I know this topic might be old news to some of you, but I wanted to make sure that our new users out there were familiar with it. What is it? VLC, the magical media player. This is a media player that you really should checkout.
From the VLC website:
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
Basically the reason that this program is so great is that it can play just about anything you throw at it! It handles quite a bit just out of the box and is cross-platform for use on OSX or XP. Give it a try for your media playback, or check out my previous post for other gnome media players, or you might also want to see how to make sure you’ve installed ubuntu multimedia codecs for use with this or other players.
To install VLC player search via Synaptic for “vlc” or use the command below to install the main package and dependencies.
sudo aptitude install vlc
Is there anything that VLC can’t play? I haven’t run into anything yet? Have you?
The VLC that ships with Dapper can’t play the audio in .ogg files it encoded if they contain Vorbis and H264. Strange, that. Heil FFMPEG!
It cannot play real media files. I did not find any way to play them except installing real player.
There’s a pretty cool firefox extension that’ll load vlc from embeded videos. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/446/
VLC (as shipped with Dapper) can’t play WMV3 files (as per their site, newer versions might handle these reasonably well).
It won’t play HD-DVD unencrypted files either. I believe the extension is *.evo.
On some WMF files there is no sound, otherwise one of my favorite players.
It won’t play DRM-infested WMA files. I don’t expect it to either, but there you go.
VLC has problems playing some FLAC files correctly. I’ve got one that only plays part of the way through with VLC but plays all the way through with Totem (GStreamer backend).
As Stevko wrote, VLC can’t play Realmedia files. I’d like to add that MPlayer can 😉
Yes your euite right Christian as of right now VLC media player still does not support RM files…oh well.i hardly use RM files anyway. great post 5/5