People often think
that GNU/Linux lack support for video/audio playback. With Distros
like Linux Mint having out of the box support for most video/audio
formats and almost all Android phones work seamlessly with almost all
media types, it is still a common myth that GNU/Linux won't play MP3
or MP4. So I am just listing few media players that can do the job
for you.
VLC
Surprisingly many
people running Microsoft Windows use VLC doesn't know that it is part
of Free Software. But VLC (Video LAN Client) is the most widely used
media player among Windows users. It plays everything from FLV to
FLAC told one of my friend who runs Windows and a Microsoft fanboy.
He challenged me to show an equivalent or alternate for VLC in
GNU/Linux. When he visited my house next time, I showed him my PC
having the same VLC (latest version). So VLC is one of the most
commonly used media player that GNU/Linux users can make use of.
Link:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Kaffeine
Kaffeine is a very
good media player that has a whole set of features to give you a full
fledged media center experience. It is a KDE based player (you can
still run it in other DEs.) It has support for scrambled and copy
protected DVDs (you may need libdvdcss) and it is easy to use too. It
is the default player for most of my DVD viewings.
Link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kaffeine/
SMPlayer
This humble yet
powerful player is not known outside the GNU/Linux world much. But if
someone tries SMPlayer, they will make it as their default player for
sure. It has very nice sound output and it has lot of settings that
will allow you to tweak every aspect of your audio/video. The
excellent keyboard shortcuts will come handy while watching videos. I
am so addicted to the shortcut configurations of this player as I
wonder how other players got them so wrong.
Link:
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/
So, if you are
running GNU/Linux, just search for these packages in your software
repositories. Sometimes you may need to add some other sources or to
build from source (that is not the case usually as all major
distributions have these media players in their repositories). Please
share about your favorite media players in GNU/Linux systems in the
comment section.
Note: Personally I
strongly suggest you to stay away from non-free media formats. For
list of clean and free media formats check the below link.
Link:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/so_youve_got_some_questions_do_you#formats
