Survey: List your favourite Linux Audio/Video/HTPC apps

mplayer2 - The original is great but seeking to exact frame makes commercial skipping very slick.

vlc (via vlcj Java package) - a little better with streaming video IMHO.

handbrake - Encoding DVDs and re-encoding BD when necessary.

comskip - Run with wine, does a nice job commercial flagging OTA mpeg2.

ffmpeg - I use it so often for many different things. It makes things easier once you figure out all the arguments on the command line.

mediainfo - Nice program to quickly get info on a video file.

jflicks - But I biased.

Avidemux
Pitivi
Kdenlive
Kino
hdtvTompeg2 (Wine)
MKVMerge GUI
DeVeDe
DVDFab (wine)
DVDShrink (wine)

Brasero
IMGBurn (Wine)
k3b

Xsane- scan photos, docs, DVD covers, etc
gscan2pdf - A GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents (manuals, books, magazines, etc)
exiftran- cli lossless operations like rotations on JPGs (photos, etc)
Irfanview (wine)

Audacity
Audacious
Decibel
Rythmbox (music player and CD rip)
Banshee
RubyRipper (CD rip)
(may try others like Clementine, Aqualung, Quod Libet, etc)
MythTV
XBMC

VLC
Smplayer
Movie Player (Ubuntu totem default)

Firefox with NoScript, Ad Block+ and FlashBlock Addons
LibreOffice
Scribus
Dia
Inkscape
Gimp
Pinta

...random others I may have missed.

I'll add NoMachine's NX remote desktop software. Enables me to RIP/transcode/maintain my HTPC without having to power on my projector to view the console.

MythTV
mplayer
handbrake
mkvtoolnix

XBMC
NX
DVDFab
K9Copy
Handbrake

On Mandriva 2010.0.

SMPlayer because no other media player lets me expose all the features I use most often. In fact most players don't even have speed controls which I absolutely must have for listening to podcasts at 1.5x normal speed. Not to mention zooming and panning and jumping by user configurable times.

Here you can see my customized SMPlayer interface with buttons added in the tool bar for the Deinterlacing setting, speed controls (-10%, +10%, half and double), pan controls (up, down, left, right) and the extra jump controls in the control bar (<<<, <<, >>, >>>).



Plus I have the multi-button mice on both my laptop and tower remapped so that the scroll-wheel zooms when inside the image and changes volume when over the volume control and the forward button is set to jump forward a minute and the jump back button is set to jump back 10 seconds (for easily skipping over commercials).

I do NOT and NEVER will use Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, Totem or any of the other media players that are missing all or most of these features.

My only complaint about SMPlayer (really Mplayer) is that I haven't been able to come up with image quality settings that are as good as Kaffeine (Xine). So, in rare instances, I do still use Kaffeine when image quality is more important than UI features.

Other Apps in order off the menu (not in order of most used):

Pyrenamer for bulk file renames. Personally I prefer Thunar's Bulk Renamer, but I got tired of having to do a complete XFCE install just to get the Renamer [ed. don't get me started on how much I hate sed and grep]. However, since the Gnome people seem to be bound and determined to wreck the Gnome desktop, I'll probably be switching to Mint-XFCE when Mint-Debian goes to Gnome3 and then I'll go back to using the Thunar Renamer.

PokerTH when I need a Texas Hold'em fix.

GIMP duh, of course.

Chromium because everyone should always have at least two browsers on their system at all times. But I don't really like the UI or the relative lack of add-ons which I've become addicted to, so the only time I use it is to diagnose networks problems when I can't tell if the network is bad or if Firefox is having a problem.

FireFox the browser I use most because I'm not into the minimalist UI kick that seems to be the current fad.

PenguinTV this is what I use for podcast and RSS feed aggregation, because I hate the minimalist interfaces that the built-in media players of Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok et. al have. And since PenguinTV doesn't have a built-in player, it ends up being easier to use with SMPlayer than any of those other aggregators. It also does a good job of syncing with my Sansa Fuze mp3 player.

Calibre for e-books, not because really I like it but because it's the only one I've been able to find.

LibreOffice another duh, of course.

Audacity I don't really need or want to learn a full-blown DAWS so this meets my needs.

Avidemux mostly for stripping audio tracks out of video files although lately I've been having trouble with Mplayer not playing h264 files in mp4 containers and I've found that using Avidemux to just copy both the audio and video into an MKV container fixes the problem.

EasyTag for mp3 tagging, I could be talked out of this if someone has a better suggestion.

HandBrake for the rare occasion when I feel the need to transcode something.

K3b once again preferring the non-minimalist UI over apps like Brasero. Although I only use the burning features not any of the ripping or other stuff.

K9copy on the rare occasion when DVDFab is giving me problems I'll switch to K9copy and just rip the main movie track. I've had "issues" getting K9copy to do full disk rips.

soundKonvertor here's my non-minimalist UI theme again, I much prefer this to any other tool I've found. For all the clutter it's still the best I've found for making custom mp3 settings for encoding audiobook rips (just the encoding, I never use the ripping feature for reasons I'll mention later. I also love the fact I can set the number of simultaneous encodes which makes encoding a 20 hour long audiobook take just a few minutes on my quad-core AMD965BE.

RubyRipper unfortunately something seems to be broken with RubyRipper these days and it's taking forever to compare the tracks and generate the MD5SUM while hardly using any CPU while doing it, so it seems to have some kind of low priority issue. This is my favorite native Linux ripper because I can turn off CDParanoia which is both slow and does a crappy job and instead just use the track comparison feature to get an accurate rip, so I'm very distraught about it not working right now.

VLC on rare occasions like when I want to see the closed captioning on an ATSC file which one of the rare features that SMPlayer is missing.

Dvdisaster When I really, really really need a long term backup, in my case just financial data, I don't bother for anything else, it get backed-up to an optical disk using this tool which adds Reed-Solomon encoding to the entire disk image before it gets burned to the disk. This way, both the file contents and the directory structure are protected. It's slow to encode a big disk and very painfully slow to do a recovery from a big disk, but when you're trying to recover 7 year old tax data off of a CDR or CDRW disk that has started to go bad, it's worth all the extra encoding and decoding time.

Grsync for syncing my laptop to my tower

WINE APPS:

DVDFab because it's free and can do full disk rips of almost everything except for a handful of Sony Arcos disks. I think this is the only exception to my non-minimalist theme.

DVDShrink when I just need a small clip from a DVD this is the least painful way I've found to do it.

HDTVtoMPEG I still haven't found any better than this for clipping segments I want to save out of ATSC transport streams. Every native Linux App I've tried crashes constantly or can't seem to import ATSC stream or has other problems. I'll keep trying new version of all the native Linux non-linear editors as they come out, but I'm starting to lose hope.

EAC I still use this for ripping CDs because every native Linux App I've tried is painfully slow and still has tons ot errors because almost all of them use CDParanoia which is just plain bad. I really wish someone would write a native Linux CD ripper that uses the AccurateRip database but it seems that streaming has killed off everyone's interest in CD Rippers, so I guess I'll just keep using EAC even though I probably wouldn't recommend it to new users due to the really steep learning curve.

Microsoft Classic Board Games frankly the UI's of all the native Linux versions of Go, Backgammon and Dominoes suck, so I use this pathetically old set of MS board games to get my fix of those games. IIRC, I originally bought this disk to run on a W98se box, that's how ridiculously old it is.

I've tried getting the build of mplayer2 in the Debian Testing repo to work with SMPlayer, but I have had any luck. If you ever try using mplayer2 with SMPlayer for the front end and have any luck, let me know, I'd be very interested.

Assuming the latest version of DVDfab, there should be no DVD that Fab can't rip completely and properly, usually before the disc hits retail.

This is one reason I continue to buy and use mostly DVD's- they will always be able to be ripped (all restrictions removed) with the latest version in a timely fashion.

For BluRay, there will always be an ever longer delay to get around the restrictions (disc protections) due to the complexity of BD+ and other tricks they can try. AFAIK, the current Fab *requires* an internet connection just to rip the latest BD's!? DVDFab keeps the BD disc encryption removal code on their servers.

Yeah, but I haven't been able to get newer versions to work (I think the version of Wine in the Debian Testing repos has a lot of problems. I had massive troubles getting EAC to work too).

Anyway, in my experience it's too much of a hassle to upgrade DVDFab everytime I run into a problem disk. I tend to run into installation issues with DVDFab and then have to spend another hour repairing the mess and getting back to what I already had working. So in those cases it's just less hassle to fall back on k9copy and hope it works and leave the DVDFab update for later.

A few other apps that I either rarely use or have used in the distant past:

sox when I need to do audio file conversions from a script rather than a gui.

imagemagick when I need to do image file conversions from a script rather than a gui.

I've used all of the following when I was converting my old VHS tape collection to DVDs. But that was a couple of years ago so my experience is a bit out of date now. These days I'd consider mencoder a last resort for files which transcode and ffmpeg choke on. Similarly I'd consider 2mandvd a last resort for DVD Authoring because it uses mencoder whereas DVDStyler uses ffmpeg. Also, the last time I used 2mandvd it was just called mandvd and the UI was much worse than DVDStyler's.

transcode transcoding
mencoder transcoding
ffmpeg transcoding
dvdstyler dvd authoring
2mandvd dvd authoring

xvinfo to verify that xv mode is working properly

glxinfo to verify that GL is working properly

isomaster to add, remove and edit files in an ISO image.

gmountiso I used this in the past for mounting ISOs, but the last time I tried it was broken, presumably due to all the changes that have been made to Gnome so I'm back to having to manually mount ISOs.

MythTV -- Can't stand watch TV with commercials after using MythTV! Also, I don't actually know when shows are aired as I just watch when it is convenient for me. I am never going back!

Asunder -- For CD ripping. Simple, easy, quick, and uses LAME. I liked the idea of Rubyripper but it takes **forever!** to rip and encode.

MusicBrainz Picard -- Just found this one. I am currently using it to properly tag, organize, and renaming mp3 files. Once I got used to it and set it up it the way I wanted, it makes organizing music files easy!

Rockbox -- Great software for your digital audio player!

WinFF -- Use it to convert videos from MythTV to Rockbox.

Yeah, I've been using Asunder too ever since RubyRipper broke. But only as a backup for EAC since it's still way slower that EAC on both of my machines.


Well, this sounds interesting. I'm not interested in the "organizing" part because I prefer just plain-old directories to databases that inevitably get f-ed up. But if the tagging and renaming works better than EasyTag and PyRenamer then it might be worth it.

I agree with organizing by directory and typically save things as

../Artist/Album/Track# Title.mp3

What I like about MuzicBrainz Picard is that it (sofar) is very consistent in its naming and tagging. When ripping things with Asunder it will constantly tag things wrong or inconsistent. For example it will automatically tag one Beatles album artist as "The Beatles" and another one "Beatles, The" Another example, is one album only used all lower case letters instead of proper use of capitalizing the names of the artist, track etc.

My current workflow is to rip music with Asunder into a "temp" directory letting it name directories and files whatever crappy way it wants to. I then use Picard to: clear all the existing tags, properly add tags, add album art**, add genre**, properly rename the files based on the correct tags, move these files into the correct directory using the correct (and consistent) artist, album name, track and title, and then delete the empty "temp" directories. Picard does all these things all in one step automatically once you set the options on what you want it to do and how you want it do it. Saves me a bunch of time and frustration vs doing it all manually!


** I use the "Cover Art Downloader" and "Last.fm.Plus" plugins for these features. I don't use genre much as I typically browse by directory, but I like the way this plugin sets a white list of allowed genres so I can limit the crazy number of genres to a select few!

That sounds like very much like my work flow except using EasyTag and Pyrenamer, neither of which I really like all that much.

So that should work perfectly for me with the possible exception of audiobooks which in my experience are rarely in the databases so all the info needs to be added manually.

Thanks.

re: Asunder/Ruby Ripper

Back in my Windows days, I used CDex.

It is rated Platinum on wineappdb, and it appears to work mostly from my quick test.

However, it is writing out a truncated 8.1 filename after a track is ripped. During ripping, the full name appears but is overwritten with a DOS style A~BCDEFG.FLA (for a flac file) when the track is done/closed. Don't see how to fix it. Besides, CDex just uses a Win port of the linux cdparanoia, so may as well just use any Linux ripper based on it.

Anywho, thanks for the Asunder tip- it's just the minimalist GUI CD ripper I was looking for.

How do you use ffmpeg to bitstream hd audio(dts hd ma and dolby tru hd) in Linux?

Dvd fab dosn't rip to mkv's to well, theirs an audio issue that is known.

Thanks for the tip- I'm sure the DVDFab guys will fix it in a future release soon.

Makemkv would probably be a good alternative.

I was referring to just ripping the complete disc to VIDEO_TS in any case.

Actually I haven't had to attempt that because I only have a 5.1 system. In the theater I have a projector so audio goes to my receiver via toslink. So my BR rips only contain 5.1 audio. Someday I'll want that but not in the near term...

I don't see any of the programs that you people have listed that will let me rip Blurays.

Yes makemkv works better, the dvdfab guys have known of the issue for over a year supposedly.

I have a 5.1 system to but I bitstream hd audio Do you know anything about the ffmpeg guys and hd audio on Linux? Anybody?

Theres a bunch on here.

I use Mythtv and its recordings are renamed (to be XBMC friendly) and converted to x264.mkv files using handbrake via scripts I've written that run nightly. Which are then stored on the myth server and then played via XBMC Live and/or Boxee Box. All my other music and movie rips are placed on that same Ubuntu media server.
Everything that can be automated is. I rip Blu-rays using windows running on a vmware setup - only time I ever look at windows because it simply is the easiest way and I payed for the program so why not use it?

I assume your are using AnyDVD on the virtual Windows load?

Supposedly DVDFab rips BluRays at least as well, and it runs under Wine- unless you are making .mkv BluRay rips.

re: Myth renaming-

Not to start a Myth rant, but the Myth devs need to get a clue in simple things like recordings file names- why not just use the name of the program/channel/time for the filename, like good old Hauppauge WinTv did on the PVR150 cards1? (rant off)

THey love to obfuscate and complicate things with SQL databases and other such stuff that simply adds points of failure. Video recordings only need to be stored in a flat manner, then let a front end like Myth or XBMC parse the files (or build it's own "database" or refresh it as needed)...

Dvdfab is not good to use for ripping to mkvs. It's a very cool easy program but has an audio bug when ripping to MKV, makemkv is a better solution, imo.

Yes, I use AnyDVDHD for rips - I run my old copy of windows as a virtual machine and use AnydvdHD for the decoding - I bought them years ago might as well use them.
I use Handbrake and mkvmerge on the server for mkv creation.