In my experience, in practice most people need restricted codecs including Adobe Flash plugin to provide a "complete" operating system experience, so users have to install something anyway. Besides different media players have different strengths in my limited experience: VLC can handle different playback speeds even with audio* and can be controlled nicely by lirc i.e. by remote control (although it does not survive from suspend to RAM maybe due to the fact that I have to restart lirc then). Xine is the best DVD player (I mean it can play some DVDs that e.g. VLC can not, totem can not play DVDs from iso files: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/totem/+bug/122635.) Kaffeine is the best player for digital television. Totem has the best mozilla plugin although it is not perfect, so sometimes you have to use the mediaplayerconnectivity add-on and another media player; in some cases even that trick does not work, but that could be also web service's fault. As for random access of video streams, Flash player is usually the only working solution, if it can be used with the network service in question, though it needs a powerful CPU at least in full screen mode. Flash player can't survive suspend to RAM...
*) alsaplayer can handle different playback speeds even better, but it is only an audio player and besides can't play mp4a. In summary, media player experience in Ubuntu is still far from complete. -- http://www.iki.fi/8/ -- xubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
