Most popular video codecs are proprietary, which means that implementing them in a free software application requires reverse-engineering techniques. This may limit the availability of such codecs in a free operating system, like Mandriva Linux. However, codecs for many of those popular video formats do have their free software equivalents, and are included with Mandriva Linux, allowing you to play many video file types, except maybe one or two. You may also need to download a decrypting library to play the so called commercial DVDs.
Kaffeine is a multimedia player based on Xine libraries which can play video files and streams, DVDs and other media. You can launch Kaffeine by selecting + → from the main menu.
Kaffeine's interface (Figure 4.5, “Kaffeine's Interface”) is comprised of the following:
Display Area. Where the movie being played is shown. Press the Ctrl-Shift-F keys to switch between full-screen and windowed modes.
Sidebar. The sidebar allows you to switch between Kaffeine's windows: these windows allow you to view Kaffeine's start menu, listen to CDs, a playlist, and watch DVDs.
Play Controls. A reduced set of the usual VCR controls: Previous, Play/Pause (keyboard shortcut: Space Bar), Stop (keyboard shortcut: Backspace) and Next.
Status. Located at the bottom right of Kaffeine's window, it shows information about the playlist and the movie being played.
Choose → to open a standard file open dialog allowing you to choose the movie you want to play, select it and click , the movie starts playing immediately.
Xine is one of the most interesting video application for GNU/Linux. It supports a wide range of formats and input sources. It's fast, flexible and extensible. It's also provided as a library on which many players are based.
MPlayer is yet another interesting application and supports multiple output drivers, and even older video cards. It can also handle DVD, AVI, VideoCD, amongst others. However you'll probably have to download and install winDLLs and proprietary codecs to make it work with many popular video formats. On one hand this might seem unfortunate, but on the other it gives you access to all formats supported under Windows®.
Totem is a GNOME 2 application based on Xine's libraries. As you might imagine, its capabilities are very similar to those of its “parent”, but it's better integrated in the GNOME environment.