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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.
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
Features:
Simple, fast and powerful media player.
Plays everything: Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams.
Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed: MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3...
Runs on all platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix...
Completely Free, 0 spyware, 0 ads and no user tracking.
Can do media conversion and streaming.
From the VLC media player home page.
To install VLC in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:
sudo apt install vlc
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.)
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.
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
mplayer-gui is (hopefully temporarily) dead. It wouldn't build against the shared codec libraries so had to be binned. The bug has since been fixed but now the packages have been simplified, it might never return.
– Oli
Oct 13 '10 at 14:39
Banshee - http://banshee.fm/
Having used several media players for my large music collection I have found this to be the best so far.
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
Audacious - http://audacious-media-player.org/
Apparently this is a very lightweight player that can apparently use Winamp skins.
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.
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).
Deadbeef audio player that has all the features you are describing: http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
Recent versions (now 0.6.2) bring it even closer to the purpose of becoming a Foobar2000 alternative by the 'Designer mode' feature that lets you add or remove features. The main addons like the File browser and Infobar (lyrics and biography) can be added in this way.
More plugins: http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/plugins.html
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.
Exaile Player - http://www.exaile.org/
Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python
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.
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.
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
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.
Beatbox is the music player under active development for the ElementaryOS project.
It offers:
There is GNOME MPlayer, a GTK+ frontend to MPlayer. Among its features are support for hardware acceleration and subtitles.
XMMS - http://www.xmms.org/
This looks similar to Audacious judging by the screenshots, another player I have not used.
Bangarang Media Player - http://gitorious.org/bangarang
Offers a media—audio and video—player with a lightweight interface
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.
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.
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
Qmmp is a Qt audio player which provides a user interface similar to Winamp or Xmms. To install Qmmp in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:
sudo apt install qmmp
Qmmp can read almost any audio format such as:
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.
Totem Movie Player (the default movie player in Ubuntu) is pretty good. You just need to get all the required codecs.
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.
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.
Foobnix
http://www.foobnix.com/welcome?lang=en
Main features player
and great support for russian tags :-)
(Apparently Linux is not an officially supported port of Songbird anymore. You can still get untested nightly build from here, but YMMV)
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:
- Plays all video formats supported by Phonon.
- Bundled with a simple web-page KPart.
- 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):
Qmmp Player.
To install the latest version:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:forkotov02/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qmmp qmmp-plugin-pack
Already mentioned in the other answer.
The GUI can use a skin (Winamp-like, see linked answer) or a 'simple' interface, which in fact has a lot more features, including a file browser, and follows the system theme and icons:
To switch between these two, set as below and restart player:
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.
I'd recommend xine, it is in the repository and plays HD content with lower resources than VLC.
Real Player - http://uk.real.com/realplayer/other-versions
Music and video Player, well known.
Note :Just for i386 architecture.
