music player. It is inspired by Amarok 1.4, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing music.

Answer 4

MPlayer is also a good one, which makes a good choice for scripting, since it provides feedback when exiting (e.g. Exiting... (End of file)), and allows you to react upon this, e.g. mark the file as played.

It's available in Ubuntu, in different flavors (e.g. mplayer-gui or just mplayer).

You can use VLC for scripting, too:

if vlc -f --play-and-exit $FILE | grep 'main playlist: end of playlist, exiting$' ; then
    echo "File played completely."
fi

Answer 5

Banshee - http://banshee.fm/

Having used several media players for my large music collection I have found this to be the best so far.

Answer 6

Umplayer - http://www.umplayer.com/

Front end for MPlayer, well designed, allowing on the fly skins and well set out preferences including editable shortcuts. Similar to KMPlayer on Windows. Available in Ubuntu Software Centre.

Answer 7

Audacious - http://audacious-media-player.org/

Apparently this is a very lightweight player that can apparently use Winamp skins.

Answer 8

Rhythmbox - http://rhythmbox.sourceforge.net/

Another contender for managing your music library, I have found it to be a bit cumbersome when tagging mp3 also it does not like to handle a large library (yet again that is my opinion).

Answer 9

Totem comes as standard on Ubuntu.

Answer 10

GNOME Media Player - https://launchpad.net/gnome-media-player

This media player supports the vlc, xine and GStreamer engines for playing media. Since some file formats play well only on a certain engine, this media player was made with 3 engines, so that the user can select the required engine required for playing a particular file type. It also has an engine auto select mode, in which the player automatically selects the best engine for the particular type of file being played.

Answer 11

I'm surprised nobody listed the good old super-fast and super-versatile mplayer.

Answer 12

Quod Libet - http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/

I have never heard of this player before.

Answer 13

Deadbeef audio player that has all the features you are describing: http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

Answer 14

Exaile Player - http://www.exaile.org/

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python

Answer 15

Guayadeque - http://guayadeque.org/forums/index.php?p=/wiki/page/home

Another great music playing application, constant updates from the author who does all of the work himself, and takes on board suggestions from users.

Answer 16

Smplayer : Great Qt4 GUI front-end for mplayer

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smplayer smtube

Can download subtitles

and can play youtube videos externally reducing the load on the GPU (see this, question)

the toolbar is editable

subtitles font, position etc are editable

Answer 17

If your music collections is on a remote server (very handy to control you music from everywhere in the house) then Music Player Daemon (mpd) is a go to, full documentation and list of client there: mpd

Answer 18

A nice and interesting media player: Gmusicbrowser. Its web describes it as:

An open-source jukebox for large collections of mp3/ogg/flac/mpc/ape files, written in perl.

It has a nice GUI. The default view shows the artists and bands from your collection and for the selected item it shows the list of albums including a thumbnail of the coverart (if available). It also offers themes so that it looks like Exaile, QuodLibet or Rhythmbox.

Answer 19

Gnome Media Player is new and doesn't come with too many features but for just playing movies, its great. It supports the VLC, Xine and Gstreamer engines for playing media. It also has the ability to switch between the engines, and an engine auto select mode which automatically selects the best engine for playing a particular type of file.

It's in the Ubuntu 10.10 official repositories so you can search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center.

For Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, install it using these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-media-player-development/development
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-media-player

Answer 20

Boxee - http://www.boxee.tv

It's a media center (in my opinion the best there is) for Linux, Windows and Mac. It supports lots of video / music portals as well as DVD, CD and local media in general.

It's currently not available in the Software center but I listed an idea on getsatisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/boxee/topics/add_boxee_to_the_ubuntu_software_center

Available for 32 bit and 64 bit as a *.deb file.

Answer 21

Beatbox is the music player under active development for the ElementaryOS project.

It offers:

• Automatic and manually arranged playlists
• Last.fm support (scrobbler + similar tracks)
• A play queue
• An Equalizer with presets and custom settings support
• A slick interface with 3 views

Answer 22

XMMS - http://www.xmms.org/

This looks similar to Audacious judging by the screenshots, another player I have not used.

Answer 23

Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/

It may be more of a podcatcher (or at least started off as one) that even supports bittorrent but it does play media as well.

Answer 24

Listen Music Player - http://www.listen-project.org/

Answer 25

There is GNOME MPlayer, a GTK+ frontend to MPlayer. Among its features are support for hardware acceleration and subtitles.

Answer 26

Totem Movie Player (the default movie player in Ubuntu) is pretty good. You just need to get all the required codecs.

Answer 27

Bangarang Media Player - http://gitorious.org/bangarang

Offers a media—audio and video—player with a lightweight interface

Answer 28

XBMC works great on HTPC.

Answer 29

SMPlayer is recommended as it has a really good interface and uses the superb MPlayer as its backend. It supports a great variety of codecs, and plays practically any major format you throw at it. It uses Qt, and integrates reasonably well with an Ubuntu desktop.

You can install SMPlayer by either searching via Software Center or by running Terminal and passing the command:
sudo apt-get install smplayer

Answer 30

I recommend installing SMplayer instead of VLC. SMPlayer supports VDPAU. (I heard that VLC also supports VDPAU, but I have not been able to find any PPAs with a VLC package that supports VDPAU / VAAPI without errors.)

Glossary:

VDPAU: The VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video hardware.

VAAPI: VAAPI is an open source software library ("libVA") and the API specification which provides access to graphics hardware (GPU) acceleration for video processing on Linux and Unix-based operating systems. Accelerated processing includes video decoding, video encoding, subpicture blending and rendering.