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 VLC Media Player
"Supports playback of most video files and DVD discs without the need to download external codec packs, including flv filescan. There are 5 different DVD region codes and VLC plays them all.
VLC also has the ability to take screenshots of your video, even while during DVD playback, a real attractive feature." (Review)
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SMPlayer
"Intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters, remember the settings of all files you play and more."
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Rhythmbox
"An easy-to-use music player and organizer that has a clean interface, and sports many features, such as album art display, online radio access, and CD burning. This software is powered by Gstreamer, and can therefore support all of its audio formats, such as WAV, AAC, MP3, OGG, FLAC and more." (Review)
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Banshee
Imports, organizes, plays, and shares music using a simple yet powerful interface. Other features include rip CDs, create playlists, burn audio and mp3 CDs, support for podcasting and music recommendations.
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Amarok
A powerful music player for multi platforms with an intuitive interface, supports for collection management, bookmarking, dynamic playlists, file tracking, integrated web services and more.
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 XBMC
"It is truly outstanding in this category and earns the Gizmo's Top Pick title rightfully in my eyes. It played all media files I fed it with and turned out to be the most reliable product for me.
XBMC offers convincing media library features and is highly configurable with custom skins and backdrops. You will find a vast amount of plugins, skins and other goodies for it as the community around XBMC is large." (Review)
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SoundConverter
Aims to be simple to use and fast for conversion from most audio files to wav, flac, mp3, aac and ogg files, supports for extraction of the audio from videos too. (Note: Install GStreamer MP3 Encoding to enable conversion to mp3.)
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Arista Transcoder
An easy-to-use converter to convert multimedia files from one format to another for playback on various devices. Supported output formats include m4v (Ipod), avi (Nokia, PDA or DVD player), mkv (computer) and mp4 (various Sony devices), depending on the device you choose.
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OggConvert
A small and easy-to-use utility to convert most audio and video files to the patent-free Ogg format, and support for encoding to the Matroska container format (mkv, mka), with adjustable settings on audio and video quality for conversion.
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 Kid3
"Edit all tags, generate tags from files or vice versa, import tags from databases, browse cover arts and lyrics from online resources, drag and drop cover art to a file, export tags, etc." Kid3 uses KDE libraries, while another package Kid3-qt is also available for installation without KDE dependencies." (Review)
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MusicBrainz Picard
"Identify track info by matching digital thumbprint with MusicBrainz database, show up existing tags with add and delete functions." (Review)
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K3b
A capable CD/DVD burner optimised for KDE, lets you easily burn data CDs/DVDs, create audio/video CDs and video DVDs, rip audio/video CDs and video DVDs along with other related tasks, good for experienced as well as beginner users.
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Brasero
Designed for ease of use to create a traditional audio CD, data CD/DVD, video DVD or a SVCD, burn an existing CD/DVD image to disc, copy a CD/DVD to a new disc or write to an image file in ISO and other formats.
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Furius ISO Mount
"Select or drag-and-drop an image file to mount, one-click unmount, supports for burning ISO and IMG files, generate MD5 and SHA1 checksums, saving history and retrieving previously unmounted images." (Review)
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AcetoneISO
A feature-rich application to emulate CD/DVD drives and manage CD/DVD images. You can use it to mount disk images including ISO, BIN, NRG, MDF and IMG formats, generate an ISO image from a folder or CD/DVD, backup an audio CD to a BIN image, burn CD/DVD, convert other images to ISO, extract image content to a folder, and more.
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 Asunder
A simple yet powerful audio CD ripper and encoder to save audio tracks from an audio CD as any of MP3, AAC, Ogg, WAV, FLAC, Wavpack, Musepack or Monkey's audio files.
Useful features include using CDDB to name and tag each track, encoding to multiple formats in one session, simultaneous ripping and encoding, tagging each track for a different artist and more.
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HandBrake
"Good quality in transcoded video, small file size, integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library with enhanced picture quality, speed optimizations and supports better control over multiple audio tracks." (Review)
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DeVeDe
An easy-to-use tool to create a video DVD, Video CD, Super Video CD and other disk images, with support for adding menus and subtitles, shifting audio and other video editing functions such as rotating, scaling, deinterlacing and more. You will need separate CD / DVD burning software to burn the disk images created by this tool for playback on your home players.
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ffDiaporama
A great tool to create a slideshow of your favorite photos with background colors and images, music and transition effects, clean user interface with drag-and-drop support for slides, and a preview of the slideshow from any point.
You can insert fixed or animated titles as well as movie clips into a slideshow, save your project for editing and export your result to mp4, mkv, mpg or avi formats. A wide range of video quality from QVGA (320x240) up to full HD (1920x1080) is supported.
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 Audacity
"It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of paid products. The interface is easy to use, allowing you to select and apply a noise profile just as easily as removing it.
The program also can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings, edit various sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording." (Review)
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mp3splt-gtk
"Splits mp3 and ogg files without re-encoding, able to identify split points between tracks via online database services (CDDB or FreeDB)." (Review)
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 Avidemux
"It is designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing and is my personal favorite because of its simplicity yet wide range of tools.
The software supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. It lets you do just about everything under the sun, with well documented tutorials." (Review)
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OpenShot Video Editor
An open-source and non-linear video editor which is stable and friendly to use with support for many video, audio and image formats based on FFmpeg together with lots of other useful features.
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 ClipGrab
An efficient and free video downloader for YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, MyVideo, MySpass, Sevenload, Tudou, Clipfish and many other online video sites. You can enter keywords in the box to search videos on YouTube or paste the URL to a video, then select the format and quality of the video you need, click "Grab this clip!" and the app does the rest for you.
You can also configure how the app behaves when a downloadable video is discovered in your clipboard, and whether you want to keep metadata (ID3 tags) when you download and convert videos to mp3 files.
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 LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio)
"As a stand alone application, one would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensively full featured and versatile free music creator than this, with so many instruments and effects to choose from.
The onboard Beat/Bassline editor removes the need for a separate drum sequencer and is a very nice touch: LMMS really is a one stop shop" (Review).
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 MuseScore
"The best free music notation software with fast and easy note entry in WYSIWYG mode. It's integrated with a sequencer and FluidSynth software synthesizer and allows for an unlimited number of staves; up to four voices per staff; 128 instrument sounds for playback plus eight drum and percussion sets.
Other features include import and export of MusicXML and standard MIDI files; output as PDF or PNG documents and basic ensemble scoring." (Review).
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4. Best Free Multimedia for Linux
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Comments
LuckyBackup
Candidate for a Linux back up utility
I have been using FreeFileSync as a back up tool synchronizing my personal files weekly. I finally needed a reason to restore a folder I accidentally erased. I loaded FreeFileSync and switched directions to restore and executed the task. Results were a complete disaster. I thought I had done everything correctly and could not tell exactly what went wrong. I kind of feel the GUI although looks straight forward can be a bit tricky. Luckily I had made an Image and restored my system.
After doing some searching I found LuckyBackup:
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2011/02/schedule-backup-luckybackup-ubuntu-1...
Very nice and easy to use. When I did a test to restore, it worked perfectly.
There doesn't seem to be a great deal of free Linux backup utilities but so far LuckyBackup seems to work well and a possible candidate for Best Free Software For Linux list.
Cheers
I'm looking for a simple package for home use and wonder if anyone know such solution.
I want to use a small 7" touch pad with Linux. This unit will be installed right inside the entrance door and the whole family should use it to remember things when the arrive or leave the house.
Main problem is to have a user interface that fit a small 7" pad as it's made for communicating through touch. Hopefully the to-do-list can be updated from external PC inhouse, but no demand. It should also be easy to connect to another PC or internet to see the weather prognoses, etc by an icon to switch to another application.
Anyone knows any software that can be used for such small touch pad.
Joje (Norway)
If it has enough storage capacity you may want to try Linux mint. I am partial to Mint 'Julia' but Mint 11 is available although it uses gnome 3 which is not my cup-of-tea. Look here: linuxmint.com/
There is Puppy Linux which is small in size but may not be suitable for people new to linux. Look here: http://www.puppylinux.com/
Further info on linux platforms can be found here: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
Hope this helps get you started
Good luck
Thanks.
I was in fact thinking of Mint, but have no replay from supplier of the pad if they have testes their hardware with this or other Linux versions (I do not want to use Android).
But as you say I'm rather new to Linux and want to start up with som "fail safe" :-D solution.
Thnaks for your suggestion. I will look into Mint and at the same time an Application software with a very simple user interface (mainly graphic).
Added LuckyBackup to the list and thanks Wdhpr for recommending this software.
The guy from Liberian Geeksays states their are allot of linux backup utilities. For starters Mint has one installed by default and its very limited. I also disagree that there are a many of them. From what I can tell many use resync as their core. Where as Window's has a ton of backup software.
Perhaps I need to look harder :\
GnomeDo should be added to this list as a competitor to Launchy, and DesktopNova should be added as a competitor to Wally.
Good suggestions Shuey. Both GNOME Do and DesktopNova are now added to the list.
Comodo antivirus for linux, realtime scanning, free software!
This is still in beta and therefore not recommended for general use. Also, there is a requirement to sign in to the Comodo forum for access. If this has now changed, please provide a link here otherwise nothing further will happen with this at this stage.
I am looking for a way to search for files from within Mint 12 GUI. This site recomends Google desktop but it has been discontinued. Any other sugestions?
Try this link. It should give you several options:
http://tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-desktop-search-tools
Update: Replaced Google Desktop Search with Recoll.
Please add Best Single File Encryption Software category.
Good suggestion Panzer. Any good applications in your mind?
Update: added GNU Privacy Assistant.
Not at the moment.
Hello, I have created a lot of image or flash videos, on my hard drive. When I burn these images on a DVD disc ,I am unable to play these discs on other electronic devices. Does anyone have a suggestion on how i can convert these images to playable disc?
We are unable to provide support here in the comments section. Please post your query on the freeware forum :
http://www.techsupportalert.com/freeware-forum/
I'm surprised there havent been arguments over the opening line, but that's good.
It might be worth mentioning (atleast briefly) the difference between free/libre software and free-of-charge software (and clarifying what you're listing... though most seems to be libre some things are not: Opera isn't and truecrypt is highly debatable in this regard).
Still... generally a good list - though a few I'd recommend considering.
* Exaile - music player, similar to clementine already mentioned, but imho a more comfortable GUI.
* Kdenlive - video editor, this is a big one imho because it's the most intuitive editor I've found yet yet supports a wide range of formats (input and output). Yes, it requires KDE libraries but so does Amarok which (imho, deservedly) makes your list.
* The browsers you have on your list are quite heavy, full featured browsers. That's fine, but when linux on netbooks is seeming to gain a little in popularity, a lighter browser mightn't be a bad idea (atleast for when needing to run alongside other apps, especially office-suites as many students would have to). Midori sadly seems somewhat crash prone on many distro's (though it's working fine on my gentoo machine) which is a shame as it's otherwise a nice browser - Epiphany is a touch heavier, but seems much more stable.
* Claws mail is worth mentioning as another good email-client, though not many people seem to use email-clients anymore.
* Deluge - my favourite torrent client. Vuze can't touch it, imho.
Kdenlive includes a feature to create basic dvd's (including menus), perhaps take a look and see if it suits your needs...
Afterall, it's free (and libre) so won't cost you any money (or freedom).
One of many reasons to love linux (imho) is this fact - you can try new packages without worrying that you'll waste your money (or install something dodgy) if it doesn't fulfil your needs.
Best Dock contenders:
Cairo Dock
http://glx-dock.org/
Avant Window Navigator:
http://wiki.awn-project.org/
Best Network Protocol Analyzer:
Wireshark
http://www.wireshark.org/download.html (bottom right)
F.Lux for Linux - Redshift:
http://jonls.dk/redshift/
Thanks Panzer for good suggestions. Cairo Dock is now added to the list.
Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service for Linux:
I suggest adding SecurityKiss to this list. I've been happily using it for awhile on Windows (thanks to techsupportalert advice). The free service has recently been made available for Linux and it works great there as well (Xubuntu 11.10). Easy to set up, easy to use, fast, and reliable. Same restrictions as on Windows (300MB/day).
http://www.securitykiss.com/resources/download/linux/
Its good to see you included Pinta. I installed about a week ago and I was impressed to find how closely it resembled Paint.net.
Why not Jdownloader ?
@vin100, JDownloader is mentioned, but currently not rated, in the section of "Other Download Managers" at Best Free Download Manager. Hope this helps.
Glad that you like it Wdhpr.
Users should be wary of jDownloader (notice the difference in spelling) which has a red rated site by WOT (Web Of Trust)and is a scam product.
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/jdownloader.com?src=addon-warn-viewsc
Webilder is an awesome wall paper changer that downloads pictures from Flickr and Webshots.