Media Player for Crouton

As an alternative to XBMC on Crouton, I am pleased to report that SMPlayer (a front-end for MPlayer) seems to work very well and that the visual quality of the video displayed is second to none.  My next candidate is VLC, primarily because I prefer multi-platform solutions.  That way, I have some reason to expect that a file I'm building or testing on Linux will play similarly on Windows (or vice-versa).

A Retraction

I sincerely regret that I must withdraw my enthusiastic endorsement of XBMC.  Although I remain very fond of the software, further use has revealed that the visual quality of the video it displays is noticably inferior to that of other media players.  I will admit that this difference may not be apparent to most people with most encoded video, but for me, it's a deal-breaker.  I have no idea why this is the case but hope it gets resolved.

CrOS Media Playback

I got the bright idea to exploit all that HDD real estate on the C7 by loading it up with media files. Unfortunately, Chrome OS's local video playback failed to impress me.  My testing was limited to the AVI & MP4 containers, standard definition video (DVD resolution) and mostly XviD & MP3, so other formats/codecs might fare differently.  In addition, I readily admit to being an obsessive videophile, so my expectations are very high.  In fairness to Google, I must also say that my opinion of Ubuntu's OOTB video playback is similar.

However, I can report that XBMC can be installed on Crouton and it works beautifully (at least for me)!  I would expect other media players to perform well too, but haven't yet confirmed this myself.