Rounding out this little series I took a look at KDE’s video player of choice: Dragon Player.
Dragon Player
For those of you familiar with similar applications such as VLC, Totem or even Windows Media Player, Dragon Player is a simplistic interface on top of quite powerful video playback.
Dragon Player’s power comes from the integrated KDE media backend Phonon. What this means for the user is that it is completely compatible with all installed system codecs. Speaking of codecs, Dragon Player prompts you whenever it doesn’t recognize a new piece of media and offers the ability to automatically search and install the required codecs. This works very well and allows you to keep your system relatively free of nonsense codecs you’ll never actually use, instead installing what you need as you need it.
For a KDE application Dragon Player is surprisingly streamlined and doesn’t offer very many configuration options. In fact almost any other video player has more configuration options than Dragon Player. The only real settings I could find were changing how the video playback looks:
And that’s it. No seriously, there isn’t anything else to mention about this application and believe it or not that’s a good thing! This program is designed for exactly one thing and it does it well. If you’re looking for a single use video player application, and you’re not already a VLC fan, I would highly suggest this as an alternative.
Does it have vaapi support?
@M.C.
Phonon (which Dragon Player uses) is really just a frontend for your distro of choices backend technology. In this way Phonon can provide pass-through straight to something like GStreamer (which does have vaapi support). It all depends on your setup though.