I've used Media Player Classic for years. It's so simple, handles pretty much everything, is lightweight, and I've never had an issue with it.

It's pretty ugly, though. No skins. And I'm a fagmonster who likes bling, so I went looking for something that offered it. I tried KMPlayer, but I'm having issues playing a DVD in it and it's pissing me off. It looks cool but the whole interface design is pretty much terrible. It's annoying because I love mplayer on Linux.

I just downloaded GOM Player. It's fugly. I don't like it.

I think I'm either going to fuck around with KMPlayer more, or just go back to good old MPC. Unless someone uses something awesome.

windows media player 10 for music and vlc media player for movies and anime.

VLC. Simple and will play virtually anything.

VLC hasn't failed me yet.

Nothing beats Media Player Classic - Home Cinema which definitely is superior to the original MPC. It has extra features and updated code. It's a fork of the original MPC and looks the same, but (obviously) functions differently. Yes, it's ugly, but if you can get past its ugliness and come to enjoy its power and minimalism, you may come to appreciate it.

I've never come across a better player, and I've used dozens. The second-best player I've used is KMPlayer, but MPC - HC definitely takes the crown for being the best Windows player as it has highly unique and powerful functions. It's likely the best player available for any OS.



Here are the codecs and such I use for it:

Misc. Video Codecs: QT Lite, Real Alternative Lite (all you need in order to watch Quicktime and RealPlayer videos through good video players)
Video Renderer: Haali Renderer, MadVR (MadVR is a new video renderer that gives slightly superior results to Haali renderer. Media Player Classic - Home Cinema was one of the first players to support it. It still doesn't have much support)
Video Codec: FFDshow Tryouts (a superior fork to the original FFDShow)

I suggest that you first try to use MadVR renderer to watch videos. If it doesn't work, switch to Haali Renderer. I also highly suggest you install FFDshow Tryouts over the original FFDshow as it has updated code and better features than other forks.

So yeah... MPC - HC definitely makes a great front-end.

By the way: I find that VLC is an overrated video player. Most people use it because it "plays videos out of the box". Other than being great at playing things out of the box, I find that it's a rather dull player which uses more ram that I'd prefer and is somewhat buggy. It, along with Pidgin, are a couple of the most overrated open-source apps out there.

Sorry, haha. To people who use VLC: it's an adequate player. It's just that, when it comes to stuff like this, I'm far too anal.

QuickTime Player, mostly. With Perian it can play Flash videos and others. I use VLC for .wmv files because Flip4Mac is too slow.

Well, I use MPC-HC with Haali. I never really payed attention to the difference between it and MPC. It comes with CCCP, so yeah.

I went back to MPC at any rate. KMPlayer pissed me off.

Actually, if you want bling in a good player, I suggest you take a look at Zoom Player.



I'm pretty sure it's skinnable, but the free version may not be. There are three versions of it - a free version and two premium versions that you have to pay for (or find on a torrent site, Rapidshare, Emule, etc.).

I've not tinkered around with it much, but when I briefly checked it out last year it seemed very promising. Simply by looking through its options I could tell it was a good player - seriously. Quite a few anal cinephiles use it when watching films on their PCs, but the most anal ones tend to go for MPC - HC.

Haha, BETAMAX!

We had one when I was a toddler. I think it was like $800.00.
Tape 3 hours worth of TV shows!

Whatever works. Winamp, VLC, etc. I don't care about what software I use as long as it works.

KMPlayer for high-definition videos, Windows Media Player for just about everything else.

What Chair uses.

Windows Media Player, RealPlayer SP, & VLC

KMPlayer is the best for video quality, but it gets subtitle lag sometimes... so I usually fall back on VLC.

I used to use BS Player, until it quite literally went bull sh*t. Now I tend to use a combination of VLC, Media Player and Media Player Classic.

Depends on my OS
Windows: Media Player Classic
OSX: VLC
Linux: MPlayer

I just installed Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 and so far I really like it. The interface is almost exactly what I wanted, it plays .mkv and handles multiple audio tracks, which is mostly what I require.

I got it purely because I needed something to play Blu-Rays, and no free player does that satisfactorily. It seems to be, from what I gather, the best of the BR player choices. It costs like $100, which is crazy, but I'm of questionable morals so that really doesn't have an impact on me. I hate switching between players, so I can see this becoming my main one.

I've never heard of it. PowerDVD is usually what I see people recommending for viewing Blu-Ray discs.

Have you tried it? If not, you should give it a shot. You might like it more than TotalMedia Theatre.

PowerDVD looked fugly. Everything's all pretty and transparent and slick in TMT5.

PowerDVD is coming with my drive, so I was planning on trying it then. Most of the newer recommendations I read favored TMT5.

aww, snap, i know you didn't. i'm liking the pidgin/finch (aka libpurple) chat clients lately: I like that everything --- IRC, AIM, XMPP, and even skype (sort of) --- is grouped together in the same library. It's not a huge program; certainly nothing compared to a compiler, rendering engine, or even video codec. But still, why do you have to be hating? Here I am, all week talking up the program to quasar in the irc, and now just totally unsubstantiated bird-bashing.

as to the original question, mplayer mostly.

edit: and but furthermore i /know/ it can use skype because _you told me so_

Pidgin is actually far from horrible. I just feel that it's inferior to various other multi-protocol apps I know of such as Miranda IM. Pidgin (or perhaps Kopete, which I haven't spent much time using) is probably the best option for Linux users though, and I don't find anything wrong with Linux users using it. But when a Windows user tells me they use Pidgin I'll recommend them Miranda IM if I think they'd actually spend time customizing the app.

I'll admit that Miranda IM quite sucks "out of the box" and this is why it took me a while to switch from Pidgin to it, but once I thoroughly customized it I started loving it and found it to be better than Pidgin.

Miranda is so lightweight that by default it doesn't even come with emoticons, a dictionary, and various other things you find in most other IM clients -- you have to install these yourself. This, unfortunately, turns off a lot of people. I actually wish that Miranda would include a few essential add-ons "out of the box" to prevent people from giving up on the app so quickly.

Thanks for this. I recently got a new PC and one of the first things I did was come back to this thread. I tried MadVR with MPC but had some issues, so I'm going to try it with KMPlayer as it's my favourite of the bunch. I want to get all the clarity I can out of my SD videos on this LCD monitor. I do kind of miss my CRT monitor because the ghosting on this one annoys me. /jargon

I use to use VLC, but I dropped it since it wouldn't stretch videos to full screen on my HDTV. I switched to MPC and have used that ever since. I use it with lav filters to play my 10bit anime. It displays everything in high quality and upscales 480p videos pretty nicely. It's just I get some lag sometimes with certain videos. It's usually only with anime. I think it's a subtitle issue.