media players: a lot...

[owiknowi]

in p2011.2 by default installed are gnome mplayer and smplayer.
atolboo advised me to install vlc player in order to properly play live streaming tv broadcasts (netherlands). and, as usual, he was right: only vlc could handle live streaming video without problems.

my questions, out of curiosity, are the following:
1. why is gnome mplayer installed in a kde based distro? can i safely replace it altogether with vlc?
2. what makes vlc play more stable, not only live video streams, but also in playing .mkv containers?
i had a 1.1gb .mkv aniamation which only could be played using vlc.

[John A]

I prefeer Kaffeine and it's a KDE developed player:
http://kaffeine.kde.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffeine

It works fine for me.

[owiknowi]

thanks, john a
kaffeine almost always works fine with me too (especially in the morning and afternoons...  )

but i was wondering what made the pardus developers decide to put a gnome media player in kde?
especially when i had to install vlc to be able to properly play .mkv's and streaming broadcasts? but the latter also may be due to my lack of knowledge on all different setting in the different media players.

[John A]

I dont know the reason for that. But many applications in Pardus are Gnome programs. Cheese for webcams for example:
http://live.gnome.org/Cheese

Pardus repository are not the largest among Linux distributions, so I think they try to choose the best programs that are avaible.
If a Gnome application are better than a similar KDE program they prefeer it as a default program i guess.

And I think it's the correct way for Pardus to deal with it.

This say some about their policy for programs:
http://www.osor.eu/studies/a-new-kid-on-the-block-the-turkish-pardus-linux-distribution

[owiknowi]

you're right there: one should use the best one can get (still have to use vlc, though). downside might be on the dependencie side: a distro can become pretty bloated that way.

and nice inside article! will place the link in the dutch section too.