Video Players

Video players can play sound, as well as video. However, they are intended for video. Two useful video players are:

• RealPlayer: RealPlayer is a favorite application on Windows. RealPlayer 10 for Linux (10.0 first released in August 2004) is greatly improved over previous Linux RealPlayer versions. It's based on the open source player, Helix. The Helix player supports many open source formats, such as Ogg Vorbis. RealPlayer is built on top of the Helix player and supports several non-open source formats, such as RealAudio, RealVideo, and MP3.

  RealPlayer is not installed in most Linux distributions, but it's quite easy to install from the Real Web site (www.real.com). Installing RealPlayer is described later in this chapter. In addition, a RealPlayer plug-in for Mozilla allows you to play video clips in your browser, rather than opening a separate RealPlayer window.

• MPlayer: The Movie Player is a good, popular video player that you can use on your Linux system. MPlayer supports the most common video formats, such as MPEG, AVI, WMA/WMV, MOV, and others, including REALMEDIA (.rm) files that RealPlayer uses. MPlayer is not installed with most Linux systems, so you need to download and install it yourself. Installing MPlayer is discussed later in this chapter.