Media Players

for me this varies distro to distro (or rather gnome to kde).

Under KDE:
amorok - music
kaffeine - video
XineUI - dvds

Under Gnome
rhymebox - music
XineUI - dvds
mplayer / vlc - video

Dont discount VLC either though. I use xmms, xine, and vlc typically on linux.

Seablade

Not to sound super silly or any such thing, but isn't it a violation of federal law to be playing DVDs on a Linux box because to do so you have to be using illegal software, specifically the cracked CSS known as DeCSS?

I'm not so sure saying one does this in a public forum is a good idea.

Comments welcome and if you want to flame it, it's okay by me: The whole idea pisses me off too.

Cheers.

While the legality of DeCSS has been questioned in courts, I am not sure if it has ever actually been fully proven as illegal. However DVDJon who I believe wrote it is also working in the US now for a company so that may get redug up.

However most video players use libdvdcss which was written using a different method and I dont believe has had any legal problems, at least in the US.

Seablade

I use xine and amaroK.

As far as the DeCSS thing goes... I use it. The MPAA is welcome to sue me now along with all 2 year old infants and 90 year old grandmothers they've been sueing.

And dead people... dont forget the dead people.

Seablade

amaroK > all

Well nice opinion, to bad Amarok doesnt like to play nice with non KDE desktops... I hear good things about it as an audio player, but have yet to have a good experience using it. I wouldnt touch it for non audio stuff though. That is what VLC or Xine is for, and for streaming(With VLC).

Seablade

Both beep-media-player and amaroK work properly under Flubox for me.

Hmm havent been able to get Amarok running under Gnome, Enlightenment, or Mac OSX yet.

As I said I hear good things about it for audio, but I just cant seem to have luck using it.

Seablade

xmms for music and vlc for video, and grip for ripping CD's, rythembox is nice, but I still prefer xmms

I use kaffeine for standalone mp3, wmv/avi/quicktime/etc. and DVD/VCDs.

However, for its stability, I use the mplayer-plugin for embedded video inside of websites. The kaffeine plugin just doesn't work as well IMHO.

I used to use a myriad of tools (xmms, etc.)... but I switched just for the simplicity of having one app for all formats (thinking along the lines of Win Media Player).

So here is the chance to redeem Amarok for me

At the moment I have amarok installed on both my Gentoo Box and MacOSX laptop. Well assume the Gentoo box is what we are working with here just for the sake of sanity and not having to worryabout a bad port.

On my gentoo box, Amarok loads up fine, scans collections and all that jazz, but anytime I go to play anything using any engine it says the output is busy, when nothing else is using it. I havent tried in 1.3x but I know in 1.2 version I had earlier it owuld also lock up the Alsa port and not let anything else use it until I canceled that user's session(Logged out and back into X). I upgrade to see if that might fix it but so far no dice. Xine outputs dont work to ALSA(What I have, and refuse to install ESD as this is an audio workstation and esd I dont consider good for my work, not to mention like arts it gets in the way a lot). I have tried both with telling it to autosense the output, setting it to alsa and telling it to use the default, and just to make sure even specifying the hardware port. Nothing.

Gstreamer I have a different error come up but still bad, and gstreamer it completly crashes. The error I have there is that the gstreamersink doesnt work and oss sink doesnt exist. It even goes so far as to buffer streams I try to play, but after giving me that error partway through the buffering(Typically about 75 percent thorugh) it crashes completly.

So any ideas from those of you using Amarok? As I said I hear nice things about it, but I have yet to have it work on any box.

Seablade

My Amarok works with the Gstreamer pluging; I use alsaink, pointing it to the ossmix software mixing device I have.

The reason Amarok comes back at you saying the device is busy is because it is (mis)configured to use OSS. Same thing applies to anything else: if an app hogs the audio device, its using OSS and accessing the sound device directly. Try what I mentioned above.

HMm I tried running it with aoss thinking something along those lines was happening, ill give directing it to the specific device a shot soon.

Seablade