Availability
Find them and install them!
You can easily install all five video players as long as you run a Linux distribution (distro), which features a good repository (repos). Such distro choices as Arch Linux or Rosa Desktop Fresh will work well, while Ubuntu and OpenSUSE both show the strength of their extra PPAs and OBS repos respectively. But it wouldn’t be sensible to expect someone to change their entire distro that they love using just because they want to try out a different video player (which is why we’re testing them for you. You’re welcome).
Building a player from source isn’t a major obstacle, but it takes time and some skill, so we’d expect to see some binary packages. Bomi is a relatively new video player project, but it already has pre-built packages for many Linux distros, including all the mainstream ones and also some of the younger distros, such as KaOS and Chakra (see http://bit.ly/BomiPlayer).
VLC is perhaps the best-known cross-platform video player being a real veteran and a popular desktop application. As you’d expect, the VLC download page ( http://bit.ly/ VLCDownloads) features dozens of options for many Linux distros and even if your system isn’t listed chances are that you’ll easily find VLC in your package manager.
In contrast, QMplay2 isn’t that well established; it’s really a personal project by one Polish developer, Błażej Szczygieł, who rolled out his work back in 2012. The fact that you might never have heard of the player [unless you read HotPicks, p60, LXF191] has stopped it from having QMplay2 builds for Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Rosa, Mageia and other distros.
SMPlayer has been a familiar name to many in the Linux word since 2006, when it emerged as an Mplayer fork. The official website of SMPlayer offers only sources and an Ubuntu PPA ( ppa:rvm/smplayer). Of course, SMplayer packages exist for other distros as well, but the number of options are very limited, perhaps because SMplayer’s relationship to the original Mplayer is about dissidence, rather than amicable redirection.
Pretty much the same can be said about Romp, which stands for the Rosa MediaPlayer, which is another fork of Mplayer. Romp is included by default in Rosa Fresh and is featured in OpenMandriva. Third-party packages have been made for Ubuntu ( ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8) and Arch (see AUR), but that’s perhaps it, so for many distro users Romp will likely remain undiscovered.