Which is the best Multimedia Player For Linux?

XMMS

XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp 2 "classic" skins since its release. Though the original release was made under a license that did not provide any access to the program's source code, it is now released under the GNU General Public License.

Audacious

Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player 0.9.7.1, which is a fork of XMMS. William "nenolod" Pitcock decided to fork Beep Media Player after the original development team announced that they were stopping development, in order to create a next-generation version, BMPx. The reasons for the fork were purely technical. There were some quirks in Beep Media Player that had annoyed users, such as the ID3v2 tag handling, which had been reported as buggy by some users. The developers also had their own ideas about how a player should be designed, which they wanted to try in a production environment. Besides, Beep Media Player allegedly lacked functionalities that were considered useful for people who did streaming, such as support for an XMMS-like "songchange plugin".

Winamp

Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is a skinnable, multi-format freeware/shareware. Winamp was first released by Justin Frankel in 1997. Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (Benski) and Maksim Tyrtyshny. Winamp grew from 33 million users in February 2005 to over 57 million users in September 2006.

LinDVD

LinDVD from Corel is a commercial proprietary software for Linux for the playback of DVDs and other multimedia files. The latest version now supports ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) and mobile internet devices (MIDs), as well as a streaming media and a wider range of standard and high-definition video and audio encoding standards. This is currently available only through manufacturers. LinDVD can play copy protected (CSS) DVDs. Certain distributions like Mandriva have included this software in their commercial Linux distributions, and Dell is now preinstalling it on their Ubuntu systems.

LSongs

Lsongs is a music management/media player for Linux. The Lsongs project was started by and is maintained by Linspire, a Linux distribution based on Debian. Lsongs is free software written in Python and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

VLC Media Player

VLC media player is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS, Solaris and Zaurus, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6

PowerDVD

CyberLink PowerDVD is a commercial media player for Microsoft Windows and Linux [1]. The latest version of the software is PowerDVD 8. Several editions of the software are available for purchase, Ultra, Deluxe and Standard with reduced features respectively. Currently, all editions support the viewing of DVD but only the Ultra edition supports Blu-Ray playback. HD DVD playback is not supported. The product is distributed via physical install media (CD) or via download from the Cyberlink website. A Linux version of PowerDVD is available at the Canonical Ltd. store. PowerDVD is often bundled with a variety of PC systems and peripherals (particularly optical drives).

Xine

xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. Another important feature of xine is the ability to manually correct the synchronization of audio and video streams. xine uses libraries from other projects such as liba52, libmpeg2, FFmpeg, libmad, FAAD2, and Ogle. xine can also use binary Windows codecs through a wrapper, bundled as the w32codecs, for playback of some media formats that are not handled natively.

Helix

Helix is a project to produce software that can play audio and video media in various formats, aid in producing such media, and serve them over a network. It is intended as a largely free and open source digital media framework that runs on numerous operating systems and processors (including mobile phones) and was started by RealNetworks which has contributed much of the code.Helix DNA Client is the multi-platform multi-format media playback engine. Helix Player is a media player that runs on Linux, Solaris, Symbian and FreeBSD and is built on top of Helix DNA Client. Helix Producer is an application that can aid in the production of media files, and Helix DNA Server can stream media files over a network.

Songbird

Songbird is a free-software media player and web browser developed as open source by a group known as Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine), with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web. "Songbird employs Mozilla's XULRunner platform, and is thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. Songbird utilizes the GStreamer media framework.

Totem

Totem is a media player (audio and video) for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 (released in March 2005), but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Totem can also use xine libraries. Totem is included as the default media player in many desktop Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Mandriva Linux and others. Release under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Totem is free software.

Banshee

Banshee is a media player that is built upon Mono and Gtk#. It uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play, import, and burn audio CDs, and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod and Creative's ZEN players, in the current version. Music stored on the iPod can be played without synchronization, and album art stored in the Banshee library is transferred to the iPod. Support for MTP and PlaysForSure devices, as well as the Rio Karma player is planned for the near future. Released under the terms of the MIT License, Banshee is free and open source software. As of the 7th November, Banshee 1.4.1 has been packaged for Mac OS X and is available through the downloads section on their website.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development.

Vorbis

Vorbis is a free and open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and intended to serve as a replacement for MP3. It is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container and is therefore called Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis development began following a September 1998 letter from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Soon after, founder Christopher "Monty" Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until a stable version 1.0 of the codec was released on July 19, 2002. The latest official version is 1.2.0 released on July 25, 2007, but there are some fine-tuned forks, most notably aoTuV, that offer better audio quality, particularly at low bitrates. Work is in progress to merge back those improvements. Source code (called libvorbis) for the Xiph.Org Foundation release is available from the official download page.

Hello,

I will go with the CyberLink PowerDVD because I had very good experience with it and has absolutely no problem handling that.

I Go with XMMS now the version is XMMS2. User friendly and a bit winamp like [winamp for windows]