Top 10 Video Players for Linux

MPlayer – Every time I give MPlayer the deep six, in search for a better multimedia player, I eventually end up "embracing" it again, and thinking that I'll never let it go. MPlayer is, was and will be the best video player Linux ever had. Even if the default user interface is old and needs to be rewritten, it can play anything you want, even the latest Windows Media Video in 720p and 1080p video streams. It is also the base for many projects that you can find on the big download websites.

VLC – Being able to decode almost any video stream by itself, VLC, this cross-platform media player and streaming server, deserves the second place on my favorite video player applications list. It is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Kaffeine – It’s the default media player for many KDE-based Linux distributions you can find these days. But being based on the xine engine, it lacks a few modern features and I had some problems with HD videos. Moreover, the interface has no more than 4 useless (for me) settings; the only real configuration you can make is for the xine engine, but you have to know what you're doing when you play with those settings.

SMPlayer – Even if it's new, SMPlayer's charm has enraptured me and wins the forth place on my favorite video player applications list. It tries to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, and, until now, it did a very good job by providing features you can't find in other MPlayer front-ends; for example, it remembers the settings of all the files you play.

KMPlayer – This was and will be one of my favorite multimedia front-ends, because it integrates very well the mplayer and xine engines and it supports the GStreamer engine as well. It's very fast, light and it integrates very well with Konqueror web browser, in order to play embedded content. It also plays and records TV streams.

KPlayer – Not so popular, this one is an MPlayer powered multimedia player for the K Desktop Environment that can easily play a wide variety of video/audio files and streams using a rich, powerful and friendly interface that follows KDE standards. I recommend this video player to all the Linux beginners out there.

Totem – Some will agree with me, others will not, but the GNOME desktop deserves a better video player than Totem. Not only does it lack many features, but it does not even let you setup the xine backend like GXine, Kaffeine and KMplayer do.

GNOME Mplayer – Yet another GUI (graphical user interface) for MPlayer, only this time is for GNOME users. It provides a simple and very easy to use user interface for the best video player Linux ever had, MPlayer. If you're a Linux newbie, than you should definitely give this application a try.

GXine – It's the official GUI (graphical user interface) for xine. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. But the interface is very old and hard to use.

MplayerXP – I bet not many of you knew about MplayerXP, which is a branch of the powerful mplayer multimedia player, but based on the new (thread-based) core. The new core provides better CPU utilization and excellently improves performance of video decoding. The main goal of MplayerXP is to get monotonous CPU loading during movie playback. Unfortunately, this player doesn't have a GUI front-end as far as I know.