8 Free, Open Source Tools for Video Playback and Encoding

by Sam Dean - Aug. 20, 2008Comments (11)

It wasn't that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting, even if you're currently happy with your video and encoding tools. Here are eight good applications to try.

Miro is widely known as a free, open source video player through which you can watch web videocasts, BitTorrent files, and play almost any type of video file. You can deliver video and audio to Miro's player as a publisher as well.

 

 

 

 

Linux and Mac users should look into VLC Media Player.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MPlayer is a popular video player for Linux, Windows and the Mac. It supports a large number of formats, and can save streamed content to files with ease.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SMPlayer is a front-end for MPlayer, and it goes well beyond simple media playing features. It supports filters, lets you add subtitles, and more. It's for Windows and Linux.

 

 

 

 

 

SMPlayer Portable is just that--a portable version of SMPlayer. You don't have to install it to run it, and it's easy to run from a USB thumb drive.

 

 

 

 

 

Chameleo is an open source media player with a focus on extensibility and widgets. The software, based on GStreamer and other open source projects, supports a wide variety of codecs. The sample widgets that come with Chameleo give video watchers the ability to take screen captures, blog what they’re watching, use video tags and subtitles, open new files, and browse the web.

 

 

 

 

 

Prism is a free application that will let you convert video from one format to virtually any other popular format. You can preview the output to guage whether you have all the encoding right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple Theora Encoder is a very popular, easy tool for encoding video on a Mac. See Lisa's review.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MediaPortal is an open source application for turning your PC/TV into an advanced media center. It juggles music, radio, videos and DVDs. It also works like a DVR and lets you record live TV.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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11 Comments
 

Thanks!

0 Votes

UHm. what about VideoLan and MediaCoder?

0 Votes

that is ... vlc works great on windows, and it doesn't rely on window's installed codecs like mplayer does, so you can get some movies to play on it when they won't otherwise, and visa versa.

1 Votes

Great List! VLC Media Player Rocks!

1 Votes

Thank You.

0 Votes

Prism is great but it isn't FOSS - They have this paid "Premium" product but the free one is good enough for most things you'd need..

1 Votes

MPlayer, SMPlayer and SMPlayer Portable are essentially the same product.

0 Votes

gostaria


0 Votes

I use Avidemux for taking DVD movies and web-source video and transcoding it to 320 x 180 to 240 for viewing on my Cowon D2 personal/portable media player. It works well with lots of options to optimize the quality of the output from almost any source/codec you can imagine.


0 Votes

And then there's MythTV -- also available as part of the MythBuntu distribution -- it allows you to use an older PC as a media player, and supports almost any number and almost any mixture of analog and digital tuners from a backend PC to almost any number of front-end systems throught your home or across the internet. Of course, you can run the fron- and back- ends on one PC.


Open Source Rocks.

Open Source Rules.


ubuntu = life without windows


0 Votes

We should also check out the free and oprn source XBMC(xbmc.org) and Boxee(www.boxee.tv) [Boxee is absed on xbmc but is more feature rich]


0 Votes
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