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Asking about video players or audio players separately would already involve the risk of getting a lot of duplicate answers, but a question asking one about all "media" players had made it all useless in my opinion, especially by the fact that the thing is impossible to improve and keep up to date. Any new answer would make the post more boated.

There are no "media players" (that would cover all media files) other than (some) video players: all video players are audio players too, but, having that in mind, it is not a reason not to have a separate question about audio players only. Or about video players only. Any such question would be a duplicate of the one above until that is closed. But I am not sure how to articulate what the problem really is in the terms of rules of the community: but there is something wrong with that question.

From time to time I look at it trying to find (or add ) something new on the matter, I have also contributed a bit editing some answers, but from the very beginning my conviction is that a better thing would be just to close it and have two separate, systematic ones: one about video, one about audio.

Of course there are players that play both: video players do. But after a few more steps their ways have to part in order to have a good application going. The way the experience is developing on the long run is very different for music and for movies.

During all my experience with music and movies on a computer I felt that a good audio player and a good video player, or at least that are worth mentioning, are two different things. I never used something like windows media player and don't want something like that in Linux. I feel a such question doesn't look good, and it gets uglier with every new answer.

Trying new questions now would doom them to be closed as duplicate. Before trying I need a straightforward meta answer on this.

What to do? (Already flagged that trying to make a point.)

(I might very well be too subjective on this matter, but that is a good reason to want to find what Ubuntu main-trend is on this.)

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Unless you're pretty big on music, most people arn't going to bother with seperate players or anything but the basic one.

More importantly, 'list' style questions don't scale well on SE. They're popular on 'new' sites since they're an easy way to farm reputation, and generally get closed once a site gets mature, and rules get in place.

There's no real point in splitting the question or to ask a new one. I'd say leave the question as is. Proper questions should be about problems not "what is the best...."

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  • good question should be of general interest. any problem is too localized unless is articulated for further general use. also, it has to be open to useful updates. adding one answer on top of the other is worse that any listings, especially if the subject is two-folded. big on music? who isn't these days? (my 12-year old nephew already is, why shouldn't i? ;) - also: do you feel that "what media players are there" is a "problem" as you say? from time to time i want to find something new about a linux media player and stumble into that old fat post. curiosity is my problem, and logic
    – user47206
    Feb 5, 2013 at 22:15
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    I agree that list questions are generally bad, so upvote. There are instances where I think they are appropriate, like hardware support for a specific feature, but breaking audio players out of multimedia is a no-go for me.
    – RobotHumans
    Feb 5, 2013 at 22:32
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    From the main site FAQ "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page." Good questions are often of the form "How do I fix $problem" or "What are my options, when I have $needs". The QA format works best when there's one right answer, and in the case of listy questions there isn't. Listy questions also need one answer a entry, as opposed to one answer a user (which is how SE is supposed to work). Its just something thats a bad fit.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Feb 5, 2013 at 22:32
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    Agreed, list questions are generally offtopic, they become a maintenance burden, I think it's just splitting hairs on determining whether video or audio players, both would be offtopic.
    – Jorge Castro
    Feb 5, 2013 at 22:42
  • I agree big list questions like this are not constructive, and that there would be no benefit to having separate ones for audio and video. However, more generally, I'd caution against overzealous interpretation of "actual problems." Clear questions with well-defined (not open-ended) scope seeking objective or "good subjective" answers are good even when they are based on curiosity rather than a "problem" in the narrow sense of "thing I have to solve or bad stuff will happen."
    – Eliah Kagan
    Feb 6, 2013 at 11:25

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