Multimedia in Ubuntu

Banshee Media Player (all-in-one)

Banshee is considered to be one of the most popular media player for Linux distributions. It’s a great media management and playback application, possessing all the functions you may need. You can sync your G1 phone, iPod, and many other devices. Banshee has very attractive and user friendly interface. Before we go ahead with its main characteristic features, let’s see some screenshots.

The main window:

As you can see the main window of given app is divided in several panels in order to make it easier to use.

Preferences panel:

Given panel is basically used for customization.

Watching movies:

Though you can hardly understand something from this screenshot, it was made just to show that there is opportunity to watch movies.

As for the main characteristic features here are the most important ones:

• Importing audio from CDs
• Opportinity to download or stream podcasts and video podcasts
• Last.fm streaming radio
• Artwork is automatically fetched as you listen
• Encoding/decoding different media formats by using GStreamer and etc.

This media player being a really all-in-one application produces extremely nice impression. Most likely this is the reason why many users choose it to play music and videos.

You can install it both from Add/Remove panel and by running the following command in terminal:

sudo aptitude install banshee

Still you can always check for the latest version of Banshee Media Player on the official website.

Dragon Player (mainly video)

Dragon player is an application designed to be as simple as possible. There are just basic functions and very simple interface. Due to this fact it’s hardly possible to mention characteristic features of given player — all of them are pretty standard. It should be emphasized that Dragon player is more a video player than a music one. Though it plays music, there are a lot of important features missing, such as playlists, equalizer and etc.

Here are some screenshots to check. The main window of Dragon player:

The first and the only thing to notice is uncluttered interface.

Watching a movie:

Again there are just basic functions.

In general it seems to be too simple for a media player that can become more or less popular. However those users who like things to be simple, may find it decent enough.

As far as the installation is concerned Dragon player can be easily installed from Add/Remove panel.

Exaile Music Player (audio)

Exaile represents a very decent media player, which tends to be similar to Amarok (designed for KDE), but for Gnome desktop environment. It offers a lot of nice features from different media players, such as: automatic fetching of album art and lyrics, artist/album information via Wikipedia, handling of large libraries, Last.fm support, tabbed playlists, downloading of guitar tablature from fretplay.com and etc.

In addition to that it has very user friendly interface, so everyone will find it easy to use. Let’s check a couple of screenshots, so you can have an idea about the way it looks. Here is the main window:

As you can see the panels are well organized, moreover the playlist view is customizable, so you can arrange it the way you like.

Preferences, plugins and equalizer:

Though you can hardly see it on the screenshot there are a lot of available plugins for Exaile player, which can be pretty useful, so you should check them for sure. The equalizer is pretty decent and there are many presets to choose from.

Given player is a really nice one and we would recommend you to give it a try. The only disadvantage as you understand is the lack of video playback feature.

To install it go to Add/Remove panel or enter the following command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install exaile