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Don't forget Xine. It plays most of real media stuff (FAQ).

Don't forget Xine. It plays most of real media stuff (FAQ).

Categories? I open playlist, and there's my categories, in neatly arranged .m3us.

Album cover display? I don't know why people have such an obsession with the looks of the music. I tend to listen to the music with my ears, not my eyes. Cover displays are useless. Visualizations are useless.

Skins? Skins suck. I far more prefer global, uniform UI look - yes, this is why Rhythmbox rules and why I'll be using it once gstreamer gets 1.0 out or something like that. I mean, come on. people actually use these? They're stronger than I am and have a freaking huge screen, I tell ya. I use the NeXTAMP skin on XMMS, goes well with the WindowMaker!

I used to have a huge playlist, but these days, I just split the thing in several files.

There are some other things I don't like about XMMS: GTK+ 1.x, the plugin API isn't as cool as it could be (the plugins can't get song metadata from player), and there's no built-in crossfade (there's a plugin that does this nicely, but it makes the wave display or the FFT display go way out of sync - not that I much care about any kind of visualizations anyway).

Categories? I open playlist, and there's my categories, in neatly arranged .m3us.

Album cover display? I don't know why people have such an obsession with the looks of the music. I tend to listen to the music with my ears, not my eyes. Cover displays are useless. Visualizations are useless.

Skins? Skins suck. I far more prefer global, uniform UI look - yes, this is why Rhythmbox rules and why I'll be using it once gstreamer gets 1.0 out or something like that. I mean, come on. people actually use these? They're stronger than I am and have a freaking huge screen, I tell ya. I use the NeXTAMP skin on XMMS, goes well with the WindowMaker!

I used to have a huge playlist, but these days, I just split the thing in several files.

There are some other things I don't like about XMMS: GTK+ 1.x, the plugin API isn't as cool as it could be (the plugins can't get song metadata from player), and there's no built-in crossfade (there's a plugin that does this nicely, but it makes the wave display or the FFT display go way out of sync - not that I much care about any kind of visualizations anyway).

I've actually gotten my hands on the installable beta. The install seems pretty decent. It's easy, and it leaves your windows drives alone, unless you tell it otherwise. Everything is extremely simple, with a little "detailed" button you can click, if you are an experienced user.

I was surprised to see that the installation automatically detected and installed the wireless network adapter on my laptop, something I haven't seen any other distribution do (even though the driver is ready in the kernel).

The rest of the installation went flawless (except for a hitch with starsuite, which for some reason was in chinese, but I'll leave that to the beta-testers).

For some reason SUN has decided to provide the Java Media Player as the default media player. This would be just fine, if it in any way matched with the overall system design, or if it could play all media, but a simple test proved that it couldn't even play a standard (if such a thing exists) divx file. It worked fine with Ogg Vorbis and mpeg though. I wasn't able to find a dvd-player, xmms wasn't installed, and I could find no other media players besides the already mentioned java media player. If they want to win on the desktop, one thing SUN seriously needs is the capability to play media files using a pretty functional player (xmms for music is the obvious choice).

The entire desktop is seemingly a clone of the basic windows desktop with "this computer", "Documents", "Network Places" and "Trash". Exactly as I remember windows, just with slightly altered names. You even have a control panel (called preferences) in "This Computer".

Another problem I will leave to the beta testers is the fact that my DVD-drive is both mounted as cdrom and dvd, and thus also shown as two icons.

All in all a slick O/S, though with a few bumps which are hopefully straightened out through beta-testing, with a very bad choice of multimedia player (If anyone from SUN read this, go punch the guy who chose java media player in the stomache, and point him to xmms, mplayer and xine instead!).

a problem specifically with Xine's, and it's independent of skin. Buttons mysteriously stop working

I also have a problem with the fact that Xine's volume button is independent of the mixer device. MPlayer uses the mixer directly, so if my wife watches a movie with MPlayer, and turns the volume down so it doesn't wake up the baby, then I have to open aumix (or another mixer) to restore the volume for Xine to play the sound audibly.

my comment wasn't uninformed. I was trying to provide what I had experienced to another poster

Xine takes about 5 seconds to start up when you click on a movie file. MPlayer starts up in less than 1 second

If it weren't for the tone of your post, I'd probably be more inclined to--as you say--read the docs for Xine, but I must say that you have completely failed to convince me I should bother

I've never even seen docs for Xine

That is a known issue. SuSE ships a broken Xine package. I've seen a lot of reports on that.
Red Hat also shipped a broken version a while ago.

Don't use the version shipped by SuSE. Go to the website and download the latest release. It works without problems.

VLC is pretty cool, yeah. Especially if you wanna broadcast video on a LAN.

But for a media player, i found Xine to be better than both. It supports all the formats that mplayer supports, it also has a browser plugin, but it handles DVDs a lot better. In fact, the DVD menus and stuff like that works exactly as with a standalone DVD player.

Sure, it's great to have a v1.0 release of MPlayer, but on the other end of the stick, Xine is not far off from hitting the 1.0 status as well. Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
Perhaps some collaboration between MPlayer and Xine should occur.
However, the fact I find most surprising, is that Microsoft hasn't stepped in argueing that the software cannot be called, "MPlayer". Perhaps it's 1.0 status may spur things on...
Let's hope the MPlayer guys don't ship their next release as version 9.0 :P

If anything deserves to be mentioned along with mplayer, it's Xine. In fact, I think it's been better than mplayer for quite a while now.

Xine? (Well in my opinion, xine is too buggy, crashes on most files and its gui sucks)

• Totem (for GNOME)
• Kaffine (for KDE3)
• OpiePlayer2 (for handhelds even!)

Actually, we do have an open source DVD player for Linux. At least three of them in fact:
xine
mplayer
VideoLAN client

The only thing that's illegal is the CSS decryption libraries needed to play most (but not all) CSS "protected" DVDs.

Sigh.

xine

MPlayer

Both run quicktime, yes even with the Sorenson codec, perfectly.

I can't believe how many people say this! Xine has had fine dvd playback for at least three years. Is this NOT "out-of-the-box" because you have to download it? If so, windows doesn't have it either.

DVD support is the only reason I keep a Windows partition.

ogle, xine, and mplayer.

Just install Xine. Download and install the Windows DLLs. Done. Now you can play QuickTime files, and even QuickTime webcasts (not to mention Windows Media, because those DLLs contain the required codecs). Heck, if you install RealPlayer9 for *NIX, you can also play Real Media in Xine.
If you install the gxine interface, not xine-ui (but you can install as many interfaces at the same time as you like) you even get a Mozilla plugin to play all those formats in your browser. ;-)
For the lazy, Red Hat RPM packages are here: freshrpms.net.
No emulation (Wine or otherwise) required.

Great call.

But you know, I'd be very surprised if the disc didn't play in Ogle, mplayer or Xine.

Perhpas we should start 'returning' crap DVD software too.

If you like you can install the gxine xine GUI for gnome, and it will automatically set up Gxine to be the default viewer for audio and video in Mozilla(and I believe system wide but don't quote me).

According to Xine's website there is a Mozilla plugin in the works that provides embedded stream playback. Until then, if you install gxine it comes with a Mozilla plugin that all you need to do 'ln -s' it into your ~/.mozilla/plugins... this will launch gxine and start playing with a nicer interface.

The most impressive use of AAlib I've seen thusfar is the xine output plugin (included with the xine-ui tarball). It's one hell of an effect that you've got to see to belive. Any video source xine can play, including DVDs and nearly any file format you can get your hands on can be displayed entirely in ASCII.

There's nothing like watching the Kung-Fu scene in the Matrix in pure text. Make sure you stand back a couple feet from the monitor for the full effect, though.

Xine is both free as in beer and free as in speech and available at http://xinehq.de/. And both Lycoris Linux and Mandrake Linux have GPL .ISO sets that can be downloaded for free and home-burnt that include Xine. There is also a port project to bring Xine to Win32.

"Unfortunately, most people seem more interested in demanding obscure playback modules in MPlayer, rather then looking at the problem from an abstracted view."

Apparently KDE decided to do with xine what Gnome wants to do with GStreamer: a multimedia player infrastructure. Want your foo-bar KDE/Gnome application to play DivX? Just make the appropriate calls to the xine/GStreamer API on your system.
GStreamer seems to be more ambitious towards video broadcast and stream video. But it's not quite ready yet for prime time (still feeling kinda alpha version).
OTOH, xine is already production quality, has a working player and started to develop a video editing infrastructure.

It will be interesting to watch how these projects evolve in the future. Both have interesting features, and have a promising look.

xinehq.de

You need the latest beta, and you have to also get the Win32 codecs (Quicktime included). If not sure where to get the Win32 codecs from, ask on the mailing list.

It works fine, it can play streaming material. It even has a Mozilla plugin.

And it's not just Quicktime, you can play basically any multimedia format: DivX, DVD, SVCD...

Xine already has a Mozilla plugin, if you use the gxine interface. And it's 100% Linux/Unix, no emulation required.
Not to mention that it plays any multimedia format, including DVD, SVCD, DivX...

xinehq.de
You need the latest beta, and you have to also get the Win32 codecs (Quicktime included). If not sure where to get the Win32 codecs from, ask on the mailing list.
It works fine, it can play streaming material. It even has a Mozilla plugin.
And it's not just Quicktime, you can play basically any multimedia format: DivX, DVD, SVCD...

xinehq.de
Install the latest beta, grab the Win32 codecs (ask on the mailing list if you're not sure where to get them from) and you're done. It can even do streaming, it has a Mozilla plugin...

I can't say much about which has more features, but I'll say that xine's interface is, lets say, not particularly well designed.

Maybe you were using the default skin? I'll agree, it's horrible. The 'cloudy' skin (which comes with Xine-ui) is great.

Also, Xine's libraries are used in a few other apps, most of which have simpler interfaces.

Just because the core Xine team might not be particularly interested in building such an interface themselves doesn't make them "fucktards". It just means they work on what interests them and are happy to leave it to others to fill in the gaps.

But I'm flying with GStreamer atm and couldnt be happier. Also Xine and MPlayer are top quality too. Especially when used on conjunction with interfaces like Totem, I really couldnt ask for much more! DVD playback is also coming on strong!

Off the top of my head I cant think of anything (apart from DRM) that WMPlayer can do that any of the above can't do anyway? [conspiracy]Maybe that's the point.. this is a cunning plan to get DRM onto Linux :)[/conspiracy] Anyway, by the time it's available the other Linux media players will have either caught up or be better I expect.

2003 will be the year for linux \o/