Video Players for Linux
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Mplayer is probably the best media player ever written.
It does pretty much whatever multimedia task you ask it to.
Throw at it video in whatever video encoding and whichever container format you can get and it will play it with the deligence of a schoolboy. It can use tens of codecs which need to be dumped in a pre-decided directory on your system; and wallah! it's ready to play video.
But guess what? Playing back video is not the only thing the Mplayer package does.
Mencoder comes bundled with it. Mencoder is the swiss army knife of video compression tools.
Apart from creating high quality compressed video, you can use it to fix broken video files, synchronise audio and video in a file, conbine multiple videos into a single video, etc. - The list is quite long.
Mencoder by default uses lavc, the most advanced and efficient video codec (that outperformed Divx recently). There are other options such as Mpeg 1/2/4, Theora and so on.
The sound in your video can be compressed using a variety of audio codecs as well, including mp3, vorbis, and so on.
To add to this, you can choose from a variety of skins to use with Mplayer from it's website.
Merits:
- Plays all known video formats
- Feature-packed
Demerits:
- Manual post-installation and configuration
- Has not been yet ported to many OS platforms
Learn more about Mplayer and download it from their website.
Click here for the complete downloading, installation and configuration instructions.
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VLC (Video Lan Client) is a good media player for many platforms (including Windows).
It does a good job of playing common video formats.
This player is based on a client-server architecture - for those facinated by streaming video, you could load VLS (Video Lan Server) Server program on your machine and let others play it through the network using VLC (Video Lan Client) on their machines.
Merits:
- Plays most video formats
- Has most common features, plus a few distinct ones
- Easy to install and configure
- Available on most common OS platforms
Demerits
- Manual post-installation and configuration
Learn more about VLC and download it from their website.
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