How to play Audio / Video from Ubuntu Linux command line ?

Ubuntu supports various media player which allow you to play audio and video from command line.

Mplayer – Movie Player

mplayer is a movie player for Linux. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, ASF/WMA/WMV, RM, QT/MOV/MP4, Ogg/OGM, MKV, VIVO, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM and RoQ files, supported by many native and binary codecs. You can watch VCD, SVCD, DVD, Blu-ray, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies, too.

You can install mplayer on Ubuntu as,

$ sudo apt-get install mplayer

Now, to play audio and video using mplayer, just type command “mplayer file_path/file_name.extention”

Play Video from Ubuntu Linux Terminal as,

$ mplayer helloworld_video.mp4

Play Audio from Ubuntu Linux Terminal as,

$ mplayer helloworld_audio.mp3

Note: With mplayer running from command line, you can use Arrow Keys for forward and rewind.