I have a basic rule when encoding content and that is to never trust the input. Streaming media, at it’s core, requires three basic things.Ģ) An even keyframe distance which is also known as a Group of Pictures or GOP.Ĥ) Finding a better bitrate for your content.ħ) Proper encoding for your target audiences. In this post I hope to help shed some light on what does and does not work. 1.I’ve been in the streaming media industry since 2008 and have seen a lot of misinformation regarding both FFmpeg and libx264. Please keep in mind that the list is in no particular order of ranking.

I have mentioned the commands, but if you like, you can install them from the Software Center. You should have universe repository enabled to find and install these video players from the software center or by using the command line. These open-source video players should be available in any Linux distribution you are using.Īnother note for Ubuntu users. I have included the installation steps for Ubuntu but that shouldn’t make it a list of Ubuntu video players. You won’t have an issue utilizing the default player-however, if you want more open-source video player choices (or alternatives to the default one), you can find them here. Usually, you go with the default video player that comes baked in with your Linux distribution (that could be anything).

Watching movies/TV series or other media content on computers is not an ‘ancient tradition’ yet. You can also download videos from YouTube and watch them later, or if you are in a country where you cannot get Netflix and other streaming services, you may have to rely on torrent services like Popcorn Time in Linux. You can watch Hulu, Prime Video and/or Netflix on Linux. Wondering which video player you should use on Linux? Here’s a list of top open source video players available for Linux distributions.

How to use ffmpeg create video player