Audience is a new media player written in Vala that "brings the lessons learned from the web home to the desktop".
The application uses a slick, clutter-based user interface and is designed to play videos without getting in your way, with controls displayed in a semi-transparent overlay that uses autohide and a seek bar that shows a thumbnail preview for a given mark in the video, eliminating the need to manually seek to see what happens at a certain point in the video. For the menu, Audience uses an elementary-style AppMenu instead of a classic menu bar:
Audience doesn't have any settings and the only thing you can configure are the subtitles (language), though some options like lock / unlock window resizing to the aspect ration of the current video, enable/disable video resuming and others are available in Dconf.
Here's a short video I've just recorded with Audience media player in action:
Before installing, please note that Audience is not stable yet! The application is available in a daily PPA, for testing purposes only. To install it in Ubuntu 11.10, you'll also have to add a PPA that provides Granite and the one for the latest Vala (this isn't required for Ubuntu 12.04).
Granite is available in the elementary testing PPA - add it using the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/testing
To add the Vala PPA (not required for Ubuntu 12.04), use the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa
And finally, to add the Audience PPA and install Audience media player in Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, use the following commands: