Linux media computer?

I'm thinking about setting up a separate box to try linux - I'm pretty sick of Windows. I primarily use WinXP for media - video (all formats), audio, dvds - and internet applications. The last time I tried this, I used Mandrake 8 and found that it wasn't able to keep up with Windows in terms of playing the media I wanted to.

Can anyone recommend a good distribution and applications for what I'm trying to do? Is there a Linux solution that allows .WMV/.ASF files to be played? Apple Quicktime .qt or .mov files? Realmedia? Preferably, I'd be looking for a single application which can handle all of these media types.

Thanks,
-antiopus

Mplayer can play all of those media types. As for a distro, I like gentoo.

absolutely.. mplayer can handle any media type you can shake a stick at. however some distros tend to bundle a really crap hacked up version (for poossible copyright issues) that plays hardly any files at all. the ones i know of that do this are suse and debian. so if you get those distros you will have to download the source code and compile it manualy.

i have researched media playing apps from the proprietry and open source areas and not one of them plays as many formats as mplayer. it really is awsome. you name it, it plays it

edit: that is movie formats (mplayer stands for movie player not media player) use xmms for audio (thier is a mplayer plugin available for xmms ;))