SMPlayer -- Freeware Video Player for Windows and Linux
VLC tends to get all the video player love on the Internet. I've never been that impressed with VLC. It's certainly a "good enough" freeware video player, but its outstanding feature seems to be that it is the best known freeware video player. SMPlayer is an alternative video player that runs on Windows XP or later and on most modern versions of Linux. Like VLC, it's freeware and plays just about any video file you can throw at it. However, it as one feature that makes it my favorite: it remembers the settings for every video file you play. Not just the current location in the video file so it can resume where you left off, but all the setting changes you may have made for that specific video -- for example, the volume, subtitle color, which audio track you are using, what filters you have on, etc. This is great if you have to interrupt watching a video and come back to it hours or days later, especially if you had to watch other videos that needed different settings during those hours or days.
Some other interesting SMPlayer features:
- * Configurable subtitles. You can choose font and size, and even colors for the subtitles.
- * Audio track switching. You can choose the audio track you want to listen. Works with avi and mkv. And of course with DVDs.
- * Seeking by mouse wheel. You can use your mouse wheel to go forward or backward in the video.
- * Video equalizer, allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and gamma of the video image.
- * Multiple speed playback. You can play at 2X, 4X... and even in slow motion.
- * Filters. Several filters are available: deinterlace, postprocessing, denoise... and even a karaoke filter (voice removal).
- * Audio and subtitles delay adjustment. Allows you to sync audio and subtitles.
- * Advanced options, such as selecting a demuxer or video & audio codecs.
- * Playlist. Allows you to enqueue several files to be played one after each other. Autorepeat and shuffle supported too.
- * Preferences dialog. You can easily configure every option of SMPlayer by using a nice preferences dialog.
- * Possibility to search automatically for subtitles in opensubtitles.org.
- * Translations: currently SMPlayer is translated into more than 20 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese....
SMPlayer is freeware and open source (GPL License). It uses mplayer as it's video playing backend so it has all the features of mplayer available in a nice interface. The only drawback to SMPlayer is that all its features mean that the preferences dialog mentioned above hides a large number of options, many of which the average user will never use.
Rating: 5.0
Operating System: Windows XP or later, Linux
License: GPL
Price: Free
Version Tested: 0.6.10
Web Site: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/
