blog/data/2016-06-06-debian-media-player.txt

   1 Title: The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu, multimedia, video
   3 Date: 2016-06-06 12:50
   4
   5 <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
   6 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
   7 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
   8 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
   9 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
  10 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
  11 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
  12 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
  13 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
  14
  15 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
  16 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
  17 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
  18 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
  19 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
  20 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
  21 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
  22
  23 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
  24 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
  25 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
  26 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
  27 toten and parole.</p>
  28
  29 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
  30 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
  31 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
  32 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
  33 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
  34 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
  35 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
  36 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
  37 formats.</p>