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Multimedia (audio and video) is a common source of information exchange between people in the world. Therefore, its important to choose and use the best programs and tools to play our media files with the highest efficiency and quality. .

In this post I will review a list of the best four "open source" programs for multimedia playback on Linux system...

1- VLC

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Released in 2001 under VideoLAN project. It is one of the most powerful multimedia programs in the world, it is multi-platform, running on most popular operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, iOS, Android, Solaris...

The program is written in C, C ++, Objective-C, and it is licensed under GPLv2 +, and it supports a large number of different codec libraries. Also it supports many different media formats, subtitles and supports playback of media directly from DVD.

VLC has the ability to play the media files contained within an ISO image file, and it offers many other unique features that made this program stand on the throne of media players ...

2- Kodi Media Center known as XBMC before

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Kodi is written in C++ and Python. It has a large number of powerful add-ons, and offers high flexibility because it allows the user to play audio and video files directly from their sources from the INTERNET, local networks, and local storage ...

Users can search the INTERNET for media repositories that contain Add-ons, and install them on Kodi. Using these Add-ons on Kodi, users can for example stream movies and watch live TV channels.

Kodi is popular and is widely used in many devices such as smart TVs, media streaming networks and others .... It is simply a Multimedia operating system.

3- SMPlayer

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SMPlayer, a media player derived from and based on MPlayer, is written in C ++ \ QT only, It has a beautiful GUI, and built-in Codecs which makes it one of the most powerful and elegant programs to play almost all media formats without the need to external Codecs.

SMPlayer has the ability to adjust and fix subtitles and fetches them from the Internet. Also, it offers many beautiful skins and themes, and gives the user the ability to play YouTube videos directly on it.

4- MPV

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MPV is one of the lightest and fastest media players, and it is written in C, Objective-C, Lua and Python.
It is based on and built primarily on MPlayer.

MPV depends heavily and primarily on the command line interface which means it should be run through the terminal. MPV is powerful and high-quality, and has good algorithms and color management.

MPV can be used as audio and video splitter, and it is available on Windows and Mac as well.

Honorable Mention

1- CMPlayer

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It is a media player based on MPV program. It is easy to use and has a beautiful user graphical interface, and it has MPV features as well as other features added to it.

2- Xine

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A multi-platform media player written in C language only. The project's improvements started in 2000, where the process of playing DVDs was done manually and boring, and Xine came up to simplify this process.

Xine supports a wide range of different media formats. But one of its beautiful features is the ability to correct synchronization of the audio with the video manually.

Sources:
https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/vlc.htm
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/what-is-kodi,review-4160.html
https://www.smplayer.info
https://mpv.io
https://www.hecticgeek.com/2013/11/cmplayer-minimalist-features-rich-ubuntu-13-10/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xine

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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