[SOLVED] Which Movie Player?

[Kappity]

I've been using Ubuntu on an old laptop for about a year now, I think. Now I'm looking at buying a new Ubuntu desktop from Dell. Before I do, I'm just thinking about what applications I'll be using with the new system.

I can't play DVD movies on the old laptop, because it doesn't have a DVD drive. On the new computer, I'd like to be able to play a DVD movie as follows.

Fullscreen mode available.
Audio and video quality as good as on a typical Mac or Windows computer.
All standard DVD players controls available, e.g. ff, rew, stop, pause, skip, disc menus, etc.
Can handle subtitles.

Reading this forum, I see at least three applications mentioned for playing DVDs, mplayer, vlc, and Totem. There seem to be more negative comments about Totem, but is at least one of these applications adequate according to the specs above? Are there other movie players people would recommend?

I'd probably be using Gnome desktop with the new system. Currently have a couple of Macs, which I'm keeping for now. For people who have played DVD movies on their Macs or Windows computers, would you rate Ubuntu better, worse, or equal in this respect?

I should add that if I can't play a movie adequately on the new comp, it wouldn't be a deal killer, as that's not the main thing I do. I'm just getting an idea of what I can and can't do.

[dannytatom]

VLC gets my vote. I always replace totem (including the firefox plugin) with VLC (has it's own plugin).

I don't have a Mac, but VLC beats playing video through WMP any day.

[albinootje]

One other media-player which you should consider using is smplayer.
It's a front-end for mplayer.
It's very good at handling subtitles out of the box (i find it annoying when there's only one subtitle-file available that in some other players you still need to select it manually).
And it remembers where you stopped watching a video whenever you shut down smplayer.

[binbash]

for dvd i am using vlc, for other types i am using smplayer

[Kappity]

Just in case somebody else finds this thread while searching . . .

Got the new Dell yesterday, earlier than planned. I installed vlc from the package manager. However, when I put a movie DVD in the drive, an application called LinDVD started. Seems to work quite well. I went to their web page, and they only sell it to manufacturers at this point.

I'll have to try the other movie players later. Still a lot to learn about Linux in general.

[ellalan]

SMPlayer works well for me(I found out today).

[Vryko Lakas]

Just in case somebody else finds this thread while searching . . .

Got the new Dell yesterday, earlier than planned. I installed vlc from the package manager. However, when I put a movie DVD in the drive, an application called LinDVD started. Seems to work quite well. I went to their web page, and they only sell it to manufacturers at this point.

Dell has been including LinDVD in their Ubuntu installs, I suppose to help ease people into the world of Linux from other operating systems (and get fewer customer complaints). The reason? As you know, a lot of new people can be confused by the options available on Linux, and which ones have the best support for which features. I'm not a Free Software purist, so I have no problem with big companies including some extra software here and there with Linux, to make life a bit easier. It's still far removed from the trialware that gets loaded onto the average Windows computer at the factory.

VLC and Mplayer are both very powerful media players that can handle almost any format, but in my experience they can be also confusing to use if you're not already very familiar with video playback options. I was totally lost, for example, when I tried learning to transcode .MOVs into plain old DVD video using VLC. And that was on Windows!

[albinootje]

Dell has been including LinDVD in their Ubuntu installs, I suppose to help ease people into the world of Linux from other operating systems (and get fewer customer complaints).

I thought that LinDVD was included with Linspire or Xandros before, but it was apparently made by Corel :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinDVD
I've never seen LinDVD in action, but it's perhaps good to mention that it's closed-source software

For me smplayer, totem-xine and vlc work great, but then again, I don't bother so much about DVD-menus, what I find important are the use of pause,forward,backward, and fullscreen keys.

[wolfen69]

even back in my windows days, vlc was my media player of choice. no eye candy, but very effective.

[SuperSonic4]

Another vote for vlc here. I use smplayer 0.66 for mov files but vlc for everything else. It [vlc] has a huge range of aspect ratios and it has 16:10 apparently quite unusual but which I have on both my monitors

If I'm ever in windows I use vlc to play music too, particularly with an m3u file