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:
· A toolbar editor has been added. Now it's possible to select the buttons and controls that want to appear in the toolbars.
· New video filters: gradfun, blur and sharpen.
· Now it's possible to change the GUI (default, mini, mpc) at runtime, no restart required.
· sub files from opensubtitles should work again.
· (Youtube) Recognize short urls (like this one: http://y2u.be/F5OcZBVPwOA) Better support for chapters in video files.
· Bug fix: remote m3u files work from the favorites menu or command line. Internal changes in the single instance option (switch to QtSingleApplication).