Is Mint Xplayer better quality than VLC ?

Lucap · Post by **Lucap** » Tue Feb 07, 2017 2:05 am

Apart from being able to play most video formats i've never really been that impressed with the playback quality of VLC on any linux distribution , it doesn't matter how many guides i follow or how much i tweak the VLC filters , post processing , gpu acceleration or de-interlacing it always looks rough and choppy with panning shudder.

Yet the exact same file being played on Xplayer has smooth playback , great quality output and better colours without having to tweak anything.

I wondered if anyone else has found the same.

Hoser Rob · Post by **Hoser Rob** » Tue Feb 07, 2017 10:13 am

I'm using 17.3 and probably will continue with it until EOL, and it didn't come with Xplayer. 'Videos' is Totem instead. And I find Totem is rubbish ... the video quality is awful and there are no useful settings at all.

According to the Mint 18 release notes, "Xplayer is based on Totem". Unless they pretty much rewrote the whole program I suspect that's rubbish too.

Is VLC going to be better? I actually think VLC is one of the most over rated apps around but it works better for me than Totem. VLC has a lot of settings and they aren't implemented very well. E.g. the setting for the size of the local file cache ... which is a ver important setting ... is buried in the Codecs section. Just stupid.

However, it does have useful settings and they aren't all optimized by default. So thread discussions of it aren't always productive ...

I use SMplayer as my default video player. 1It has much better performance than either, a good quality GUI, and it's very configurable. On an old or less powerful computer I'd suggest gnome-mplayer, which is a GUI front end for mplayer like SMplayer is, and it's even faster and lighter. Fewer bells and whistles though of course.

MintBean · Post by **MintBean** » Tue Feb 07, 2017 10:18 am

Xplayer looks a bit snappier than VLC. Never really had playback issues with either, but VLC is a great 'swiss army knife' if you find a codec you can't play with anything else.

Lucap · Post by **Lucap** » Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:48 am

I'll checkout SMplayer , i've added other player to the poll as i didn't think of that.

I like the output quality of Kodi Player but all the menu bloat and sub menus are annoying , not sure if there is a Skin or theme to turn it into a simplistic desktop player.

trytip · Post by **trytip** » Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:49 am

no ... i hate totem video with a pasion MINT should have based it on a better player like mpv

Fred Barclay · Post by **Fred Barclay** » Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:22 pm

The quality of the videos seems pretty good for both Xplayer and Vlc, but Xplayer is definitely a bit faster to start on my computer.

BG405 · Post by **BG405** » Wed Feb 08, 2017 4:07 pm

Whilst I've had no issues with video playback quality and performance with Totem (Cinnamon 17.3 64-bit) and Dragon Player (KDE 17.3 32-bit) I was not satisfied with the lack of configuration options, including a queuing facility (that I could find!), on either. I find SMPlayer has everything I need and is more like the media player I used to use on Windows - Media Player Classic.

English Invader · Post by **English Invader** » Wed Feb 08, 2017 9:30 pm

The main thing VLC has going for it is that it plays DVDs from all regions. I agree that it's a bit rough round the edges at times but it still has an impressive amount of features for an open source media player and I think it's an essential program to have on any computer (Linux, Apple or Windows).

mwbworld · Post by **mwbworld** » Thu Feb 09, 2017 9:29 am

I'm glad to have both. I think in terms of basic effective playing xplayer is a bit smoother, but VLC has better extended features that can be useful.

Lucap · Post by **Lucap** » Fri Feb 10, 2017 1:49 am

I'm not sure what to make of SMplayer just being a front end for MPlayer/mpv and it relies heavily on Qt.

The output quality of the video didn't seem any better than Gnome Media Player to me.

killer de bug · Post by **killer de bug** » Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:14 pm

I only use mpv. Been my player of choice since more than 3 years. I don't want anything else.

Joss · Post by **Joss** » Sat Feb 11, 2017 6:34 pm

Lucap wrote:I'm not sure what to make of SMplayer just being a front end for MPlayer/mpv and it relies heavily on Qt.
The output quality of the video didn't seem any better than Gnome Media Player to me.

Gnome player is also a front end to MPlayer, so the output quality should be the same.
My reason to use SMPlayer (I voted "other") is, as @Hoser Rob said, configurability. Check it out, the options are quite extensive.

Lucap · Post by **Lucap** » Sun Feb 12, 2017 5:05 am

Joss wrote:Gnome player is also a front end to MPlayer, so the output quality should be the same.

LOL , that explains why i could notice any difference.

Thanks

BG405 · Post by **BG405** » Wed Mar 22, 2017 2:23 pm

I should add to my above comment that Totem does indeed have a queuing facility, via command-line, Dragon Player doesn't appear to. SMPlayer does occasionally crash on launch (not a catastrophic failure as it will play the video when tried again) and as mentioned above, has everythibng you'd expect.

Sorry this (and my previous post) is a bit OT as I haven't actually used VLC for quite a while.

Hoser Rob · Post by **Hoser Rob** » Sat Mar 25, 2017 11:44 am

Lucap wrote:
Joss wrote:Gnome player is also a front end to MPlayer, so the output quality should be the same.
LOL , that explains why i could notice any difference.

Thanks

Actuallt, it's gnome-mplayer, not gnome player. And if you have a decent amount of computer power and decent Linux support for your video card ... which you can't assume ... then you most likely won't notice any difference.

But if it's old/slow hardware and/or your video card can't do hardware acceleration in Linux ... like my netbook ... then you WILL notice a difference. Gnome mplayer is much lighter than SMplayer and that makes the difference.

sikejsudjek · Post by **sikejsudjek** » Tue Apr 04, 2017 12:09 am

I found sm player better than vlc on Linux. X player didn't have enough configuration for my liking.

Royal-Mint · Post by **Royal-Mint** » Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:31 pm

https://help.gnome.org/users/totem/stab ... window.png
https://distrowatch.com/images/screensh ... -xapps.png
http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2016/02/t ... are-ready/

*Whistle~* What a sly fox,Clem. Forked gnome applications, rename into your own name applications
and make newbs believe it's a new applications just like pluma(gedit), xviewer(eye of gnome), xreader(evince)
for sake clear off [gnome name tag]-applications to manipulate gnome haters into love that
and this "x-apps" plan very effective "sell a pup" tactic that is.

I've seen some many gnome haters that gone too far to hate (gnome nametag)-applications
and can't exact their hater from gnome3 DE. When I ask do they hate gparted, gedit, disk as well?
their answer is no, When I ask what about gnome-pie or any gnometag-apps they hate it. what an annoying hypocrite ppl.
At this rate all gnometag-apps must be erase and reduce into g-apps or rename into something else to be unnotice.

Thanks to Hose Rob confirmed this truth.

Fred Barclay · Post by **Fred Barclay** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:57 am

Royal-Mint wrote:https://help.gnome.org/users/totem/stab ... window.png
https://distrowatch.com/images/screensh ... -xapps.png
http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2016/02/t ... are-ready/

*Whistle~* What a sly fox,Clem. ...
Thanks to Hose Rob confirmed this truth.

What truth was there to confirm? Clem was clear from the beginning that these were all forks of existing applications. They were/are necessary because those existing applications are more and more being designed to integrate with either the Gnome or Unity DE, which made them look out of place on Mint. It would have taken a lot of work and time on the Mint developers' part to undo those changes while keeping functionality, for every single Mint release.
Clem thought it was better for Mint to have its own set of tools with a more generic interface that could fit well with Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce, rather than having to wrestle with upstream UI changes.

X-Apps will be a collection of generic GTK3 applications using traditional interfaces which can be used as default desktop components in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. In Mint 18, the “X apps” will allow us to maintain a native look and a good level of integration because they will be used in replacement of GNOME applications which now look foreign (using headerbars and a distinctive layout). Long-term, the X-App project will allow us to innovate and to develop new features and improvements in the applications themselves (this is something we couldn’t do via patches, temporary forks or DE-specific forks like the MATE apps because it was too costly).

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2985

Royal-Mint · Post by **Royal-Mint** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:43 pm

I've already aware that full well, out of place that "gnome3 border" on other DEs huh? I've already knew that.
and thanks to the truth that I've seeking for now I gain the same ability as Clem.

I can't expected clem to fork everything from gnome3 it's too much for him
I'm going to forked other things that Clem didn't.

Clem is like Zhuge Liang in distro war kingdom.
He knows how to be a main character and I'm going to learn some skills & strategies from him.

Hoser Rob · Post by **Hoser Rob** » Thu Apr 06, 2017 1:46 pm

sikejsudjek wrote:I found sm player better than vlc on Linux. ...

I fuond it better in WIndows too ... it was my default video player before I installed Linux.

SOmeone mentioned he found xplayer started quicker. In smplayer (or gnome-mplayer) one of the 1st things I always do is to set the local file cache to a nice big 8192Kb, and tell it to always prefetch the video file so that cache is always at least 1/2 full. This makes it noticeably slower to load a video file. But it plays the video quite noticeably better too. You can't judge performance or speed by boot times.

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