What happened to the really slick video players for linux?

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

I used to love xine and vlc is ok but slick it is not and when I tried to see if there were any new video players I found none! It's all the same stuff from 10 years ago - and they all look like they're from 10 years ago.

The media player I use on Windows is The Kmplayer. It's classy, slick, simple, easy to use but its advanced settings allows you to change everything (far more than vlc and probably on a par with mplayer). Even Windows Media Player does a better job that lots of the stuff out there.

Maybe I have been out of the loop for too long.

Maybe someone can cut down XBMC into a nice media player?
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 18084

I never liked xine, but then I'm OK with VLC.
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sikpuppy · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2013 6:29 am Post subject:

SMplayer is good. The only thing it doesn't do well is DVD menus. For that use VLC. VLC even plays DVD .iso files.

arnvidr · Guru Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 599 Location: Oslo, Norway

I use pure mplayer. No interface at all, nothing you can claim is not slick

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ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

vlc comes with its own problems - sometimes it remains running (but not playing) in the background even after I have quit from the interface.

mplayer has a good interface in smplayer, but then which mplayer would you choose? mplayer? mplayer2? mpv? Only the last one can comes with ready to use vaapi acceleration that is needed for playing HD videos decently in intel graphics. But it doesn't work with smplayer

xine is something I hadn't checked in a year or two. But it seems it finally has vaapi acceleration since last May, which is very nice. Not sure what player has a good interface to this.

Most of the players from gnome/kde are either really dumbed down, or they have massive dependencies, or are really ugly.
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sikpuppy · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2013 3:05 pm Post subject:

ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

_______0 · Guru Joined: 15 Oct 2012 Posts: 521

mplayer with urxvt or any term you love is slick as hell, specially with zsh option auto-complete.

zlg · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Sep 2012 Posts: 49 Location: Earth

I use smplayer. I'm curious, though: what is the big difference between mplayer and mplayer2? Is the latter significantly better? If hardware matters, I run a hexcore AMD CPU with a GTX 550 Ti.

Dr.Willy · Guru Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 500 Location: NRW, Germany

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2045 Location: Germany

reading that I seriously ask myself why anybody would prefer mplayer and its frontends over xine or vlc.
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dmitchell · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2013 5:43 pm Post subject:

I use vlc in windows and os x. It works for me.
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

smplayer looks ok but is hardly slick and new looking. Why are the icons so incredibly fugly? Why does no media player basic theme in linux look like it was created after 1995?

I have to spend half an hour downloading special icons from deviant art and extracting themes for it!
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2045 Location: Germany

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

_______0 · Guru Joined: 15 Oct 2012 Posts: 521

I came across ROSA player, from the ROSA linux distro. Another mplayer front end but quite nicer than fugly smplayer. GUI seems to match current KDE development instead of looking like eye sore.

McLink · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2013 8:15 pm Post subject:

I use KPlayer (using a homebrew kplayer-9999 ebuild). It looks OK and does what I need it to do. *shrug*
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

Koala Kid · Guru Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 381

try UMPlayer
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Old School · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2013 11:28 pm Post subject:

VLC sucks anymore. I just use Windows Media Player. With the K- Lite Codec Pack, everything just works.

As far as Linux is concerned, VLC was always my preferred choice, but if it is anything like it's Windows cousin, I don't know.
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3343

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 18084

Greens · n00b Joined: 23 Aug 2013 Posts: 27

I use mpv with vdpau output, which is a fork of both mplayer and mplayer2.

Config file.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2045 Location: Germany

lol config file

any video player that needs a config file to be usable is an instant failure.

I don't want to 'configure' a video player - I want it to play media. With sensible defaults.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.