media player Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

Ambient Noise (ANoise) Player Fixed For Ubuntu 16.04 And Newer

Author: Andrew | Date: June 14, 2017 | View Comments | Tags: anoise, cinnamon, gnome shell, media player, productivity, sound, unity

Ambient Noise, or ANoise is a simple, lightweight application for playing ambient noises, such as waves, rain, fire, and so on, useful to help you stay focused and boost productivity, or fall asleep.

The application didn't work in Ubuntu 16.04 and newer until recently, when it was updated to GStreamer 1.0 and Python 3, along with some bug fixes.

XBMC Media Center 13.0 Gotham Beta 1 Released

Author: Andrew | Date: March 04, 2014 | View Comments | Tags: android, linux, media center, media player, Raspberry Pi, ubuntu, windows, XBMC

XBMC Media Center 13.0 "Gotham" Beta 1 has been released, bringing improvements across all platforms, such as hardware decoding on Android, proper PulseAudio support for Linux, improved settings, support for some 3D movie formats and more.

Audience Media Player Getting Close To A New Release, Help Test It!

Author: Andrew | Date: April 01, 2013 | View Comments | Tags: audience, elementary, linux, media player, ubuntu, video player

Audience is a minimalistic, Gstreamer-based media player written in Vala. The second Audience release is getting close and its developers have invited users to help test it. There aren't any major new features since the previous release, but a large amount of bugs have been fixed recently. So if you can help test it or just want to give it a try, read on.

Parole Media Player 0.4.0 Released With New Features

Author: Andrew | Date: January 10, 2013 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, parole, ubuntu, xfce, xubuntu

Parole, the default Xfce / Xubuntu media player, has reached version 0.4.0, a development release which brings many new features and improvements.

The latest Parole 0.4.0 features CD and DVD playlist support, DVD navigation support, custom subtitle management and other new features along with some important bug fixes for fullscreen controls, screensaver inhibition and others.

Xnoise Media Player Gets New Album Art View

Author: Andrew | Date: October 30, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, music player, ubuntu, video player, xnoise

Xnoise 0.2.13 has been released today, introducing a new Album Art view, similar to the one available in Banshee or in Rhythmbox through the CoverArt Browser plugin, along with a new application icon created by Reda Lazri.

The new Album Art view can be accessed from the toolbar/menu or by using the CTRL + B keyboard shortcut. There's an integrated search too, which supports searching for artist, album or track name so you don't have to exit the Album Art view to find out on which album you can find a certain track:

New Xnoise album art view

Rhythmbox 2.97 Released With Improved Interface [Ubuntu 12.04 PPA Available]

Author: Andrew | Date: June 05, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, rhythmbox, ubuntu

Rhythmbox 2.97 has been released a couple of days ago, bringing a new, more compact header layout which includes album art by default, along with a new podcast subscription interface and other minor new features and bug fixes.

How To Remove Media Players From The Ubuntu Sound Menu [Ubuntu 12.04]

Author: Andrew | Date: May 11, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, sound menu, tips n tricks, ubuntu

The Ubuntu Sound Menu can get very crowded because many applications are automatically added the first time you run them. Here's a quick way to remove / blacklist applications from the Ubuntu Sound Menu (for Ubuntu 12.04 only).

Help Test Audience Media Player

Author: Andrew | Date: May 04, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: audience, elementary, linux, media player, ubuntu

Audience, a Gstreamer-based media player for Linux written in Vala is getting closer to its first public release. But firstly, it needs testing so if you want to help, install Audience and submit any bugs you find @ Launchpad (before you do, try the videos in Totem to make sure the bugs are Audience-specific).

Xnoise Media Player 0.2.0 Gets Refreshed Layout, More

Author: Andrew | Date: April 04, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, music player, ubuntu, xnoise

Xnoise, a simple and fast media player for Linux, has reached version 0.2.0, getting a refreshed layout, support for dockable media sources, a redone application button and more.

Install VLC 2.0 In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

Author: Andrew | Date: February 20, 2012 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, music, ubuntu, video, vlc

VLC 2.0 "Twoflower" has been released with faster decoding, support for more video formats, a reworked web interface, experimental BluRay Discs support (without menus) and more.

Try The New Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE)

Author: Andrew | Date: November 05, 2011 | View Comments | Tags: gnome shell, gnome shell extensions, linux, linux mint, main menu, media player, systray, ubuntu

The official Linux Mint GNOME Shell (more about Linux Mint 12 here) extensions can be downloaded via GitHub. However, since some of them are forks of the official GNOME Shell extensions, it's not a good idea to install and activate all of them because of possible conflicts with the original extensions.

If you want to manually install some of the MGSE extensions, get the Git branch, open the "test" script and remove any extensions you don't want to install. And finally, run the "test" script (./test).

For Arch Linux, you can find all the MGSE extensions in AUR: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=53742

To make it easier for Ubuntu users to give some of the new MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions) a try, I've uploaded 3 extensions to the WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA (all credits for the extensions: Linux Mint and their official authors, all I did was to upload them to the PPA).

GNOME Shell Mediaplayer Extension Available In The WebUpd8 GNOME3 PPA

Author: Andrew | Date: October 20, 2011 | View Comments | Tags: gnome shell, gnome shell extensions, linux, media player, music, ubuntu

Mediaplayer GNOME Shell extension is now available in the WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA. This extension can control MPRIS capable media players from the GNOME Shell top bar.

Install VLC 1.1.6 In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Via PPA

Author: Andrew | Date: January 24, 2011 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, ubuntu, vlc

VLC 1.1.6 was released yesterday, bringing security fixes and many improvements. Here's the complete VLC 1.1.6 changelog:

VLC 1.1.5 Has Been Released [Ubuntu PPA]

Author: Andrew | Date: November 15, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, ubuntu, vlc

VLC 1.1.5 has been released yesterday, introducing some small features and bug fixes.

One of the most interesting new features in VLC 1.1.5 is the addition of 1000 Web-shows listing integrated inside VLC's playlist, provided by Channels.com. These can be accessed by going to View > Playlist > Internet:

VLC 1.1.2 With GPU Acceleration Uploaded To The Official Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Repositories

Author: Andrew | Date: August 05, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: 10.10, gpu, maverick meerkat, media player, ubuntu, vlc

Video Acceleration API (VA API) is an open source software library ("libVA") and API specification which enables and provides access to graphics hardware (GPU) acceleration for video processing on Linux and Unix based operating systems. Accelerated processing includes video decoding, video encoding, subpicture blending and rendering. Using VA API (GPU acceleration), playing H.264 videos for example should take some load of the CPU thus making the playback run more smoothly and with less CPU usage.

Like we told you when VLC 1.1.0 was out, there's no proper way of installing it with VA-API (GPU acceleration) in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and older because of the dependencies it requires - compiling it against newer ffmpeg packages would break all other packages which need ffmpeg (like video editors, other media players and so on).

Dragon Player Default In Kubuntu 10.10 (Not VLC), Firefox Default In UNE 10.10 Instead Of Chromium, Ubuntu Tweak In New Queue

Author: Andrew | Date: August 03, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: 10.10, chromium, dragonplayer, firefox, kaffeine, linux, maverick meerkat, media player, ubuntu, ubuntu tweak, vlc

Dragon Player has been made default in Kubuntu 10.10 instead of Kaffeine (I'm not really up to date with what's happening in Kubuntu, but it seems Kaffeine was default in Kubuntu 10.10 until now - at least according to the changelog of the kubuntu-meta package). A while back, the Kubuntu developers said they were considering VLC to be the default media player but unfortunately this didn't work out as expected. I'm not sure what are the reasons for this (since the news came from the kubuntu-meta changelog), but most probably there were some license/legal issues so they had to go with Dragonplayer.

Install VLC 1.1.1 In Ubuntu [PPA]

Author: Andrew | Date: July 23, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, ubuntu, vlc

VLC 1.1.1 was released 2 days ago, this version bringing only minor tweaks and fixes for Linux users and GPU decoding for ATI users (Windows).

VLC Default In Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat?

Author: Andrew | Date: July 21, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: 10.10, kde, kubuntu, linux, maverick meerkat, media player, ubuntu, vlc

It seems the Kubuntu developers aren't big fans of Kaffeine 1.0 and want a new default media player for Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

The first obvious choice would have been Smplayer, but:

smplayer almost certainly not, mplayer has licencing isues which prevent it being on the CD.

And since Smplayer is a Mplayer front-end, that completely rules it out.

Xnoise Media Player Gets A PPA, New Version Released

Author: Andrew | Date: June 24, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, music player, ubuntu, xnoise

Xnoise, the lightweight Linux media player (or should I say music player?) we wrote about 2 days ago, got a PPA and a new version. That also means that now there are official deb files for both 32 and 64bit.

Add the Xnoise PPA and install the latest Xnoise version:

How To Install VLC 1.1.0 (Final) In Ubuntu From A PPA (deb)

Author: Andrew | Date: June 22, 2010 | View Comments | Tags: linux, media player, ubuntu, vlc

Like you already know, VLC 1.1.0 (final) has been released yesterday. I will take this opportunity to clarify some things regarding vaapi (GPU acceleration). Read on!

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