I say Mplayer - but with the excellent KPlayer interface.

VLC for downloads, dvd, but Kafeine is a close second for the browser starter plugin, and xine a close third for the simple right click menu.

I like several of them and have used most of them. In my opinion, none of them is a clear "best." (For what it's worth, Windows doesn't have one that is head and shoulders above the competition either.) I finally decided to go with Totem.

Totem with the xine engine works the best on my video lightweight IBM T20 laptop. With Totem I've little problem with the audio and video being out of sync and considering the low video capabilities of the lappy, the picture is reasonably good.

mplayer for me.

Long live MPLAYER the best video player ever

I use totem most of the time for the drag & drop playlist, if it can't play something I go with mplayer. But I gave my vote to vlc! Because it can play anything too, it's available for every platform out there and it's extremely low on resources. I haven't used it alot myself, but every time someone asked me for a player, I said: vlc. And everybody liked it so far.

vlc is good but mplayer is real linux kinda player
it can play anything even.flv , it can even convert that flv to .mpeg
mplayer is really cool.

VLC because everything is just in there. I don't have to install a bunch of funky codecs and its plugin works with Firefox.

vlc eversince...

MPlayer, always the best.

REAL PLAYER defintely! Where is it, by the way?!
:)

VLC for me. I like it's cross-platform support (like most of us here, forever trying to switch friends over from Windows is an arduous task but the more & more you show 'em apps/things you can do on Linux, the more they see "the light" hehe) & LOVE the fact that it plays ANYTHING I throw at it.

KPlayer 0.5.9 from Svn is the best but since its not there i'll give it to its back-end mplayer, which plays everything, xine can't play flv files, vlc can play flv files. MPlayer is clearly the best!

mplayer (without GUI) is simply the best.