On Sun, 4 Dec 2011, Jason Hsu wrote:

> What are your favorite multimedia apps (DVD/video player/ripper, 
> audio/CD player/ripper, etc.) that are lightweight?

I'm not sure how lightweight you're going to get media players to be. 
Especially video players. There are so many millions of codecs out there, 
for one. Same for any kind of ripper - they want to be able to handle 
anything you throw at them and output anything you want them to throw out.

Doubly true if you want anything with a GUI. I mean you can always use 
mpg123 to play your MP3 files one by one, and I bet someone's made a 
commandline interface to do playliss like that, but it's just so much 
simpler to use a GUI jukebox kinda thing.

Although if you want to go REALLY lightweight you put all your media on a 
media server and use a web-based player like Subsonic or something.


Since you already have Gnome, wouldn't it make sense to use Gnome's media 
players? I mean then you already have a lot of the dependencies.


As for me - I use mplayer for video (on my HTPC, I like it much better 
than MythTV's builtin player). VLC alwyas gets top reviews, too.

I use Rhythmbox to play music on my desktop. I'm not sure why. I used to 
use xmms a million years ago. The HTPC uses MythTV's music player though, 
and like I said, I have Subsonic running so I can stream that through a 
browser or my phone.

I use abcde to rip CDs to FLAC, which goes on the media server, and then 
use pacpl to convert to MP3 for streaming. I know abcde can supposedly rip 
to both FLAC and MP3 at once but that was just messy as I wanted to 
integrate into my existing trees. Thanks to people on the lit for 
suggesting abcde, btw. Both abcde and pacpl should be  pretty lightweight, 
I'd think.

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs. I've been working on digitizing my DVD 
collection like I have my CD collection, now that we have the storage 
capacity for hundreds of movies. I don't know that it's light, but it 
works.


-Yaron

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