Ubuntu – Which media player has seek preview with thumbnails

vlc

I was looking for a good video player to replace VLC, something that is as good as vlc but has seek preview. I am tired of fast forwarding in vlc

EDIT: I meant seek preview with thumbnails

Best Answer

ExMplayer is an MPlayer GUI with thumbnail seeking. The graphical user interface is Qt-based and it depends on mplayer or mplayer2 package.

exmplayer-demo-1

exmplayer-demo-2

Features and performance

As version 5.0.1, it lacks some advanced features that you might expect it to have. While it plays any typical H.264/MPEG-4 video clip smoothly, it is not quite a replacement for VLC media player for three reasons below.

  1. Somewhat high memory usage

  2. Significantly high CPU usage

  3. Relatively no option to adjust performance

These are based on my brief experience, when comparing ExMplayer 5.0.1 (more than 90% CPU usage) to other players such as VLC media player 2.0.8 and GNOME MPlayer 1.0.5 (both were barely at 10% CPU usage) in Xubuntu 12.04.

Not tested for ExMplayer 5.5.0.

Availability

ExMplayer 5.0.1 (released on 2015-07-28) is available via older PPA on Launchpad for Ubuntu 12.04 until 18.04.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:exmplayer-dev/exmplayer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exmplayer

ExMplayer 5.5.0 (released on 2020-07-21) is available via newer PPA on Launchpad for Ubuntu 20.04 or newer releases.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:exmplayer-dev/exmplayer-qt5
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install exmplayer

Else, visit download page of their project site. While the project site is hosted on Sourceforge, the packages and source code for Linux distributions are linked to Launchpad and GitHub.

TL;DR ExMplayer is responsive and able to playback video clips without problem. But it is resource hungry, when compared to similar Qt-based VLC media player with default settings and GTK-based GNOME MPlayer.

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