Dragon Player is a video player for KDE 4 that focuses on simplicity and easy of use. Dragon Player is the successor of Codeine, a player for KDE 3.

Some Key features:

• Simple interface that does not get in the way
• Resumes where you left off when replaying a video
• Support for subtitles
• Video display settings (brightness, contrast)

So, how does this player compare to that of Kaffeine or SMPlayer, a great frontend for MPlayer. It simply doesn’t, as the player is simply very simple. The only thing that this player has is the Phonon support. But what about the rest! It is nearing version 2 and looks like the features that it has is that of 0.5 release. The question I have, how do I:

1. Play/Steram directly from internet (Open File/URL)
2. Where is Playlist
3. For DVD - Titles, Chapters selection
4. Where I select which Audio Channel to play or
5. Which Subtitles to show
6. Where I select which Video Driver for output (xv, x11, opengl/2, etc) to use
7. Why put Controls (Seek, Play/Pause, Volume, etc) on top!
8. lots more

Here is a real world scenario: I launch a video file, and audio is there but no video. The reason is that with the latest ATI drivers (versio 8.01) and desktop effects (compositing) switched ON, there is problem viewing video. I need to manually change video output driver to show. Ok, I switch off compositing, but then I want to stream CNN-IBN or CNBC-India … how do I do it? Usually I have a ready playlist of TV channels and there is no way to select which one to stream. At times I like to watch old Japanese movies, and I have several that come with subtitle files or audio channels in more than one language … how do I select?

So, why another simple player and not port Kaffeine completely to KDE 4 and make it default player, and if possible SMPlayer? Again, these are my personal point of views and not necessarily that of most other KDE users out there.

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