What do you use as a media player on Linux?
One of the first things I tried out on Linux was mplayer. I just had to. When I work, I need my music! For breaks, I need to watch something. Maybe an episode of an anime I am following or maybe a movie. For me, songs and videos are essential!
mplayer was something I enjoyed using when I was heavily using Emacs. Emms would call mplayer and so that let me watch videos by calling it via Emacs. And it also had a GUI-fied user interface so it was nice as a stand alone player too. Aside from that, I could tweak around with various options so I could optimize the videos I am watching.
Later on I got around to using Totem while I was in another company. We were using Ubuntu for half of the workstations there and I loved how easy it was to mount a shared folder in Gnome and treat it as if one of my folders and select songs from that folder. It made things lovely as I got access to some of my co-workers fantastic playlists.
These days, I’ve been using VLC. I guess I found the user interface very simple to use and it’s available on both Linux and Windows, so in case I have to use Windows and I could install some apps, I choose this player. Also, I was able to find a way to still view videos even though I broke something in the xrandr settings of my laptop when I tried to use the extended desktop feature. (That’s something I have to fix!)
I’d also like to know what you’ve been using in your own Linux boxes. :) I created a poll on the sidebar of my blog so that you could share your answers. If the one you’re using is not listed there, just comment here so you could tell us what you use and if you’d recommend it to all of us and why.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Geeky Fun
7 opinions for What do you use as a media player on Linux?
SAP
Sep 20, 2007 at 11:06 am
Amarok. I like the interface.
Doug
Sep 20, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I have used EMMS and (more frequently) Bongo in Emacs with mpg321 as the backend. Whenever I want to hear a file quickly I still use mpg321 from the command line.
On the Pentium II Vector Linux box I had as a spare at work, I used mp3blaster because it is a fairly full-featured terminal based player.
On my main laptop (running Ubuntu Feisty), I use Exaile regularly.
Ali
Sep 20, 2007 at 2:12 pm
i really like exaile for music. i really enjoy its use of last.fm to generate random themed playlists from my music.
John K
Sep 21, 2007 at 6:26 am
Audacious for music (closest to winamp I can find; didn’t like xmms) and VLC media player for movies and music streaming (it truly is the swiss army knife of media players).
Clair
Sep 21, 2007 at 8:34 am
SAP: I like the Amarok user interface too but I didn’t want to install KDE and other qt packages. So I decided to stick with VLC.
Doug: Bongo — that’s one I have yet to try. I have searched for a multimedia player for Emacs before and I saw EMMS so I just used that. I haven’t bothered checking out others because I haven’t been ‘living in Emacs’ (as some people would say) these days.
Ali: I used the last.fm app so I haven’t been able to try it out with Exaile before. I haven’t uninstalled Exaile yet so maybe I could still take a peek at how it works then :D
JohnK: You’re right about Audacious. I recently installed it on my laptop and I kinda like it. It’s pretty cool. :D I have yet to use a WinAmp skin on it though. Hrm. I wonder if I still have that Yogurt WinAmp skin…
Nifty mplayer
Nov 7, 2007 at 9:40 am
[…] know that I recently just said I use vlc for almost anything and everything. After the poll, however, I started using Audacious for music files and I’ve switched back to […]
MeduZa
Sep 13, 2008 at 10:10 am
Audacious is my now favorite player, before I used exaile, rhithmbox, banshee, and mplayer ^_^
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: