Linux used to be slated for it's 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.

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

Music

__[Beep Media Player|http

//www.linux-media.net/beep/]__ : XMMS updated for GTK2 (and renamed at the bequest of the company that maintains XMMS). Some recompiling of plugins is required (MostPeople? probably don't use any) but otherwise BMP is XMMS is BMP. If you have XMMS, get this.

RhythmBox

an Apple ITunes inspired interface for Linux. Now officially part of GNOME (built on GStreamer). If you have FedoraCore 1, you have this, although without MP3 support - see http://www.ieeto.net/rpm/.

Video

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 open source 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)

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