VLC

VLC is a legendary but constantly evolving media player with network capability and its own libraries that can display practically any video content. In Ubuntu, it therefore does not require the Gstreamer framework and its “bad” plugins. The acronym VLC originally stood for “VideoLAN Client”. Even though the original client/server architecture is long abandoned, VLC still has network capabilities that make it more than “just” a local multimedia player.

Since version 2.1, VLC can not only use VA-API for video acceleration, but also VDPau, so that it is able to exploit the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs. The setting may be found under Tools -> Settings -> Input/Codecs in the menu item “Hardware-accelerated decoding”.

VLC took its last major development step in 2018: since version 3, the program has been able to play videos up to 8K and has built-in support for Chromecast. This allows the application to send streams to Google’s Chromecast stick if you select it in the menu via Playback > Renderer.

Founded in 1996 at the École Centrale Paris, VLC has been open source since 2001 and is constantly being developed by an international community – for Windows, OS-X and Linux.

Installation

sudo apt install vlc

Documentation

According to their website, the VLC project is currently unable to provide up-to-date documentation due to a lack of volunteer technical editors. However, there is a Wiki that provides instructions for beginners as well as a hacker’s guide for experts. Due to the large user community, you should also be able to find the answers to many questions simply by searching the Internet.

Alternativen

MPlayer and ist successors – currently recommended is mpv – also provide a self-sufficient media player with extensive codec support.