The main criterion when choosing a media player is, in most cases, the ability to play as many video and audio formats as possible. This is also the case of SMPlayer, a software solution based on MPlayer that's supposed to play most, if not all, multimedia formats out there.
This utility doesn’t need external codecs and it should be fine when working with avi, mkv, ogm, mpeg, vob, 3gp, asf, mov, wmv, mp3 and ogg files, as well as with Internet streams and DVD discs.
You should be pretty familiar with the interface if you have already used MPlayer. SMPlayer uses the same clean and user-friendly look, despite the fact that it hides so many powerful features.
During our tests, the software managed to play all formats we tried, although we had to wait a little bit when running the application for the first time because it needed to index fonts and other elements.
SMPlayer offers a lot of customizations and the settings menu follows the same idea as the rest of the application, so it’s pretty straightforward if you wish to modify certain things regarding the interface or the way it works.
SMPlayer is very easy to use, highly configurable and, all in all, it software does a pretty decent job. Also, thanks to its ability to handle a wide variety of formats, this software can easily be the player of choice for many users.
What's New in This Release:
Fixes:
· SMPlayer took more than 10 seconds to show when running for the very first time.
· The links to download subtitles from Opensubtitles were wrong.
· SMPlayer crashed in the favorite editor when trying to select a file if the KDE open dialog was used.
· Some translations were missing in the Windows package.
New:
· By default the screenshots are saved in the user's pictures folder instead of the SMPlayer's config folder.
· Now it's possible to change the opensubtitles server.
· Youtube: seeking is slow with flv videos, so now flv videos have the lowest priority.
· Youtube: now it's possible to search and download videos from youtube. This is provided by an external application (in linux you have to install an independent package: smtube).