SMPlayer 23.12

The ever-growing variety of video file formats and codecs makes it awfully hard for many media players to play back all our videos correctly and without a glitch, unless you’re using SMPlayer. This open-source GUI for the award-winning MPlayer supports nearly all existing codecs, while offering you a highly intuitive front-end and a wealth of features that you won’t find in certain popular free and commercial media players.

SMPlayer not only plays any video file you may come across, but it does it flawlessly and fast. Its apparently simple and effectively intuitive interface hides features that not all media players can boast of. All the usual suspects are there, both in the program’s menu bar and in the set of easy recognizable icons below – open file, audio settings, video settings, subtitles, screenshots, you name it.

One of those not-so-obvious options is the SMPlayer’s subtitles search and download capabilities – it will connect with opensubtitles.org and will make the search for you, listing all the subtitle files available for that movie by language. All you have to do is pick the one that’s right for you, and it will be added automatically to the video on the screen.

Another hidden gem of this versatile tool is its YouTube support. This means not only that SMPlayer can play back your YouTube videos, but also that it will let you search for videos on YouTube, download them (“record” them, in the program’s own words), and play them back offline at any time. You will need to download and install an external plugin to enjoy this functionality, though. more