MultimediaApplications

Revision 35 as of 2006-06-15 18:40:57

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A Word About Multimedia Frameworks

Ubuntu offers a wide range of multimedia applications through its Main, Universe, and Multiverse repositories. To help you choose the most suitable music player or video editor, it is useful to differentiate between the media players themselves (or 'front-ends') and the playback engines (the 'back-ends') they use.

The front-ends are the applications that you interact with on your desktop. Some are tightly integrated with the two desktop environments, GNOME and KDE; others are platform-independent. The two main back-ends are the [http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/ gstreamer] and [http://xinehq.de/ xine] frameworks (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake uses the gstreamer 0.10 framework by default.) Some players support both the gstreamer and xine back-ends.

Your choice will thus depend on the right combination of features, performance, choice of media formats, your preferred desktop environment, and personal preference.

This page describes the most popular front-ends: media players, music and video editors, podcast and streaming applications. For more information on gstreamer, xine and the (free and non-free) media formats they support, see the RestrictedFormats wiki page.

Default Applications

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  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)

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Totem

Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment. It is also Ubuntu's default video player. Totem plays any xine or gstreamer-supported file (see the RestrictedFormats wiki page for gstreamer/xine setup and configuration). It can also be used to play DVDs (with menus and subtitles) and VCDs, SMIL, shoutcast, m3u and RealAudio playlists. It features a video thumbnailer, full-screen mode, Xinerama support, a playlist with repeat and shuffle modes, seek and volume controls, 5.1 surround stereo and TV-Out resolution switching. Totem supports either the gstreamer or [#totem-xine xine] back-ends. For more information, visit the [http://gnome.org/projects/totem/ Totem web site].

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Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is the default music player in Ubuntu. It is very easy to use, yet able to meet most needs. Rhythmbox has a simple user interface inspired by Apple's iTunes: a browser window with a music library and playlists on the left and a searchable track list sorted by album, genre, artist etc. on the right. Users can browse the library and playlists based on artist, album and track name simultaneously. Rhythmbox plays podcasts and streams, integrates with the iPod and rips audio CDs with the help of [#soundjuicer SoundJuicer]. Rhythmbox uses the gstreamer framework. For more information, visit the [http://rhythmbox.sourceforge.net/ Rhythmbox Website].

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Sound Juicer

Sound Juicer is a simple and clean CD ripping tool. It extracts audio tracks from compact discs. Sound Juicer is designed to be easy to use and to work with little user intervention. If your computer is connected to the Internet, it will attempt to retrieve CD track information from the open content [http://musicbrainz.org/ MusicBrainz] service. SoundJuicer integrates tightly with GNOME 2.14 and the gstreamer framework. See the [http://help.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/desktopguide/C/music.html Music Chapter] of the Ubuntu Desktop Guide for more on how to use Sound Juicer to play and extract audio CDs. For more information, visit the [http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer Sound Juicer website].

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Sound Recorder

Sound Recorder is a small GNOME application that enables you to record and play .flac, .ogg, and .wav sound files.

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Serpentine

Serpentine is a simple to use, yet porwerful CD burner for GNOME. It uses the gstreamer framework.

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  • Kubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)

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AmaroK

AmaroK is a full-featured music player with all the bells and whistles for KDE, although it works fine in GNOME. It is scriptable and themeable; it has a 10-band equalizer, crossfade, visualizations, color schemes, and a collection filter with a rating system. It supports the iPod, iRiver, and other mp3 players. It integrates with [WWW] last.fm. It'll download CD covers from Amazon and metadata from [WWW] MusicBrainz and burn tracks to CD (using [WWW] k3b). It even lets you choose the database type you want to use (SQLite3, MySQL, PostGreSQL)! AmaroK supports both the xine and gstreamer back-ends. For more information, visit the [WWW] Amarok web site.

attachment:IconsPage/apt.png See [wiki:Amarok the AmaroK wiki page] for information on how to install AmaroK under GNOME (Ubuntu).

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Kaffeine

Kaffeine is a full-featured multimedia player for KDE. It uses xine as [#framework back-end] by default, but also works with gstreamer and KPlayer if installed. It supports DVD playback with menus, multiple playlists, a 10-band equalizer, and a CD cover manager. It rips and burns audio CDs to mp3 and ogg vorbis, streams audio and video and supports LIRC. For more invormation, visit the [http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/ Kaffeine web site].

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Extra Packages

BR attachment:IconsPage/dvd-video.png Video Players and Editors


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MPlayer

MPlayer is a powerful and versatile media player that can play all types of free media formats (see the FreeFormats page) as well as most 'non-free' media formats. See the RestrictedFormats wiki page for instructions for enabling non-free formats in MPlayer and gmplayer. For more information, visit the [http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html MPlayer web site].

attachment:IconsPage/apt.png Information on installing and setting up mplayer can be found on the [:MPlayer:MPlayer] wiki page.

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Diva

Diva (i.e. Diva not AVID) is a video editor for the GNOME desktop. It uses the gstreamer framework. For more information, visit the [http://www.diva-project.org/ Diva web site].

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Kino

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in RawDV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. For more information, visit the [http://www.kinodv.org/ Kino home page].

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gstreamer-editor

A graphical editor for creating GStreamer media pipelines.

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totem-xine

totem-xine is a version of the [#totem Totem player] that uses the xine multimedia framework. See the [#totem description for totem-gstreamer above] for details. For more information, visit the [http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/ Totem Website].

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gxine

gxine is a GTK+ based multimedia player for the [#framework libxine video player library]. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like avi, mov, wmv, and mp3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available--and some of the most uncommon formats, too. For more information, visit the [http://xinehq.de/ xine home page].

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xine-ui

xine doesn't have the most attractive interface, but it's powerful and gets the job done. It allows you to fine-tune keyboard shortcuts, and has an excellent default set to make the program easy to use without a mouse. In addition, it has numerous options for DVD menus and subtitles. It also has a small footprint, and starts up in seconds. For more information, visit the [http://www.xinehq.de/ xine website].

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VLC

VLC (also known as VideoLAN Client) is a versatile multimedia player that supports a very large number of audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI/MPEG-4, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVD and VCD playback 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. For more information, visit the [http://www.videolan.org/ videolan web site].

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attachment:IconsPage/cd-audio.png Music Players and Audio Editing


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Audacity

Audacity is free and open source software for recording and editing sounds. It can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit ogg vorbis, mp3, and wav sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, and change the speed or pitch of a recording. For more information, visit the [http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Audacity web site].

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Banshee

Banshee allows you to easily import, manage, and play selections from your music collection, import CDs, sync your music collection to an iPod, play music directly from an iPod, create playlists with songs from your library, and create audio and MP3 CDs from subsets of your library. For more information, visit the [http://banshee-project.org/Main_Page Banshee web site].

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Cowbell Music Organizer

Cowbell is an elegant, album-based, music organizer. It supports many audio formats including ogg/FLAC, mp3 and MusePack. Cowbell is tightly integrated with Amazon, using its free SOAP service. Cowbell employs this service not only to fetch album cover images, as most tag editors do, but also in combination with intelligent algorithms to "guess" the appropriate song information from song titles. It can also cache these cover images in the same directory where that album resides. For more information, visit the [http://more-cowbell.org/index.php/Main_Page Cowbell web site].

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Beep Media Player

Beep Media Player (BMP) is a multimedia player with an interface very similar to Winamp's. If you like Winamp, you're likely to enjoy this player. The Ubuntu package includes a lot of skins that can be used to change the appearance of the player.

attachment:IconsPage/apt.png Detailed installation instructions can be found on the [:BeepMediaPlayer: Beep Media Player wiki page].

attachment:IconsPage/info.png BMP is currently being rewritten from scratch. See [http://bmp.beep-media-player.org/index.php/BMP_Homepage Beep Media Player's home page] and the [http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/site/BMPx_Homepage new project page] for details.

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Muine

Muine is a music player for GNOME. It features:

  • A simple, intuitive user interface
  • Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and mp3 music playback support
  • Automatic album-cover fetching via [http://musicbrainz.org/ MusicBrainz] or Amazon

  • Support for embedded ID3v2 album images
  • [http://www.replaygain.org/ ReplayGain] support

  • Support for multiple artist and performer tags per song
  • Plug-in support
  • Translations into many languages

For more information, visit the [http://muine-player.org/wiki/Main_Page Muine website].

  • attachment:muine.png

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Streamtuner

Streamtuner allows you to browse streaming internet radio stations, and play them in your favorite media player. The program includes support for [http://www.shoutcast.com/ SHOUTcast], [http://www.live365.com/ Live365], [http://dir.xiph.org/ Xiph] and [http://www.basic.ch/ basic.ch] and allows you to add custom stations. For more information, visit the [http://www.nongnu.org/streamtuner/ Streamtuner web page].

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See also

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CategoryDocumentation CategoryNeedsExpansion