2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice AwardsThis forum is for the 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.
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Mplayer pipes and streams and plays image directories and generally makes most people happy and doesn't argue with intel video drivers too much. It's also fun to screw with the filters on Grandma's MythTV box.
I use mplayer for every video and DVD playback. It is the most reliable media player and it also has the most tolerance. VLC has never been reliable. Xine is also have been lacking in reliability. I do not know why people say that VLC and Xine is reliable to them. I tried compiling both VLC and Xine different and they always come out unreliable.
I have to agree with that, when I started using Linux exclusively, back 4 or 5 years ago, used to use Xine though rapidly switched to Mplayer.
Xine was too unstable for me and I must say its interfaces were a little clunky until I found GXine [...] as a GUI option. However, thanks to the vLC people -whose player I don't like but its great- we all can enjoy quality x264 videos in whatever player we chose. And I have to say the same on mpeg, wma and other vary many video formats (ffmpeg -de- codecs, preferably form fmpeg-svn) thanks to Mplayer's people.
My actual choice is definitely Mplayer, the development versions were quite stable this year and it always was quite customizable as well. You can do a lot of things with it (web cam, transcoding, blah, blah) No matter how new is some people to this applications and how badly some distros deal with it [...] it's high gain for all of us.
The mplayer plugin for Mozilla/Gecko browsers handles embedded quicktime files better than the xine plugin. But xine handles DVDs better (like the chap above said... menus).
To me VLC is the most satisfying cross-platform Video Player (especially the latest 0.9.8a with cute Qt4 interface). Sadly, many users don't know the true VLC player functionality like it can do good Video codec job, if not best! Over all, VLC rocks (oops, with those .ogg files of Linux video presentations etc).
I know the true functionality of VLC. Reliability and stability is not one of them. One stupid setting does screw it up. Its tolerance for files is poor compared to MPlayer and Xine. MPlayer is by far the most reliable and stable media player that has very, very high tolerance of errors in media files. Companies have used MPlayer in their products with out any permission, so this tells you something. MPlayer GUI interface is not stable, but MPlayer was not designed to run from a GUI interface. MPlayer is best run from CLI.
MPlayer. very fast and never had issues with subtitles hassle & stuff.
VLC's new user interface puzzle disappointed me, so i took it out of question.
i use Totem for quick playing shorts, very handy but i wouldn't depend on it for surviving
Last edited by ephemeros; 01-31-2009 at 05:35 AM..
Reason: added about totem
I use smplayer for all my videos. It has support for sftp connections which is important for me because I stream videos from my server onver the lan. I would use xine but I've stopped using ever since its control panel started hiding from me and deleting its ~/.xine dir didn't help.
Actually prefer Totem for the ability to scroll through video with the mouse wheel. VLC doesn't do this (at least mine doesn't) but VLC handles everything I throw at it even if Totem doesn't. VLC for me.
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