Thread: Installing a Video player

Kaffeine or Mplayer are two common video players for Linux. Xine is a popular video player. but one that is usually not included by default. All these players are very good in terms of interface and features, but unfortunately, few distros provide the codecs that allows you to play all the videos that you might encounter out of the box. Linux Mint is an exception in this aspect, which supports more audio and video formats than Windows Vista out of the box.

VLC, the media player of choice for many. is available for Linux.For Linux Mint and Ubuntu users, the simplest way to install VLC is through the Package manager.

However, don't expect VLC to run as seamlessly as it does on Windows. as the Linux variants still require a few codecs to open. some video files. Another option is to download the Windows version ofVLC and run it through Wine.



Many distros try to solve the propriety codec problem by bundling RealPlayer for Linux with their distros. RealPlayer is one free application, whose license allows it to freely distribute propriety codecs along with their free versions.

Xine is the media player of choice for many long term Linux users. This is because Xine is actually a library called libxine. There are many frontends, which are GUIs that actually let you control the video. Xine is extremely skinnable, and something like what you see with Winamp has happened to Xine over tie. Kaffeine,-the default media player for KDE is also a Xine frontend.

To install Xine, use the package manager. Once you have got a media player installed, you will need to find and install codecs.