Linux Media Player Roundup - Part 7 - Finale (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 10, 2007 at 02:53pm
Section:
Software
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Welcome to the last part of our Linux
media player roundup. Today we'll be covering VLC, XMMS, Xfmedia, Xine and one more
previously missed media player, the "Listen Media Player". But even though
this is our last part, we still hope you enjoy what we have to offer you here and that
you've enjoyed the series so far. So, without further delay, let's dive into part 7
and see what each of these players can offer you!
VLC
VLC is more or less the jack of all trades of media players. If it's playable,
VLC can likely play it. At the very least, everything I threw at it played just fine
with no complaints. Video playback was always smooth, including playing some rather
large or oddly encoded files that would otherwise choke other players. It even
played mal-formed ogg files that other players choked on, and did so without issue.
But that doesn't mean that VLC is great for music files. I'd say that the level at
which it's music playback and playlist system is currently would be sufficient for playing
audio files if no other audio player were around. Especially since it's simple, yet
unique playlist system begins to stumble once you cross a thousand files in the playlist.
But that's not a problem, because VLC's primary focus is videos, of which it does a
great job. This is also the area in which it has the most features. VLC can
capture videos, view or broadcast network video streams, play DVD's, and much more.
It can even transcode (aka translate) your audio and video files into a currently limited
number of video formats. Also, when you're playing videos, VLC has an interesting
bookmarking feature that will allow you to bookmark your place within a video or sound
file and come back to it later. While this is a great idea, it fails in practice as
I found the bookmarking feature to be flaky at best. But since VLC is still
considered beta, that's forgivable.
VLC also has an extensive settings dialog which allows you to tweak just about
everything you can imagine. It comes with a fully embedded equalizer, support for
mouse gestures and a lot more. It even has a web interface, and a fairly well
designed system for skinning the player. By default it comes with the wxWidgets
interface you see above. It's subtitle support is also amazingly good. It also
has support for multi-audio movies, aka avi, mkv or other video files and formats that
have more than one audio track embedded in them. Overall it has a fairly well
devised audio system at its core. VLC also has a fairly well designed DVD playback
system as well with full CSS support, allowing you to view your dvd's with ease.
Originally VLC was the "Video Lan Client", and was part of a client/server
pair that enabled users to stream videos over a network for others to watch. But
over time the two merged into one and now it is simply known as the VLC Media Player.
Overall though, VLC is a great all around media player that not only does a lot,
but should have lots of room to grow in the future with even more features that'll blow
the mind. Even if you don't use it as your full time media player, it's still good
to have around because it will provide you with a great player that can do things and play
files that other media players would not be able to.
VLC is available for a wide range of platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, Windows
and several more. For more information on this great and flexible media player, then
don't forget to check out the VLC homepage.
XMMS/XMMS2
XMMS is my preferred player on Linux and BSD. It may seem like clone of Winamp,
which it is in many ways, but it's also a simplified player that works very well under
pretty much any window manager. It prefers KDE, but it'll run just fine under
anything. Created in 1999 as X11amp, it was later renamed to XMMS and expanded a
lot. It was such a good player for its time that a lot of other media players forked
off of it, or used its core systems for their players. Some of these include Beep,
BMPx, Audacious and others.
XMMS supports quite a few different media formats, including AAC, APE, Audio CD's, XM,
MOD, MPG 1-3, Ogg, wav and many more. It even includes CDDB support via Freedb.
It even supports a number of common video formats quite well, although that's not
its primary focus. It's playlist and equalizer are single tasked, so no
multiple playlist option, but that's not a big deal, because if you're after XMMS, you're
looking for a player that plays music for you without fuss and just gets out of your way
when you don't need it visible.
The equalizer is very good as well, allowing you to adjust the sound of all your files
very easily. You can also create presets depending on the mood or your own personal
preferences. It includes scrolling song information, basic song management,
including editing of ID3 tags, and excellent support for large libraries. A library
of 10,000+ files wouldn't even be warm-up for the playlist on XMMS! In theory you'd
need to hit well over 100,000 files before the playlist editor would start to break a
sweat.
It has no support for external media devices, such as an iPod or other device, but it
does have an extensive plugin system that'll allow you to add a wide range of extra
features, codecs and more at the click of a button. XMMS is also easily skinnable,
and if you've used Winamp before (the older winamp, not the newer one), then you'll be
very at home with many of its Winamp like features. It has a little trouble chewing
on malformed ID3 tag data and internal song info, but otherwise it does great. Those
couple of things won't ruin your listening experience, but it might make XMMS report some
ID3 and song length data wrong.
XMMS is available via most distributions, however, due to the fact that all development
has stopped on XMMS to make way for the upcoming XMMS2, which is a complete gut and
rewrite of the media player, it has been pulled from a few mainline distributions and may
slowly disappear from others over the coming years as XMMS2 quickly ramps up to final
version status. Currently, some distributions are shipping both XMMS1 and 2, so feel
free to experiment some. XMMS is window manager independent and runs fine in any
window manager.
For more information on this excellent player, check out
their homepage.
Xfmedia
The XFmedia player is a very simplified music player designed for the XFCE window
manager. It's capable of running on other window managers, but it is specifically
designed to work on XFCE as its default music player. It is capable of playing video
files as well, since it's based on Xine, however, using it for anything other than playing
audio files is ill advised since the player seems to have a nasty habit of crashing your
machine if it tries to play any video files.
Given Xine's extensive support for media formats, it's a given that Xfmedia also
carries that wide ranging support for formats both common and obscure. Given it's
light weight design, it's also extremely good at supporting large media libraries with
ease. It has full ID3 tag support, even though it only displays a limited amount of
information in the playlist window. Only a single playlist at a time is supported,
but playlists can be saved and loaded at the click of a button. A small sacrifice
for such a light weight player that will be used in a window manager also designed with
simplicity and light weight operation in mind.
Now as for configuring Xfmedia, there isn't many options to work with, but there are a
couple, including visualizations should you want them. Streaming media support is
also good. Didn't find any issues with it at all. There's also a system called
"media marks", a type of bookmarking system from what I can best tell.
With it you can bookmark all your favorite music and media streams. XFmedia can be
found by default in XFCE, or via your favorite package manager. For more information
on this player, you can check out the
Xfmedia website.
Xine
Xine is a dedicated video player for Linux, BSD and many other operating systems.
It's my preferred media player for everyday viewing of videos, dvd's, and the like.
Why is that? Simplicity. Xine is designed to do what you need it to do,
but then get out of the way when you're done. All of its functions, which are quite
extensive, are easily accessible either by keyboard, or via a detailed right click menu.
You can also open or close the player dialog (as seen above the word
"XINE" in the picture above) or use its vast features to access the equalizer,
settings and more. And if you don't want it, a simple keystroke and it's gone.
While Xine isn't quite as good as Mplayer or VLC, it's low footprint and non-intrusive
nature make it a ready choice for most people who want a media player that's simple to
operate, doesn't get in their way, yet does all they need. But that doesn't mean
that Xine is a sub standard video player. In fact, only VLC trumps it in total
supported audio and video formats. Yes, Xine *can* do audio, but that's not it's
primary function. Just to give you a small taste of what it can do, here's a short list of the formats it
supports, compliments of Xine's homepage. (List starts at the middle of the
page)
As you can see, it supports a LOT of formats. Due to questionable legality, the
Xine team has opted not to include any CSS support in their player by default (but this
can be added in later if you want with a simple plugin), however they do allow unencrypted
dvd playback, as well as other popular dvd like formats such as VCD and the like. If
you get inside the menus, the playlist or the various player dialogs, you may feel like
you've stepped back in time, given their somewhat antiquated look. But that's
because simple is the principle of Xine. If KISS can't be applied to the dialogs,
what's the point of making the rest of the player simple?
But if you want something fancier to use with Xine, it does have a complete skinning
system to allow you to change the complete look of the player, dialogs included, if you so
choose. It also has an extensive and detailed plugin system (some of the plugins
developed for Xine are used by other media players because of their simple portability),
so if you find that something's not supported by default, which given the long list of
what it does support shouldn't happen, you just add the necessary support via a simple
plugin. It also has full streaming support, simple, yet powerful subtitle support, a
complete menuing system for dvd playback and much more. It even has limited support
for analog TV.
And if you think what I've listed is a lot, I've just gotten started. And before
you think that I've just contradicted myself about the simplicity of Xine, remember this.
You can still have a lot of features and a powerful interface, and yet still keep
everything simple. And just to prove this, the master settings dialog is a good
example of this. Depending on your experience with computers and your knowledge of
video and audio playback, the settings dialog can be adjusted to suit you. By
default, it's set to beginner, which provides you with the basics to help you make the
right choices to suit your needs. Feel braver? There's also an advanced,
expert and "Master of the known universe" setting (yes, the developers have a
sense of humor. ^_^ hehe), each providing you with even more configurable
settings.
But be careful stepping beyond the beginners stage if you don't really know what you're
doing, because there is risk that the ultra advanced settings, if configured wrong, can
and will do damage to your hardware. But that's to be expected of all expert and
above level configurations. So only use the expert of "master" settings if
you really, really, really know what you're doing. Otherwise stick with either the
beginner or advanced skill levels. Xine will run under any window manager out there,
but it prefers KDE.
To learn more about Xine, visit their homepage.
Previously Missed players:
For those waiting patiently for me to bring in more of the couple of media players I've
missed before, here's yet another player I missed that our readers pointed out to me.
Read and enjoy this short review on this interesting little player.
Listen Media Player
The Listen Media Player is a fully featured audio player designed for Gnome that
includes a wide range of features which should please many music fans out there. It
has full support for album cover art, a very detailed song information system and even
some rather surprising features such as a complete lyrics system so you can sing along
with your favorite songs. There's also a built in related songs information system
that's quite intriguing. Shown above you can see the favorites and last played
dialogs that take the system library, load it into the player, and then grab a list of all
your favorites and displays them for you. This is part of the included context
system.
The "Current" section shows you information and related songs by the artist
or band you're listening to and even which songs by that artist or band were last played,
which of their songs are your favorites, and other albums by them. Now some of you
might be curious about the wikipedia feature. What that does is it uses a simple
included browser to connect to wikipedia, search for the name of the artist or band you're
listening to, and gives you any pages related to them.
Listen also includes complete Last.fm support, so if you use Last.fm a lot, this will
allow you to integrate with it flawlessly. The library feature is very feature rich,
employing some of the same artist, genre, album and song information breakouts as seen in
other players such as Songbird, Rhythmbox and others. The podcast feature is well
designed and simple to use, allowing you to easily add, search, update and listen to all
your favorite podcasts.
The web radio feature allows you to connect to your favorite streaming radio stations
on the internet, or search through the shoutcast music directory for any genre of music
you want. There's even an included file browser to help you find any song files you
want to play, preview, or add to your library. Playlists are a bit of a trick to
work with, as it's not directly apparent how you should work with them. But for
those who like multiple playlists, support for many different playlists is available.
Support for large media libraries is good as well, although importing may take a
bit on some of the larger libraries due to the extensive amount of information the player
gathers on each song as it adds it to the library.
The options section is fairly simple, only giving you a handful of options to work with
to allow you to tailor the player to your specific needs within a small window of
allowable changes. An interesting feature I found in the program is the ability to
search album cover art. Not sure why you'd want to, but it's there if you do.
Listen also has full ID3 tag support, including the ability to edit tags on the fly if you
want to. As for media formats supported, I couldn't find out what was and what
wasn't, however everything I threw at it seemed to work just fine.
More information about this project can be found at the Listen homepage. Not every
distribution has this player just yet, so you may have to do some hunting and possibly
compiling of the program in order to try it out or use it.
Conclusion
Well, this is the end of our Linux Media Players Roundup! I hope you've enjoyed
this little series and all it's brought to you. I also hope that it's opened your
eyes to the wide world of Linux media players and all that is available for you out there.
At some point in time we may come back and touch on some of these players again,
updating you on each of them, and maybe even offering you a few new media players as well
as more appear on the scene. As usual, if you have any comments or concerns, please
feel free to contact me or discuss them in our forums. Also, if you'd like to check out
the previous parts in this article series, here are the links to each of them.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
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