Compare the Top Media Players for Linux as of November 2025

What are Media Players for Linux?

Media players, also known as video players, are software applications that enable users to play a wide range of video, audio, image, and media file formats. Third party media players and video players typically offer a wider range of features and file format compatibility than default media players. Compare and read user reviews of the best Media Players for Linux currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Amarok

    Amarok

    Amarok

    Amarok is a powerful music player for Linux, Unix, and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before, and it looks good doing it! Much of where work has been invested in Amarok 2 is the Web services integration. Now Amarok can connect to various Web services and access the music directly, greatly expanding the potential number of songs at your fingertips. Thanks to the powerful API, adding additional services can be done with very little effort. Scrobble and listen to any Last.fm radio stream with fully featured Last.fm integration. Buy tracks from the integrated Magnatune store, and help support the music labels. Connect remotely to an Ampache music server and browse search, and playback media files. Find, subscribe, and download audio and video podcasts from all over the ultimate podcast directory. Listen to streaming audio books straight from the Librivox catalog.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 2
    Parole
    Parole is a modern simple media player based on the GStreamer framework and written to fit well in the Xfce desktop. Parole features playback of local media files, DVD/CD, and live streams. Parole is extensible via plugins, for a complete how to write a plugin for Parole see the Plugins API documentation and the plugins directory which contains some useful examples. Parole is a modern simple media player based on the GStreamer framework and written to fit well in the Xfce desktop. It is designed with simplicity, speed, and resource usage in mind. Parole features playback of local media files, including a video with subtitles support, audio CDs, DVDs, and live streams. Parole is completely free, meaning anyone can use it, redistribute and/or modify it under the GNU general public license. GStreamer Base plugins comprises the base functionality of GStreamer and are required for normal operation. GStreamer Good plugins comprises a set of high quality plug-ins under the LGPL license.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    Kaffeine
    Kaffeine is a media player. What makes it different from the others is its excellent support of digital TV (DVB). Kaffeine has a user-friendly interface so that even first-time users can start immediately playing their movies, from DVD (including DVD menus, titles, chapters, etc.), VCD, or a file. Media player with support for digital television (DVB-C/S/S2/T, ATSC, CI/CAM) It is now possible to run Kaffeine from Docker without installing it on your machine by using Docker. You need to have Docker already installed and configured. By default, libVLC will try to use hardware acceleration on the machine with Kaffeine. As described in Kaffeine's documentation, xmltv files are now supported. Kaffeine's internal logic will map the channels obtained by the grabber into the channel names it has stored internally.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    Haruna
    The playlist is automatically populated with files from the same folder as the file opened for playback. The playlist can be opened by moving the mouse to the left or right side of the player (depending on user set up, right by default), with a shortcut (P by default) or through a button if opening with the mouse is disabled. The playlist can also overlay the video or push/resize it. Most actions in Haruna can be triggered with a keyboard shortcut that can be configured by the user. Assign actions to mouse buttons: left, middle, right single and double clicks, as well as scroll up and down.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    Clapper

    Clapper

    Flathub

    Simple and modern GNOME media player. Clapper is a GNOME media player built using GJS with GTK4 toolkit. The media player is using GStreamer as a media backend and renders everything via OpenGL. The player works natively on both Xorg and Wayland. It also supports hardware acceleration through VA-API on AMD/Intel GPUs, NVDEC on NVIDIA, and V4L2 on mobile devices. The media player has an adaptive GUI. When viewing videos in "windowed mode", Clapper will use mostly unmodified GTK widgets to match your OS look nicely. When the player enters "fullscreen mode" all GUI elements will become darker, bigger, and semi-transparent for your viewing comfort. It also has a "floating mode" which displays only video on top of all other windows for a PiP-like viewing experience. Mobile-friendly transitions are also supported. We improved the GL/GLES context automatic selection. Additionally, it also has a few patches, thus some functionalities work better (or are only available) in Flatpak version.
    Starting Price: Free
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