This needs a section devoted to it. First of all, it plays MP3s at full quality. Then, there is more to this section than meets the eye. Since Amarok is missing (no KDE), I had to settle with Exaile. I was impressed with the sound quality, especially for the MP3s. I played MP3s of Linkin Park's latest album Minutes To Midnight, to test it. MP3s on Linux have a tendency to make the speakers sound like they are exploding.

MP3s on openSUSE 11 sounded terribleon my system. I also amplified any possible effects by turning both the PCM and Master values on the Mixer to 100. To my surprise, no exploding effect occured. Instead of the default Totem, Parsix comes with VLC Media Player. Another pleasant surprise, since VLC has a reputation of playing anything that is thrown its way. It successfully played the FLV of the Large Hadron Collider that I had downloaded from CERN's website. It also played MP4s downloaded from YouTube (H.26x).1t includes a TV viewer, but MythTV would have been a better choice.

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I tested unprotected WMAs with both Exaile and VLC. Exaile did not open them, and VLC played them without a glitch. But there was the speaker explosion effect that put me off. But if you keep the VLC Volume to 29 per cent or so and turn up the speaker volume, the explosions are minimised. And yes, iRobot from a DVD in VLC looks and sounds cool, so does Nancy Drew in full High-Def format. I did not test protected DVDs, but it should work as libdvdcss is include by default.