My favourite media player is VLC 1.1.5 on Fedora 14.

Amarok for all my music.
Dragon player for videos.
gtkpod for syncing my iPhone (It's a company phone, if it was my choice it would be an Android phone )
And VLC when all else fails!

VLC for audio and video and xine for some hd movies(works smooth than vlc)

Much love for VLC it seems.

(G)Xine for most video playing, as it's available and easily keyboard controllable on Slackware 13.x. Quod Libet is for audio play, because it's lighter on resources and more stable than Amarok on my old computer. But VLC is a good back up, since it plays /anything/. And I keep Audacious for rapid playlist creation and play.

VLC for video and "non-music" audio, Rhythmbox for music.

Never was a xine fan, but I have it installed, it seems...

Mplayer for playing video and audio. It will play anything if the codec for the media type is installed. It will do playlist with the playlist flag.
Mplayer for dumping raw streams to file.
A high definition movie that is too much for an older machine to handle.
Crop the black lines off of a movie while you play it. After using
Selecting the audio stream (language) of a DVD
Mencoder for encoding, cropping, aspect ratio setting, joining clips
Lame encode to mp3
oggdec .ogg to .wav
oggenc encode to .ogg
Lavc and xivd encode to .avi

mkisofs
growisofs
cdrecord
tkDVD
gpodder
gtkpod

VLC works good but it's a little heavy.
Xine works ok.
grip, audacity work ok too.