Linux Media Player Roundup - Part 3 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Nov 12, 2007 at 11:23am
Section:
Software
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Welcome to part 3 of our Linux Media Player
Roundup. Today we'll be covering even more media players that are available for
Linux, and even touching on a couple that do more than just play music, they also play
your movies and dvd's.
But first, as before, I'd like to add a few clarifications from the previous part of
this roundup. One reader wrote in to ask how each media player handles large music
collections. Overall, all of them handled my large music collection without any
problems as far as sheer number of files is concerned. Actual media support and how
they play the individual files is another story entirely, but that was already covered, so
I won't reiterate those here. The only exception was Audio Overload, which of course
only plays specialized files, so it's excluded from this test. Every time I ran the
test, each player handled it fine.
Amarok had a little problem with sorting, and Decibel acted a little strange during the
sort process, but otherwise that was the only issues I saw. However, I don't think
my test really puts these players to the test like it should as my collection only
contains about 2500 or so songs. So I can only guarantee that they work as described
with collections up to this size. If someone has a collection of 5000 or 10,000
songs and has tested any of these players with that many songs in the playlist, I'd love
to hear from you about how each player did so that I can pass along the information to the
rest of my readers.
The second comment I received was about how all of the players shown so far seem to
only be for KDE. Actually, that's not true. There are only two which are
written specifically for KDE. The rest are either written specifically for gnome, or
are not window manager specific. Audacious, Audio Overload, and BMPx are not window
manager specific and will run under any window manager that can load the specific
libraries they need, be that GTK or otherwise. Banshee, Decibel and Exaile are
specifically designed to run under Gnome, but can also be made to run under KDE or XFCE if
you so choose. Only Amarok and JuK are designed to only run under KDE. Also,
KDE was my primary testing environment and Gnome my secondary simply because I'm more
familiar with KDE. I hope that clarifies things a bit.
Also, Banshee, Amarok, and JuK all have the ability to be minimized to the system tray.
The others I couldn't get to do it, so I don't know if they are able to or not.
By the way, keep the comments coming. They've been very helpful and I
appreciate them. :) And now that I've clarified those things, let's look at
our next batch of Linux Media Players.
KPlayer
KPlayer (also known as KMplayer) is a fully featured multimedia application for
playback of both audio and video files and includes support for MP3, Ogg, streaming video,
DVD, VCD, Audio CD's and a number of other formats. It's a fairly decent media player that
does a fairly decent job, however it's not the picaso of media players. Its handling
DVD's is decent, but sometimes problematic. But it can handle them, which is, a good
thing considering the general state of dvd playback support on Linux. It also seems
to handle most elements of the average dvd fairly well. The downside is that it
takes a lot time for dvd's to load. Not sure why, but it could be something to do
with the way it handles decoding.
Its handling of other media formats though appears to be nearly spotless. Even
the elusive Microsoft Windows Meta Video (wmv) files played with little trouble.
Audio playback overall is good, but you're not given many options to work with when
playing music. Creating playlists is fairly simple, but only one playlist at a time
is supported. It also no support for pluggins or external media players like the
video iPod. I also tried running a large playlist of files through it which it
seemed to dislike, since it would build the list, but then wouldn't play it. But it
seemed comfortable with playlists under a hundred.
But if all you need is a basic media player, then Kplayer does just that with a fair
amount of ease. Kplayer is part of the KDE Multimedia Package and comes by default
in most KDE installs and is designed to only run under KDE.
Kaffeine
The KDE Kaffeine player is also a fully featured multimedia application that comes
natively with KDE as part of the KDE Multimedia Package. However, unlike Kplayer, it
uses 3 of the most used media frameworks in the open source world, Xine-lib, Mplayer and
GStreamer Kpart. This allows Kaffeine to play nearly every single media format out
there. Think of this as being Kplayer on steroids. But there's more to it than
just the added media support. Kplayer also supports multiple playlists, proper dvd
playback, and a fully featured cd ripper and encoder.
DVD playback and full dvd menu support is also available in this player, and works
considerably better than most other players. But even it's not perfect as it could
play some dvd's, but chalked on others. But given that it's not in its full 1.0
version yet, that support only stands to improve over the coming months and years.
While certainly not my favorite dvd and multimedia player, it does a very good job at what
it does. I'd rate it as third best, with VLC and Mplayer being the top two picks for
all around media players. But even though it's third on my list, it's still top
notch and does its job well.
Importing and creating playlists is a bit of a challenge and requires far more fiddling
to accomplish than I care for. Kaffeine is also part of the KDE Multimedia Package
and comes by default in most KDE installs and is designed to only run under KDE.
MPlayer
MPlayer is a jack of all trades media player. There really wasn't anything I
could find that it didn't do. I say "almost", because I did find a few
quirks with it. Navigating the stylized Mplayer control panel proved to be a bit
daunting, even though the designers try to make it simple. And if you're after just simple
start, stop, fast forward and other controls like that, you're fine. But try to get
into the advanced options, create a playlist or something else and you're presented with a
bit of a challenge. Creating playlists is daunting and tedious, however, once you
create them, it seems to do alright. It will just take you a while to do it since
there's no way to just dump a whole directory tree of files into the playlist very easily.
Now that aside, the equalizer, player options and more were all very easy to use once
you could find the button on the control panel to access them. But, the problems I'm
describing with navigating the control panel (shown above in the upper right of the
picture) really only apply to the default skin that comes with MPlayer. Changing and
adding new skins is easy and painless. If you switch to a better skin, navigation
becomes a breeze. As far as codec support is concerned, I'm really floored. I
tried to check what audio and video formats were supported, and there were so many that
the list literally flowed off the screen.
There didn't appear to be any plugin support for MPlayer (not saying there isn't, but
nothing was obvious to me telling of it's existence) and no evidence of support for
external pluggable media devices, however it does include a large number of available
video and audio rendering engines. You can even manually set the number of frames
per second that each video renders at. Another nice and interesting feature is that
the video window and the player control panel are handled as separate windows. So if
you need to get one of them out of the way, you can do that very easily. In general
I was very impressed with Mplayer. It also doesn't seem to care what window manager
you use it in. It works fine under Gnome, KDE and XFCE, as well as others I suspect.
Mplayer also seems to be the base upon which a number of other videos players operate.
SMplayer, XBMC, VLC, Xine, Screencast, Sipie and a number of others either use
Mplayer directly, or tap its extensive libraries in order to facilitate and expand their
own playback capabilities, making MPlayer both a stand along player, and the backbone of
many other players.
Mplayer can be downloaded through your favorite package manager, or from the Mplayer homepage. The homepage
also has more screenshots, lots of documentation and more.
Miro
Miro, formerly known as "Democracy Player", is more or less a media player
that's a jack of all trades. I threw every video file type I could at it, and aside
from having some issues dealing with some Apple Quicktime files, it did a splendid job
playing everything. Music handling seems to be a mixed bag, but from what I've
gathered, music playing isn't it's primary focus. Video is. You could load a
song and play it, but it's near impossible to add it to a playlist.
Miro also is an internet TV application. As far as its IPTV support goes, Miro
does very well. It's easy as point and click to add a channel to your player,
download and preview a video, and even decide if you want to keep the video. That's
one part I love about this is you have a DVR, you can use Miro to download all your
favorite videos, and then you can copy them across your network to your DVR where you can
watch them in your TV. The number of channels available is quite extensive.
The creators boast a staggering 2500 channels.
There certainly is a lot of channels, but a lot seem to be low quality content done by
amateurs. There is content from places like the Discovery Channel, The History
Channel, National Geographic and more, but no full length shows. At least none I've
found so far. Also, it seems slow at adding channels. It does eventually load
them, but I'd click on a channel to add it, and then wait anywhere from 15 seconds to a
full minute for it to add and load the channel. The loading part I can understand,
since it has to grab the information via an RSS feed, but the slow speed at which it adds
the channel seems a bit silly.
On the flipside though, Miro does support HD video in its channel selection. If a
particular channel is providing their video in HD, Miro can not only download it but play
it too. All HD content is clearly marked. The options available inside Miro
are interesting too. While I couldn't get it working, it does have what appears to
be the ability to handle video downloads via bittorrent. You can also import and
export video playlists and share them with your friends. And if the video channels
aren't enough, Miro also supports searching, viewing and downloading video from YouTube,
Google Video, Daily Motion, Blip.TV and more.
Overall though, as a general video playback application is concerned, I would say no to
Miro. But as an internet TV application, it's very good. In fact, it's one of
the best I've found, beating Joost clean into the dirt ten feet under. Also, the
fact that Miro has none, supports none, nor ever will have any DRM or any connection to
DRM, and is completely Open Source is a wonderful thing beyond words!! It needs to
grow though, both in quality of the player (speed is the biggest thing that needs to
improve), and the selection of shows offered via it's Miro guide, but otherwise it's a
great little application. And you can guarantee that growth will come.
You can get Miro through your favorite package manager, or from the Miro homepage.
Summary
Well, that's it for this part of our roundup. Next time I plan to cover a couple
of console based media players that you can use to either play your music, or as the basis
for your own Linux powered jukebox, as well as several other programs you may find useful
in managing and playing your media collection. And as I stated at the beginning of
the article, don't be afraid to send in your comments and suggestions. I love them
all and on occation provide me with some great information I may have somehow
missed. Also, for those who have been mentioning that I haven't gotten to your
favorite player yet, don't worry. I'm working alphabetically, so I'll get to it very
soon. Until then, stay tuned! :)
On a side note, if it appears I've passed your favorite player without mentioning it,
then by all means let me know.
For those wanting to see all the previous reviews so far, I've linked them here per a
very good suggestion from one of our readers:
Part 1
Part 2
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Average vistor rating: 4.4 out of 5 (27 total votes) | |
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