MP3? QuickTime? DivX? You've come to the right place.

MediaPlayers are applications that allow you to view various 'media'. Linux used to be slated for its lack of ability to play MultiMedia (music, video, etc). Today there is almost nothing that you can't play on Linux, and it's not very tricky at all. In fact you may find it to be much less of a hassle than the constant CoDec-hunting needed in MicrosoftWindows.

Quick summary of players avalible for Linux:

• MPlayer
• mpg123(1)
• mpg321
• ogg123(1)
• RealPlayer
• Totem
• VideoLanClient
• Xine
• XMMS

Many LinuxDistributions will not play MP3 or DVD by default due to patent issues. For DebianLinux see AptSourcesList for more details.

Audio Players

Beep Media Player

A Fork of XMMS updated for GTK2 and renamed at the bequest of the company that maintains XMMS.

RhythmBox

An iTunes-inspired interface for GNOME, built on GStreamer.

StreamTuner

Mainly concentrates on internet radio, but the Local-plugin allows browsing MP3s by directories on disc.

Video Players

Totem

A GNOME video player using either Xine or GStreamer (see below).

MPlayer

One of the original X11 video players, which uses its own media libraries. A lot of OpenSource CoDecs start life as part of MPlayer.

Backends

If you're a programmer, and you want to build media into your application, you could look at something like

Xine

Originally an open source media player application, xine split into into a player and a backend (xine-lib), which is the basis for many other media front ends (such as Totem.)

GStreamer

The GNOME media framework (in the same way that DirectX is the Windows media framework.)

CategoryBeginners