Media Players for GNU/Linux

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