Kplayer and Kaffeine

Mplayer is an excellent video player for Linux. It’s plays DVDs and just about any thing else that it needs to - even WMV files. The problem with Mplayer is that it lacks a native GUI. You can play a file with mplayer by typing # mplayer /path/filename but all you’ll see is a small window with no navigation pop up, play until the end of the file, and then close itself.

Kplayer is the solution to that. Kplayer does to Mplayer what Kaffeine does to Xine. Kplayer is a frontend for Mplayer that integrates well into KDE (allowing drag-and-drop of files and compatibility with other KDE apps). It also provides start and stop (and other) controls for multimedia playback.

Kaffeine does this with Xine. Kaffeine is a frontend for Xine that gives Xine total compatibility with the rest of KDE. The new version of Kaffeine that ships with KDE 3.4 also features excellent playlist management.

The big thing that you’ll need to know about these two programs is this: If Kaffeine won’t play something, try it in Kplayer - and vice versa. They run off of totally different multimedia processing engines and they compliment each other nicely - so make sure you’ve got both installed.