Banshee is a simple but powerful multimedia player with Audio/Video playback support, subscribe and playback podcasts and last.fm radio from Banshee. With Banshee1.2 Import, organize, play, share your music and videos using Banshee’s simple but powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs

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.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

Earcandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, which for me is probably the first thing that i ever liked about pulse audio. This volume manager could mute music in your amarok or rhythombox or literally any music player when you play some video in youtube(i am not lying) or VLC or other video players.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

Most streaming audio and video on the Internet is disseminated in proprietary formats such as RM, RAM, WMV, and ASF. Fortunately, the open source application MPlayer can play and even record streams in almost any format.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I like desktop Linux. I admit though that Linux is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with proprietary media formats. These formats are designed to lock users into a particular video or audio player and those programs seldom come in a Linux version.