SMPlayer

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.

While many other similar tools will remember where you left off whenever you stop watching a video file and resume it later, SMPlayer adds to that useful functionality the ability to remember also the specific video and audio settings you selected for that file, the subtitles stream you were using, and whatever other adjustments you made to it before closing the program.

SMPlayer is not only meant for individual files – the program does offer options to open both Blu-ray and DVD discs, either directly from your drives or from a folder. The results, however, are mixed – sometimes it gets stuck at the menu, sometimes it does nothing and displays an error message, sometimes it manages to jump directly to the movie and to play it correctly (though leaving the user with no way of getting access to the menu options), etc. If only these issues were sorted out in the future, this would easily become THE only media player anyone would ever need.

Warts and all, you will find it really hard to come across a similar free media player capable of playing back any video file with the same level of reliability that SMPlayer guarantees, let alone one with all the extra functionality that this open-source tool offers. I can only recommend you download and install it and then make a one-to-one comparison between its functionality and that of your favorite media player – seeing is believing.