I’ve had an issue with VLC (choppy sound when playing .mkv files) and decided to switch to MPlayer, an extremely powerful video renderer. Most people use VLC, so I’m interested in this, as I want to see whether VLC “rules” or not 
http://kaffeine.kde.org/themes/garland/logo.png** Kaffeine - KDE Media Player**
I use the old Kaffeine-kde3 player for my HTPC which is still running openSUSE 11.3. Why you might ask? Well there are TWO big reasons.
- Kaffeine-KDE3 uses the xine player engine and can be setup for Dolby Digital 5.1 and 5.1 ES output and works like a champ using optical and coaxial connections to your receiver from your sound card.
- Kaffeine-kde3 supports Ctrl-V & Ctrl-H to allow the expansion of the TV picture to allow you to fill the entire TV screen. Its great for watching DVD’s.
I use a relatively Fast PC and a good nVIDIA video card loading the proprietary video driver playing a standard DVD. It works like a champ and can not be beat by any other standard DVD player. This setup is Highly recommended by me…
Thank You,
Smplayer. Always good performance for me. I made it standard in my desktop for all my needs.
SMPlayer - General Info
In my case I do a 1,2,3 approach VLC is the 1st choice for any video I play. The 2nd choice if VLC has problems is Mplayer with smplayer as frontend. 3rd choice(sorry Jim) is Kaffeine. In my travels with Opensuse I’ve found that is the order for me to go on flaky vids.
SMplayer. I know it’s just a fronted for Mplayer but a very convenient one. From my experience VLC is simply slow for more demanding videos. Kaffeine is nice for watching DVD’s but much more problematic than Mplayer or even Xine for anything else.
Best regards,
Greg
Interesting input, so I’m not the only one to notice that VLC is occasionally troublesome, although it’s highly acclaimed by critics. It has many qualities (like simple design and an ease in handling various files) but it also fails to be functional sometimes, especially after I upgrade it.
I’ve also used Kaffeine for a while, I must admit, not James’ version, but anyway it does a great job. Then I installed VLC but…this glitch (not to mention that it hates pulseaudio, so I had to change to ALSA output, otherwise after a pause I got no sound)…and now I just plan to stick to MPlayer for some time, as it gets along well with pulse. Like everyone, I firstly hated pulse. Now I need it.
I tried MPlayer’s extension (SMP) but it seems to be buggy, if I randomly double pause I can’t play the file, so I have to close and restart it. Maybe it’s not a serious thing, but I’m not in the mood to deal with it right now, I just want to relax watching a good film with MPlayer
First choice is VLC but i use Smplayer as well.
VLC for movies/dvd, Miro for podcasts (keep forgetting to config an external player), XBMC occasionally, Kaffeine for everything else. If I have issues with playback, I’ll try mplayer. So, Kaffeine 90% of the time.
Only 19 votes. Thinks are looking bad 
I don’t understand why people hate polls. It’s really nice to share your own preferences sometimes.
Am Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:26:02 +0000 schrieb riderplus:
> Only 19 votes. Thinks are looking bad I don’t understand why people
> hate polls. It’s really nice to share your own preferences sometimes.
There are not a lot of people writing in the forums, except the help
forums.
I use SMPlayer as it works well with vdpau and my Nvidia Gpu. Vlc works too, but not as well as SMPlayer and generally takes takes a long time to start (~10sec).
I just switched to KMplayer/Mplayer2. I have a lot of .ogv files and when playing these with Kaffeine, the sound that should come out of the center speaker, comes of out of the front right speaker (or right headphone) instead. Background sounds and music aren’t affected. Also, VLC is playing everything in ASCII. So weird, but kinda cool:
http://www.imgplace.com/viewimg94/6379/28vlcascii.png
So again, no loyalties in media player. I always have mplayer/xine/vlc installed and it seems like with every release I change which one gets used as the primary player.
No edit post option…image:
http://www.imgplace.com/img94/6379/28vlcascii.th.png](http://www.imgplace.com/viewimg94/6379/28vlcascii.png)
check the video decoder set in VLC. There is an ASCII decoder in packman, I think it’s part of ffmpeg (or not). I’ve played with it years ago, it’s cool but impractical to actually watch the video. I could never get the color ASCII decoder working, unfortunately. That would be even cooler.
The output was set to default, odd that in a fresh install it defaulted to ASCII-art output.
Thanks, and /cheers!
I’ve managed to find why SMPlayer was freezing if I paused it consecutively…it was the audio plugin, I had it set to “alsa”. Now I set it to “pulse” and no glitch so far. So SMPlayer is on a par with MPlayer. Merry Christmas!
The top 3 is as follows: 1st. VLC, 2nd. Mplayer and 3rd Kaffeine 
I hope more people will vote. 26 voters is irrelevant.
If I only watch part of something. At least smplayer picks up where I left it
SMPlayer. Not only do I find it better than the others ( some, such as VLC, I may use as well ), but as I recently realised, it has the most easiest configuration panel and is the only one which has a video equalizer that saves choices as default…
Since my monitor/card produce an excellent result except when videos are being played ( the screen is too dark ) this made it win.