Media Player

This is going to be tricky, as teachers are random creatures. They will take content in whatever form they can find it, and show it to their students. I still remember a teacher offering me a DVD to show to my class, that had been copied from VHS video tape, which was filmed on a camcorder, of a filmstrip from the 50s. Seriously. Primitive Pete. Look it up.

So we will need to support many different types of media.
There is the obvious:
DVD is a must
CD is a must
MP3 would be nice, as would iPod support
After that, FLV playback would be welcomed, along with avi, mpeg4, wav, ogg, flac, wmv, wma, and many many other formats.

The problem with many of these, is that you cannot really distribute them as part of your operating system out of the box. Microsoft pays a pretty penny to do so, and passes the anti-savings on to you.

So in order to keep Linux free, we will have to add these afterwards.

For video, you really can't go wrong with VideoLan Client, or VLC for short. Sure, its not a gorgeous interface out of the box, but it will play anything. Seriously. Wma, Wmv, mpeg 1, 2, 3, 4, dvd, cd, avi, qt, real, whatever you got, it'll play.

For audio playback of single files, VLC will work, but if you want a nice directory of music: A la Itunes, you need something more robust. Rhythmbox is the standard, and is ipod friendly, and recently Songbird was released, which appears to be taking the world by storm.

I'm going to start with both installed, and favor using Songbird for the time being.