How To Install Gnome Media Player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

To be honest, sometimes I hate Totem. I'd just too simple and useless. For instance, if your audio/video tracks aren't sync without any delays... then before the character speaks... we hear the voice which is the worse scenario for watching a movie. But with Totem (a front-end for libxine multimedia player engine) you simply can't do anything about it/fix.

And sometimes, I don't like the low sensitivity of Totem either. For instance, with other advanced players like MPlayer, when I press the "Pause" button, the player just pause the video. But Totem (maybe it's just with my GNU/Linux Laptop only) has slight "gap" before it pause the file. So after being frustrated with it with these few things and many more or you just want another player for no reason at all :)... then you should try the Gnome Media Player.

This is again a front-end that's capable of using libxine, MPlayer or the Gstreamer multimedia framework according to your preference. This is written in GTK+ tool-kit ... so you won't be seeing a lot of "options" with it either... but most of the time (especially when used with the MPlayer as the engine) I like the "sensitivity" it delivers. And unlike with Totem, with GMP, you can easily switch between player-engines as well.

If you use Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10 (could work in 10.04), then you can install GMP using the below PPA channel. As usual, open your Terminal and enter the below command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-media-player-development/development && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-media-player