A sizeable number of full featured, mature and free video applications are available on the Linux platform. This article explores such topics as becoming a digital video editing master and turning your Linux machine into a Home Theatre.
To provide insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 42 high quality Linux video applications, covering a broad spectrum of uses. Most of the titles included in this feature are desktop applications with an elegant graphical front-end, although we have not neglected console software.
XBMC for linux is really starting to get some where.
I got hooked on the xbmc interface on my old xbox. But have now managed to replace my xbox with a ubuntu pc running xbmc.
oh incase some havent noticed there is a ppa for xbmc
so you dont need to compile it any more.
Hey, thanks for that. Didn’t know about XBMC.
I’d like to add “oxine” to that list. It’s not as packed with features as say XBMC/Freevo etc, but it is a “light” media player perfect for a “minimal” media center box.
Personally, i’ve been running freevo for a year or two now as a dedicated media center, hooked up to a tv+remote, and i’m rather pleased with it.
Another one they forgot and that’s always been a mystery to me is Jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org). It’s always looked (haven’t used it) like a powerful tool to me for video editing (especially for effects), but it seems to be quite unknown and hardly used by anyone, even if it’s been around for quite a long time. Maybe someone knows more about it?
Well I’ll admit I haven’t looked at jahshaka for quite a while, but I did follow the project quite closely for a while. The latest binary release on Sourceforge is from October 3, 2006 so I don’t think much has happened since I last looked.
Basically they had lots of grand ideas, not very much working code and even less documentation. I really wanted to be able to use it since it sounded like an amazing app, and the developers seemed to have great ambitions for the project. But basically it never really worked. It was awkward to use, had very few features and crashed too often to be usable.
Which was all a great shame since a good compositing and motion graphics tool is really missing in the OSS portfolio.
i understand the need for variety when it comes to available applications, but why choose so many in a single ‘review’ or list of apps? and why 42?
this is the 2nd article i’ve seen like this lately, not sure if it was from OSNews but it probably was. this really isnt good reading content, i’d rather get a list of the 10 most amazing video apps or have them broken down into specific roles (like HTPC apps or something unique).
this link wasnt worth the click, i could of just googled for ‘linux video apps’ and gotten the same list.
also, reading the comments it seems everyone will jump in with ‘oh they forgot this’… seems pretty pointless again.
Edited 2008-07-15 14:37 UTC
So this type list is not your cup of tea. Personaly i have found this type of lists useful to me under some circumstances.
And you know you dont need to read every article on osnews the headline told pretty much wich kind of article this was, so you really did know beforehand that this was of no intreast for you.
Yeah shorter lists within a smaller area is also good especily when there are small reviews on every pice of software is also good, but it was not wath the author feelt like writing.
They covered software over a broad spectrum of uses, so it’s not suprising that the number was high.
And 42 IS the answer to the great question …
Really, you don’t know?
Many apps are mentioned including handbrake (which was originally a mac apps). Acidrip one of my favorite apps was not mentioned, probably isn’t that famous.
I love it. On Linux and Windows. It makes using mplayer from a DE easy.
The official MPlayer GUI always felt more like an afterthought and while e.g. xine has a much better GUI (still pretty bad) it’s imho slightly inferior as a general purpose player (there are some things it’s better at though), while Kaffeine and Totem suck for various reasons (slow, crash prone, lack of advanced features; ymmv, of course).
My favorite feature is that it remembers the volume for each file, I don’t care much about where I was (because mplayer seeks extremely fast, SMPlayer does too, which is my second favorite thing) so that’s not as important for me, but I have quite a few videos at drastically different volume levels.
They forgot gnome-mplayer, taking a good player (mplayer) and giving it a non crappy gtk2+ gui.
The only “special” feature I want in a video player is the ability to take screeshots of whatever I’m playing. What Linux player supports that?