What Media Players Are there?

Question

This question is present as a matter of historical interest. While you are encouraged to help maintain its answers, please understand that "big list" questions are not generally allowed on Ask Ubuntu and will be closed per the FAQ.

What media (music and video) players are there?

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

Answer 1

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 2

Of course VLC. It is better. I recommend VLC for another OS, too.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

This is only a client for mpd, but I had to post it: ncmpcpp. Fast, nice features (library, automated lyrics download, playlists manager, tag editor), and can be used without X.

Answer 5

Although it is a freeware (non open source) windows application, and so require wine to be run, I think that foobar2000 is yet one of the best audio playes out there.

It supports a wide number of formats (MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND and more with additional components).

It has advanced tagging capabilities.

And most important to me, it supports the playing of single-wav-file CDs through CUE sheets to switch between tracks.

Answer 6

Bluemindo : http://bluemindo.codingteam.net/

Bluemindo Ubuntu Packages: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=bluemindo

Bluemindo is a really simple yet powerful audio player in Python/PyGTK, using GStreamer.

Answer 7

Foobnix

http://www.foobnix.com/welcome?lang=en

Main features player

• Support for CUE (also wv, iso.wv) is the best under Linux (zavlab)
• Formats MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND ...
• Converter any format to any (mp3, ogg, mp2, ac3, m4a, wav)
• Scrobbler tags with music and radio
• Find and play music and videos
• Equalizer
• Online music download manager
• Shortcuts
• Displays the album cover, lyrics, photo artist
• Integration with VKontakte (displaying all the friends and their music, downloading music from the group vkontakte)
• Integration with Last.FM (Show plays the best songs, favorite songs, artists)

and great support for russian tags :-)

Answer 8

(Apparently Linux is not an officially supported port of Songbird anymore. You can still get untested nightly build from here, but YMMV)

Answer 9

Qmmp is a Qt audio player which provides a user interface similar to Winamp or Xmms. It can read almost any audio format such as:

• MPEG1 layer 2/3
• Ogg Vorbis
• Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC
• WavePack
• CD Audio
• WMA, Monkey's Audio (and other formats provided by FFmpeg library)

This player supports a wide range of plugins such as:

DSP effects

• BS2B effect

• sample rate conversion

• LADSPA effects (A very large collection of Open Source DSP plugins)

• extra stereo

• crossfade

Also, it's worth noting that Qmmp supports Winamp 2.x skins.

Answer 10

Banshee is music manager so better for audio. +1 to SMPlayer

Answer 11

SMPlayer is very good.

Answer 12

I still find I need the big four installed on every machine, as sometimes one doesn't work with certain files.

• VLC
• MPlayer (GTK version for Ubuntu)
• Totem
• ffplay (part of ffmpeg)

Answer 13

I would go with VLC, it can play virtually anything. It does seem to be a little more resource hungry than MPlayer for example but i don't know of any other media player that supports that many formats/codecs.

Answer 14

The default media player, Totem, is a good media player too. It's lightweight and usually just works. It's also integrated to the packaging system and can request packages to be installed if a certain codec is missing.

Answer 15

A long list of players:

http://appnr.com/category/player

Answer 16

My favorite video player is VLC Player: - superb interface, - the ONLY player for Linux that doesn't have any problems with subtitle files, - highly customizable interface and skins, - play almost every MEDIA format. I would vote for it. click here:"http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/360/best-of-the-lot-my-top-5-media-players-for-ubuntu"

Answer 17

In my experience, for the sole purpose to play something fast and easy with a "right-click/open with..." or by relating certain files to a player, there is also the Dragon Player Which does an awesome and lightweight thus fast work, it can play both video/audio files (mp3/wav/avi/mpg, etc.) and/or discs (CD/VCD/DVD, etc.)

It uses KDE so you may need to install certain dependencies if you are not using KDE and not already installed, afterwards you'll find it fast running on Unity, Gnome and other environments.

It has not a lot of features, which makes of this the cleanest click-to-play media player.

From the site:

A video player with a different philosophy: Simple, uncluttered interface.

Features:

1. Plays all video formats supported by Phonon.
2. Bundled with a simple web-page KPart.
3. Starts quickly. This is the KDE 4 version of the Codeine video player.

A screenshot of Dragon Player in action (don't expect to find anything else of which is shown in the screenshot):

Answer 18

Banshee is also a good alternative. It can play a lot of different formats, moreover it has a lot of features that help you organize things in a better way.

Answer 19

I'd recommend xine, it is in the repository and plays HD content with lower resources than VLC.

Answer 20

Real Player - http://uk.real.com/realplayer/other-versions

Music and video Player, well known.

Note :Just for i386 architecture.