Video Players

XBMC has two players available for video: DVDPlayer and MPlayer.

DVDPlayer has an advantage over MPlayer when playing complete DVD rips, i.e. those with a VIDEO_TS folder containing a set of VOB files - MPlayer will exhibit a gap in playback when switching VOBs; DVDPlayer will be seemless. Enabling stacking and playing the VIDEO_TS folder will launch DVDPlayer for playback.

DVDPlayer
DVDPlayer is XBMC's own in-house developed video-player. DVDPlayer is short for DVD-player but despite its name plays not only DVD-Video's but all video formats, it was only named "DVDPlayer" because it was originally designed to be a dedicated DVD-Video player, it has however grown to being a much more generic video-player and now plays back most known video containers and codec formats. DVDPlayer supports DVD-Video with menus, from CD/DVD-media, harddrive, network, ISO/IMG-images and RAR/ZIP archives (and even RARed ISO/IMG-images as long as they are in 'stored/archive' mode and not compressed).

MPlayer
MPlayer is the main video-player in XBMC for Xbox is a port of MPlayer, which is a command-line based video-player for Linux. MPlayer uses FFmpeg (libavcodec) to decode the video stream itself, but has its own demuxers/splitters for handling the file containers (examples of which are AVI, MOV, OGM, MKV, FLV, etc). MPlayer is however slowly moving towards replacing its custom demuxers/splitters with the ones from FFmpeg's "libavformat" library so that the work of the two projects can be combined. MPlayer also plays all of the audio files that XBMC's PAPlayer audio-player can not handle on the Xbox, plus any audio streamed from the internet.