Although the MPlayer from Hungary is extremely powerful, for most common users, its command-line operation mode is really inconvenient, even though it comes with a graphical user interface called GMPlayer. While most often the features of a media player that we require are nothing more than concise user interface, smooth playback, support to as many media formats as possible, and some customizable functions for advanced users. All these requirements are implemented in SMPlayer.

SMPlayer is a free, open-source and cross-platform universal audio & video player (indeed a graphical front-end of MPlayer) with very powerful audio/video playing ability that supports all popular audio and video formats. It was developed based on Qt 4 library (that's why it looks a bit ugly - fortunately it also allows user to change between multiple different styles of GUI, icon set, and style, just similar to MPC) by Ricardo Villalba from Spain, and plays an important role on Linux and Windows operating systems.

SMPlayer contains a very interesting and practical feature, that is it can remember the relevant settings information of media files it played (i.e., memory playback function). For example, if you need to leave during the period of watching a movie, just close it directly, you don't have to remember the end position. Because when you open this movie next time, SMPlayer will continue to start playing from where it was stopped.

BTW, at first, the KMPlayer from South Korea has always been pretty popular. However, shame on its author(s), it is using a large amount of GPL libraries but not releasing its own source code - which seriously violated the GPL license agreement. As a result, KMPlayer has been included in the shame list by FFmpeg for a long time, and as you can see, KMPlayer is being abandoned by more and more users around the world.

Key Features

  • Remembers settings and time position of each file it plays
  • Audio and video filters & equalizer
  • Multiple speed playback
  • Playlists
  • Configurable subtitles, Internet fetch
  • Radio
  • TV
  • YouTube browser
  • Skins
  • Localized in more than 30 languages
  • Automatic support for EDL files
  • Chromecast support (Requires Google Chrome or Chromium and the "webfs" package.)

Supported Formats and Codecs 

Supported Input Formats
  • (S)VCD (Super Video CD)
  • CDRwin's .bin image file
  • DVD, including encrypted DVD
  • MPEG-1/2 (ES/PS/PES/VOB)
  • AVI file format
  • ASF/WMV/WMA format
  • QT/MOV/MP4 format
  • RealAudio/RealVideo format
  • Ogg/OGM files
  • Matroska
  • NUT
  • NSV (Nullsoft Streaming Video)
  • VIVO format
  • FLI format
  • NuppelVideo format
  • yuv4mpeg format
  • FILM (.cpk) format
  • RoQ format
  • PVA format
  • streaming via HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST, SDP
  • TV grabbing
Supported Video and Audio Codecs
most important video codecs most important audio codecs
  • MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video
  • MPEG-4 ASP in all variants including DivX ;-), OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5 (Pro), Xvid
  • MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264
  • Windows Media Video 7/8 (WMV1/2)
  • Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3) (using x86 DLL)
  • RealVideo 1.0, 2.0 (G2)
  • RealVideo 3.0 (RP8), 4.0 (RP9) (using Real libraries)
  • Sorenson v1/v3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA and other QuickTime codecs
  • DV video
  • 3ivx
  • Intel Indeo3 (3.1, 3.2)
  • Intel Indeo 4.1 and 5.0 (using x86 DLL or XAnim codecs)
  • VIVO 1.0, 2.0, I263 and other H.263(+) variants (using x86 DLL)
  • MJPEG, AVID, VCR2, ASV2 and other hardware formats
  • FLI/FLC
  • HuffYUV
  • various old simple RLE-like formats
  • MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3 (MP3) audio
  • AC3/A52, E-AC3, DTS (Dolby Digital) audio (software or SP/DIF)
  • AAC (MPEG-4 audio)
  • WMA (DivX Audio) v1, v2
  • WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware audio, ACELP.net etc (using x86 DLLs)
  • RealAudio: COOK, SIPRO, ATRAC3 (using Real libraries)
  • RealAudio: DNET and older codecs
  • QuickTime: Qclp, Q-Design QDMC/QDM2, MACE 3/6 (using QT libraries), ALAC
  • Ogg Vorbis audio
  • VIVO audio (g723, Vivo Siren) (using x86 DLL)
  • alaw/ulaw, (ms)gsm, pcm, *adpcm and other simple old audio formats

Official Demo Video

Prompts

  • As AppNee found that SMPlayer has too many bugs, we finally decided to blacklist it. For example:
    • The volume for playing all the local videos is severely low (volume 80 in SMPlayer is roughly equivalent to 20 volume in MPC-BE), and cannot be increased in any way
    • The "Control bar" displays every time you exit from the full-screen mode, even if you have unchecked it, that is still completely useless.
    • SMPlayer's startup speed and ease of use are far outpaced by MPC-HC and MPC-BE.

Related Links

Download URLs

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