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VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images.
FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It is a very fast video and audio converter and includes libavcodec which is the leading audio/video codec library. It can also grab from a live audio/video source.
When it comes to video players, Kaffeine is my favourite, several reasons for it being that it plays anything I feed it with, it has good subtitle support and the interface it provides is clean and simple to use.
"...Ogg is professional-grade media format. Ogg Vorbis encodes audio and Ogg Theora encodes video. [...] The companies that control the software design it to restrict the users and spy on them. If you choose Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, you can listen to audio and stream video using many different media players, including free software that respects your freedom..."
While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.
Although this is a pre-alpha release, it looks just awesome, and if all the features (or at least almost all) will be implemented by the time 1.0 gets out as a stable release, Kaffeine will definitely keep being one of the most powerful video players for KDE.