Well we have one on audio, so why not video?
I personally favor VLC, xine or SMplayer, Kaffine for KDE4 sucks, I cannot configure its settings or what backend it uses.
SMPlayer - why? Because along with Firefox it’s the only app that actually lets you do something with your mouse thumbbuttons!
Setting these to skip 10seconds forward/backward is a great help.
It also has some other nifty things such as the option to set a regular expression to autoselect the audiotrack/subtitle track… since I tend to watch a lot of anime (and totally detest dubs) this is just one brilliant option, something like “jpn|japan|jp|jap” for the audio and I never have to listen to one of those horrible English dubs. It’s subtitle support is also fantastic (unlike VLCs).
The VDpau output option for it is also greatly appreciated because I’ve a NVIDIA videocard that supports hardware acceleration.
I used to think of its as decent linux alternative to Windows Media Player Classic (aka MPC - which has nothing to do with the regular Window Media Player) but nowadays I prefer SMPlayer.
Wish it had more developers though, its bug/feature tracker seems to have quite a few of suggestions on it that seem rather simple to implement but stay untouched for ages.
smplayer / gnome mplayer are not players. They’re just front-ends to one and the same player - mplayer. Since there’s no option for it, I voted smplayer even though I don’t use it much
Well for me Smplayer is better then Gnome Mplayer, it has way more features and is quite robust.
And yeh i forgot to add regular ol mplayer to my poll, sorry
Hi,
I always use VLC, because it always works and is easy to use.
I had a few problems with Kaffine when I first started using Linux, so I tried VLC and I’ve been using it since.
Regards
Barry.
I’m pretty much the same. I do like Kaffine but have it just stop working, eg. fail to start, for me in the past and never figured out why…
So did you VLC folks try SMPlayer? I’m curious as to why people are using certain players.
(if you use playlists I can certainly understand preferring VLC over SMPlayer)
smplayer / gnome mplayer are not players. They’re just front-ends to one and the same player - mplayer.
nitpicking imo :P, but yeah MPlayer itself could have been part of the poll although I can hardly imagine anyone using it. That said, I do sometimes use it when SMPlayer acts up - this is nearly always due to corrupt files which MPlayer doesn’t seem to mind as much as SMPlayer does.
I’ve not tried SMPlayer.
One thing I like with VLC is it seems to play most media things I’ve tried. Perhaps an odd one is that it will work with cdg, displaying the karaoke text as it plays the song. Won’t do .kar/midi though.
I voted xine. Why? Has good DVD menu support, is easily controlled by script (remotely/batch).
Not sure why the “Kaffeine (what??)”, but it’s certainly my 2nd place. Why? Xine engine, so again, menus work well, and it handles streaming to multiple hosts well, and it does music pretty well… comes the closest to being an all around media player in the vein of Windows Media Player.
I use mplayer (mencode) for encoding and for browser plugin because it’s the most stable there.
VLC for DVD playbacks. For others, SMplayer.
Voted SMplayer, simply the best and easy player.
VLC plays everything and it always works. 'Nuff said.
I like Kaffeine. It has nice UI that i find very well structured 
Dragon player is also nice and simple but i don’t think many people would call it their first choice.
Yes but the fact I cant configure it makes Kaffeine in KDE4 a sour lemon, it was so much better in KDE3.
In the KDE3 version I could tell it where my DVD/CD drives are, and I could also set it up to autoplay.
And dont get me started on that no good piece of **** Dragonplayer.
I think the cool thing with smplayer is it remembers where you last where when watching any content. I could be wrong but have not seen that feature in other players or front ends.
I was using vlc before, now that I was able to buy a newer pc and can run a good number of applications, I discovered smplayer to be my 1st choice. Also with sm player installation it’s like you hit two birds with one bullet coz it will not install w/out mplayer being an mplayer front end.
this is the exact reason why i switched to smplayer.
I have no problem with DVDs and Kaffeine. And what about Dragon player, it’s simple and nice. And it “it remembers where you last where when watching any content” so there is another player with this feature;)
No, it’s not nitpicking. That’s like saying that my h264enc is an ENCODER while it’s merely a FRONT-END to an encoder, but it doesn’t encode by itself. Take away mplayer and SMPlayer becomes useless, unless one adapts it to use another engine
And you can hardly imagine anyone using bare MPlayer? Are you kidding me? There are thousands of people using MPlayer directly without a front-end, come to #mplayer IRC and see for yourself
SMPlayer, mainly because it’s unobtrusive and due to somewhat stable vdpau implementation in MPlayer.
In a topic like this it’s nitpicking, you start it up and it plays media, that it using mplayer isn’t something you don’t really notice.
Well via the commandline it’s quite useful (use it to create thumbnails), but I meant the default GUI. That strange blue thing with tiny buttons and a seperate window with the actual video.