Movie player(s)

[oxf]

Good evening all!

Here's my silly question of the night. This all began when I went into my local bookstore, got a coffee in the cafe and settled down to read a copy of Linux Format magazine. In it, among other things, was comparison of various movie players. For some reason I've been confusing Movie Player and Mplayer all along.

But.. Movie player is different from Mplayer right? Movie Player is also reffred to as Totum? But what i cant figure is while I can add Mplayer via add/remove applications, Movie Player (installed by default) does not show up in add/remove applications.

Ok all that out of the way if I you had just one Movie playing app available to use what would you choose? I dont want x number of different ones on my PC.

Mike

[rokytnji]

I actually like 2 different ones.

VLC

Gxine /xine

[vitalka]

I use VLC under Linux and Windows. Xine would be my back up under Linux.

[GNU-Fan]

But.. Movie player is different from Mplayer right? Movie Player is also reffred to as Totum? But what i cant figure is while I can add Mplayer via add/remove applications, Movie Player (installed by default) does not show up in add/remove applications.

"Movie Player" is the simplified callsign of the program call "Totem" in the GNOME desktop environment. This label was introduced because there might be non tech-savvy people who don't care about the strengths of a particular program but rather just want the computer to "play the movie".

MPlayer (not to be confused with the former name of Window Media Player) is a very powerful application with many options and has ample support for media types.
But it is only delivered with a command line interface by default. Therefore it is usually complemented by an additional graphical interface which fits to you desktop look. I chose SMPlayer for example.

Ok all that out of the way if I you had just one Movie playing app available to use what would you choose? I dont want x number of different ones on my PC.

I have both Totem and MPlayer, because Totem is very easy to operate and it doesn't stress my little computer to much. It fits well into my GNOME desktop, too.
But I doesn't play every exotic file and so I have MPlayer as fallback option.

But if you are going to install only one player, I support the recommendation for VLC made by others.

[oz]

I've been using mplayer for the last couple of years and it's been working well. Sometimes, I'll switch over to vlc, but mplayer is my default video player.

[bigtomrodney]

I like to use whatever is the most native player for the environment I'm working in; Kaffeine in KDE, Totem in Gnome and Mplayer or Xine elsewhere. I like the applications to feel integrated and they all offer more or less the same functions. Outside of that I'll use Elisa Media Centre with a remote control to browse my library.

I like VLC on Windows and Mac but I don't think it has offered anything extra in Linux. Some people use VLC to get everything working but I prefer to just sort out my codecs so that everything works the first time around. With that said I hear the latest VLC has DVD ripping built into it so that might be worth a look.

[oxf]

I like to use whatever is the most native player for the environment I'm working in; Kaffeine in KDE, Totem in Gnome and Mplayer or Xine elsewhere. I like the applications to feel integrated and they all offer more or less the same functions. Outside of that I'll use Elisa Media Centre with a remote control to browse my library.

I like VLC on Windows and Mac but I don't think it has offered anything extra in Linux. Some people use VLC to get everything working but I prefer to just sort out my codecs so that everything works the first time around. With that said I hear the latest VLC has DVD ripping built into it so that might be worth a look.

Thanks all for the comments. The article I was reading said to watch for the next release of VLC, I didnt realise it was here. I guess I try a couple of others than the native Totum (in Ubuntu) and see how it goes.

Mike