Top 10 Linux Media Players - Play Any Audio or Video Format in Linux OS

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, i have compiled a list of 10 high quality Linux video applications, covering a broad spectrum of uses.

One of the many perks of being a Linux user is that you have plenty of excellent software to choose from. This is especially true if you are in search for an essential application like a media player because there are definitely loads of options. However, this could sometimes be a disadvantage particularly to new-to-Linux users for the reason that they could get overwhelmed with the many choices they have.

Here i have compiled some of the best free media players for Linux OS to play almost any video, audio formats you will ever need as a Linux user.

Here is the list of my Top 10 Linux Media Players:

1. MPlayer

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies. Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+. MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

Read More | Download MPlayer


2. VLC Player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols without external codec or program.

It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC can play:

* MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
* DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
* From satellite cards (DVB-S)
* Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
* From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)

Read More | Download VLC media player


3. Xine

Xine is a free multimedia player. 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. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and some of the most uncommon formats, too.

Read More | Download Xine


4. Totem

Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation. It comes with added functionality such as: Video thumbnailer for the file manager, Nautilus properties tab, Mozilla (Firefox) plugin to view movies inside your browser (in development), Webcam utility (in development) and more.

Read More | Download Totem


5. Ogle DVD Player

Ogle is the first opensource DVD player to support DVD menus! A DVD player for the Solaris, Linux and BSD environments released under the GNU Public License (GPL). Ogle, bringing you what you've always wanted e.g. Bookmarks, time skipping, multichannel audio, SPDIF output, crop & zoom video and more.

Read More | Download Ogle DVD Player


6. Helix Player

The Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating system versions are currently in development.

Read More | Download Helix Player


7. Real Player

RealPlayer for Linux allows you to play more video, including popular Windows Media files, RealMedia files and more. Get instant access to your favorite songs or video. Easily create, save, edit and manage different playlists for any event or mood. Updated multi-channel stereo sound allows you to enjoy 5-channel audio plus a dedicated sub-woofer channel for streaming or playback through either your ALSA or OSS sound system. Need to take a break from a live stream? Just click pause. Perfect Play automatically buffers streaming content. So you can pause, rewind and fast-forward through live broadcasts without missing a thing.

Read More | Download Real Player for Linux

8. Kaffeine

Kaffeine is a full featured Multimedia-Player for KDE. By default it uses xine as backend.
Kaffeine is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

Here are some key features of "Kaffeine":

* Timeshifting
* Instant record
* Electronic Program Guide
* On screen display

Read More | Download Kaffeine Media Player


9. KMPlayer

The KMPlayer is a versatile media player which can cover various types of container format such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime among others. It handles a wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and screenshots in many ways.

The player provides both internal and external filters with a fully controlled environment in terms of connections to other splitters, decoders, audio/video transform filters and renderers without grappling with the DirectShow merit system. Internal filters are not registered to user's system to keep it from being messed up with system filters.

In December 2008 KMPlayer was bought by Pandora.tv, and continues to be made available as freeware.

Read More | Download KMPlayer


10. Codeine

Codeine project is a very simple xine-based media player.

Here are some key features of "Codeine":

* Plays DVDs, VCDs, all video formats *
* Bundled with a simple web-page KPart () Starts very quickly
* Simple, uncluttered interface
* "Session based"
* Intelligent behaviour
* You can record http streams with the hidden record action
* You can use drag and drop to play files. Try dragging shoutcast stream playlists, they will play too.

Read More | Download Codeine