Best media player on Linux?

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

What is the best, DRM-free media player in Linux? (particularly for DVD playing). Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Destructionator XV]

I generally use xine for DVD and totem for wmv and mpg. But it doesn't really matter what player you use as long as you have the codecs installed; they are just front ends and share the codecs.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

I see. So it's the codec that really matters, am I correct?

And then, regarding to the players themselves, which one mostly resembles Windows Media Player in look and feel? Or it doesn't matter either as we could apply the appropriate skin?

[Destructionator XV]

You can always assign a skin. I beleive mplayer and xine both have a WMP lookalike skin, but I don't know for sure.

But using them all is trivial. Here is some screenshots of a few I have installed:

Totem media player:



Xine movie player:



And mplayer, with the WMP skin:


note that this one looks just like WMP6, but the menus and controls work differently. I actually don't like it.

Lastly, this is xmms, an audio file player. It has no support for playing video files, but does have playlists, visualitions (from plugins), skinning, lots of cool stuff.




Additionaly, there are some command line media players. They are pretty easy to use, and have no GUI interface at all. mplayer is command line if you turn off the skins. Also the command play will play sound files.


Just by looking at the screenshots here you can probably figure out how these work. Nothing very hard nor special.