3 free video players for watching almost any movie

Filed under: Video, Freeware, Open Source

3 free video players for watching almost any movie

by Brad Linder Sep 17th 2007

Last week we told you about SMPlayer, a powerful, yet easy to use frontend for open source media player MPlayer. We were pretty impressed with SMPlayer, which can run on Windows or Linux and can handle almost any format except for Real Media.

But our wonderful readers pointed out that SMPlayer was hardly unique. You've probably heard of VLC, but here are three other media players that can handle pretty much any video you can throw at them. Oh yeah, and they're all absolutely free.

GOM Player

This freeware media player comes with a ton of popular video codecs preloaded. For codecs that GOM Player cannot handle, the software automatically takes you to open source software sites to download the appropriate files.

GOM Player can also handle partial AVI files. That means you can watch movies while you're still downloading them. Or if you've only managed to download part of the video, you can check it out to see if it's worth downloading the rest.

KMPlayer

Like GOM Player, KMPlayer includes a ton of codecs for watching most video files right out of the box. If you want to watch a file in a proprietary format like h.264, you can specify an external decoder to use with the media player.

KMPlayer can also handle damaged AVI files, Quicktime movies, and Real Media files. You'll need to have RealPlayer and QuickTime installed, or download Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative.

rulesPlayer

This unassuming little media player is a powerhouse of video codec compatibility. Like SMPlayer, rulesPlayer is built as a frontend for MPlayer.

RulesPlayer includes support for multiple languages, and can handle 12 different subtitle formats.

Conclusion

Do you need 3 different video players? Nope. Any one of these will do. As would SMPlayer, VLC, or Media Player Classic. But it's nice to have choices, no?

Tags: gom-player, kmplayer, media-player-classic, mplayer, rulesplayer, smplayer, vlc

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

mustra said 5:15PM on 9-17-2007

Thanks for the info, Ill give them a try.

Insomnious said 6:12PM on 9-17-2007

Media Player Classic is pretty much my staple player, and has yet to fail on any video playback. Plus it's updated each time I update my k-lite codec pack.

GOM Player is very competent, as is SMPlayer (although the latter is still quite new).

It's good that we've gotten past the stage where we have to worry about codecs and file formats.

Franklin said 6:33PM on 9-17-2007

wow i've never heard of any of these. thanks for telling us.

and thanks for the tip on smplayer. it's become my personal favorite. it's lightweight (it doesn't appear to use much system resources) and seems to do a much better job of recognizing proper aspect ratios when you view videos at full screen. (this seems to trip up media player classic and vlc.)

the more free and open source options, the merrier -- especially since pretty much all the commercial media players suck.

Zarggg said 10:28PM on 9-17-2007

Media Player Classic and KMPlayer both reside on my computer, and I actually use both of them! (Shock!)

hazard said 7:56AM on 9-18-2007

VLC is still king. being truely cross platform and able to operate as a streaming server supporting video on demand and on-the-fly transcoding sets it apart from the rest.

and just to get bitchy .. KMPlayer is closed source but has been accused of ripping code from the open source Media Player Classic.

mg said 7:57AM on 9-18-2007

I used MediaPlayer Classic a few years.

But now I use KMPlayer cause it uses libvcodec so most files play without loading windows-codecs even FLV and 3GP. And if it needs a window-codec it can load. I found it by viewing the MediaPlayer comparision lists on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_media_players

There are very much options, but it is worth checking them out. Then it is a very comfortable player with excellent options (like audio-limiter, warp-sharpener and so on).

I guess still the best players are
1st Grade
- KMPlayer
- MediaPlayer Classic
- VLC

2nd Grade
- rulesPlayer/SMPlayer or anything based on mplayer

Eleventeen said 10:20AM on 9-18-2007

I use Media Player Classic on all my windows machines, with the exception of some rare forms of Mastroka files my friends insist on giving me, thats when I use VLC.

I use VLC and Perian/Flip4Mac with QuickTime on my Macs.

Evergreen said 7:20PM on 9-18-2007

"KMPlayer is closed source but has been accused of ripping code from the open source Media Player Classic"

Wrong belief not based on objective truth or investigation though.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=995434#post995434

CPFReviews.com said 10:38AM on 9-19-2007

Teh Problem that I am facing is these player when playing at 2x speed do not scale sound properly.

where as the Windows Media Player can scale (without distortion) the pitch is maintained.

Is there a player that can do .mov files 2x speed without distorting the pitch?

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