VLC Media Player as an Alternative Media Player for Linux

As you probably know, there's already a built in media player in Ubuntu called Movie Player. The one that will give you pop ups whenever you're trying to play a different type of Video file. It will search for the suitable plug ins and blablabla. I know it's not really nice. All we want is something that provides everything we need without interruptions whenever we want to play some different type of video file formats.

We should be thankful to the open source software community for VideoLan Client (VLC) Media Player. It started as a student project in at the École Centrale Paris, with the goal of developing a general-purpose media player that could handle audio, video and streamed content.

VLC can play most kinds of common audio and video such as MP3, OGG, WMA, AVI, WMV, MPEG, FLV, 3GP and etc. The new formats are always added to the list. So it's pretty up to date. Think of it like a Media Player Classic in Windows.

You can download VLC (and it is very recommended by me) from terminal by typing : sudo apt-get install vlc

For the Karmic Koala users, you might have some problems using VLC there (just like my friend). But don't worry, there are ways to fix the problems you have.

You can see the solutions in this link :

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/fix-for-vlc-doesnt-play-video-after-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-upgrade.html


Cheers! :)