Linux Media Player Roundup - Part 5 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Nov 26, 2007 at 01:24pm
Section:
Software
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Welcome to part 5 of our Linux Media Player
Roundup! Today we'll be going over several more media players for you to
consider. But first, I wanted to let everyone know that I've done a little cleanup
on part 1 of this article series. Looking back not too long ago, it dawned on me
that I didn't give BMPx a fair shake when I reviewed it the first time. So I've gone
ahead and updated the review with a much more detailed overview of the player. Click here to go back
there and check out the new improvements to my review of BMPx. You'll need to scroll
a bit though because it's the last player on that page. Sorry. ^_^;;
For those of you waiting for me to get to the couple of players I missed earlier in the
series (speaking alphabetically of course), I'm working on getting my hands on them for
testing and should have them reviewed no later than my posting of part 8, which is looking
to be the 19th of December. Which to me is kinda nice. It means we'll finish
this up the week before Christmas. :) And now, on to the next part of our
roundup of Linux media players.
Noatun
Noatun is a KDE music player apparently designed to be the little brother to Juk,
Amarok and Kaffeine because it really doesn't do much more than either Juk or Kaffeine
does, and in fact, in many ways does less. It's so redundant in so many ways to what
those other two offer, that if you took both of them, mixed them together into a pot and
ladled out half the features, you'd have Noatun. I really didn't find anything that
made it stand out from the rest of the media players, or even anything that separated it
from its two bigger brothers. One thing it does claim to have as an advantage is its
proported wide ranging support of media formats. If you've got a codec or a plugin
installed on your system (not within noatun) that will decode a given format, including
video formats, Noatun can play it.
It does this by handling the various media formats through external plugins and codecs
like Windows does rather than internally like most Linux players do. While this
provides you with some great flexibility in the program, it can also create some rather
ugly headaches for you as well. It does support wav, ogg and mp3 natively, but the
rest is kinda up in the air. One thing that might be considered an advantage though
is it's very small footprint. This comes from the minimalist interface it
employsl. But for those liking multiple playlists, this won't work as a good media
player because it only supports one playlist at a time.
Noatun is skinable, and supports all Winamp and XMMS skins. It also supports
visualizations through the pluggins system. Now if you have an iPod and hope to have
compatibility with Noatun, you're out of luck. Noatun has no support for any
external media players. Also, if your music collection is large, it may be a good
idea to avoid Noatun, because during testing, it choked to death on my 2500+ song
collection.
For those wanting to try Noatun, it's written for and available by default in KDE, or
via the KDE multimedia package. A word of warning though. At this point in
time, Noatun only works with the Linux aRts sound system. So if you're using some
other sound system such as Alsa, Noatun won't run for you, instead erroring out upon
loading.
Ogle DVD Player
The Ogle DVD Player is a specialized Linux media player who's sole purpose in life is
just to play DVD's and nothing else. It's also the very first Linux media player to
fully support DVD menus as evidenced in the above screenshot. It's a little tricky
to get installed on some systems, so be aware of that in advance. It's very
simple and straight forward to use, with no need for configuration by the end user.
Just pop in your disk, open Ogle, and away you go. It won't play everything, but
what disks it can play, it does a good job at. It also has a feature that'll allow
you to read dvd vob files right from your hard drive, but currently that feature is
broken.
The dvd menu system works very well on the player, allowing you full access to all
menus, extras, and even some of the really obscure stuff on the dvd. You won't find
any extras on the player though outside of the buttons you see on the screen. The
actual executable hasn't changed any since November of 2003 when 0.9.2 was first
introduced, however, a few updates of libdvdread, the core pluggin that reads and decodes
dvds, has seen a couple of updates itself. I couldn't seem to get it to do full
screen, but other than that, it worked as designed. For more information on this
player, please see the Ogle
dvd homepage.
Quod Libet
Quod Libet, Latin for "What Pleases" is a Linux audio player designed for
Gnome, written in Python and based on GTK+ with the primary goal to provide an easy way
for users to organize their music in whatever way they want to. Initially when I
fired it up, I found it to be rather plain. Like a stripped down version of
Noatun. It's also not terribly intuitive, even though it looks like it would
be. However, once you get digging into the library, it's interesting to find out the
vast amount of sorting and management power you have in your control. As a media
player, it really isn't anything special, and really is less than special. But it's
the library that makes it so special and unique. And believe me, the things you can
do in the library are incredible. Only real thing I found wrong with the library
though was that you couldn't rebuild the library or import new stuff. I actually
moved on to look at another player for a while, and oddly enough, during my fussing with
and reloading the library in the other player, it build the library in Quod also.
So I have no idea where Quod is taking its library from, but it may be queuing itself
off something in the operating system itself, which may be part of how it's able to allow
you to do so much complex management of your music collection. But not being able to
directly import songs into Quod without first having to add them to the master system
library (if that is in fact what it's doing) seems to kind of defeat any tiny advantages
the player had. Really it wasn't all that great a player, but the library features
and the management it offers to your music collection was very impressive. So I'd
say it's less a player and more a music manager than anything. It does have a
plugins system to allow you to change or improve how it does things, but I couldn't find
any plugins for it, so that made the whole plugins system completely moot in my opinion.
RealPlayer
I'm sure there's a lot of Linux users both surprised and aghast to see Real Player
mentioned here. But yes, Real Networks does produce a multimedia player for Linux,
and have for quite some time. The software is still proprietary like it's always
been, which might turn off a lot of born in the blood Linux users. However, it does
have a redeeming feature, if you can call it that. It allows you to effectively play
real audio streams or files on your Linux machine. It also has limited mp3 and wav
support, but no playlist support. It will also play real media videos, as well as
flash, AAC, AU, MP4, AU, OGG, and some other really off the wall formats you're not likely
to ever see but maybe once in your entire lifetime, if ever.
However, just because it says it can, doesn't mean it can. I went through and
tried everything I could, and threw every possible file I could at the player, and it only
seemed to ever play ogg, mp3 and RM/RAM files. Nothing else. So all that
supposed file support was a total wash. But, there was a slight redeeming it
undertook during my testing. When testing streaming real media files, it loaded and
played those without a problem via the browser plugin it installs during setup. So
at least you could listen to real media streams in your browser if you wanted to and not
have to worry about fighting any other players to get them to do it instead. So is
RealPlayer a good media player for day to day use? Not a chance.
But is it good for those few rare times when the only choice you have is either
listening to a Real Media stream, or nothing at all? I'd say yes. As odd as
that sounds, there are times when a proprietary player does in fact do a better job at
handling a niche item under Linux than any other open player. But thankfully not
very often. This just happens to be the exception.
Anywho, there's a lot of other things that RealPlayer is supposed to be able to do, but
unlike it's Windows counterpart, the advertised features, such as CD ripping, media
library, the music store and more were not there. All I found was the basic player
and nothing more. But since you won't be using RealPlayer on your machine for really
anything other than playing the odd and occasional Real Media stream, that's not all that
big a deal.
RealPlayer is available via your favorite local repository.
Summary
Well, that's it for part 5. In part 6 we'll be starting off with Rhythmbox, a
media player that I've really been hearing a lot about (and requests to include) since the
start of this series, and it's one that's really caught my interest because of that.
I'll also be covering a couple other media players some of you have been clambering
for. So stay tuned!
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
Part 3
Part 4
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