To provide an insight into the quality
of software that is available, i have compiled a list of 10 high quality
Linux video applications, covering a broad spectrum of uses.
One
of the many perks of being a Linux user is that you have plenty of
excellent software to choose from. This is especially true if you are in
search for an essential application like a media player because there
are definitely loads of options. However, this could sometimes be a
disadvantage particularly to new-to-Linux users for the reason that they
could get overwhelmed with the many choices they have.

Here
i have compiled some of the best free media players for Linux OS to
play almost any video, audio formats you will ever need as a Linux user.
Here is the list of my Top 10 Linux Media Players:
1.
MPlayer
MPlayer
is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB,
AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT,
NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many
native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD,
3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies. Another great feature of
MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with
X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use
GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA
compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific
drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software
or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer
supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as
the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+. MPlayer has an onscreen
display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded
subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO
8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are
supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM,
SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own:
MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are
supported as well.
Read More |
Download MPlayer
2.
VLC Player
VLC
media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio
and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols
without external codec or program.
It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
VLC can play:
* MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
* DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
* From satellite cards (DVB-S)
* Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
* From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)
Read More |
Download VLC media player
3.
Xine
Xine
is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also
decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk
drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It
interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and
some of the most uncommon formats, too.
Read More |
Download Xine
4.
Totem
Totem
is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on
GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume
controls, as well as keyboard navigation. It comes with added
functionality such as: Video thumbnailer for the file manager, Nautilus
properties tab, Mozilla (Firefox) plugin to view movies inside your
browser (in development), Webcam utility (in development) and more.
Read More |
Download Totem
5.
Ogle DVD Player
Ogle
is the first opensource DVD player to support DVD menus! A DVD player
for the Solaris, Linux and BSD environments released under the GNU
Public License (GPL). Ogle, bringing you what you've always wanted e.g.
Bookmarks, time skipping, multichannel audio, SPDIF output, crop &
zoom video and more.
Read More |
Download Ogle DVD Player
6.
Helix Player
The
Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and
Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating
system versions are currently in development.
Read More |
Download Helix Player
7.
Real Player
RealPlayer
for Linux allows you to play more video, including popular Windows
Media files, RealMedia files and more. Get instant access to your
favorite songs or video. Easily create, save, edit and manage different
playlists for any event or mood. Updated multi-channel stereo sound
allows you to enjoy 5-channel audio plus a dedicated sub-woofer channel
for streaming or playback through either your ALSA or OSS sound system.
Need to take a break from a live stream? Just click pause. Perfect Play
automatically buffers streaming content. So you can pause, rewind and
fast-forward through live broadcasts without missing a thing.
Read More |
Download Real Player for Linux
8.
Kaffeine
Kaffeine is a full featured Multimedia-Player for KDE. By default it uses xine as backend.
Kaffeine is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.
Here are some key features of "Kaffeine":
* Timeshifting
* Instant record
* Electronic Program Guide
* On screen display
Read More |
Download Kaffeine Media Player
9.
KMPlayer
The
KMPlayer is a versatile media player which can cover various types of
container format such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP,
MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime among others. It handles a
wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and
screenshots in many ways.
The player provides both internal and
external filters with a fully controlled environment in terms of
connections to other splitters, decoders, audio/video transform filters
and renderers without grappling with the DirectShow merit system.
Internal filters are not registered to user's system to keep it from
being messed up with system filters.
In December 2008 KMPlayer was bought by Pandora.tv, and continues to be made available as freeware.
Read More |
Download KMPlayer
10.
Codeine
Codeine project is a very simple xine-based media player.
Here are some key features of "Codeine":
* Plays DVDs, VCDs, all video formats *
* Bundled with a simple web-page KPart () Starts very quickly
* Simple, uncluttered interface
* "Session based"
* Intelligent behaviour
* You can record http streams with the hidden record action
* You can use drag and drop to play files. Try dragging shoutcast stream playlists, they will play too.
Read More |
Download Codeine