After the Internet, games and music, viewing movies is one of the major activities done by users. Maybe it cannot be compared with viewing a movie in a theater, but with a monitor or with a big screen TV, viewing movies in the comfort of your own home can be awesome.
Not considering the hardware requirements, a very important role is played by the software you use to view movies, or video player. It has a major role in image quality, sound quality and the fluency of the movie.
Happily, when it comes to picking a video player, the offer is quite rich. It’s normal to be like this, considering that almost everyone likes to view a movie at home.
Generally, operating systems include at least one video player. Windows, for example, comes with Windows Media Player preinstalled. Criticized by some, liked by others, Windows Media Player is not really the ideal video player. I’m not going into details, but it’s obvious that Microsoft’s media player has a lot of downfalls, lack of features, that other players have them incorporated for years.
Necessary features
You cannot say that one video player is better than the other without justifying your statement. And justifying it and differentiating is made based on the level of features offered by each one.
What features should a video player have? It’s obvious that some basic features are required for each user.
On the other hand, there are a number of features subjectively picked by each one of us. For some what matters most are the themes that change the graphical interface. Other may want their video player to run on different operating systems.
If we were to create a list of features that a video player should offer, without including all of them, the list should look like this:
- high number of recognized formats: MPEG-2, MPG-4, ( DivX and XviD) and MKV
- integrated codecs for the most popular formats
- low on system resources
- automatic play of files in the same folders
- image setting
- sound settings
- subtitles support
- automatic subtitle load
- online subtitle serach
- key shortcuts for important features
- OSD ( on screen display )
- themes for graphical interface
Candidates
There are many video players out there. However, during time, only some of them have become popular.
Media player Classic – appreciated for it’s low size, integrated codecs and ease to configure.
KMPlayer – offers a large number of features, probably the best video player from this point of view
VLC – one of the most popular video players, appreciated especially for it’s streaming feature.
BSPlayer – some while ago the uncrowned king of all video players, currently going through a image crises.
Mplayer – liked especially by Linux users, it also runs on Mac OS X and Windows
The list can be longer, but these are the most important video players right now. This doesn’t mean that there are no other canditates.
In my opinion I still prefer vlc. Issues people have with it are not due to codec problems but rather settings – its a more complicated program to use then most. But it works well. Have yet to put anything to it that breaks it.
In second place I would put MPC. Its solid and plays most formats. When you run into a problem you can run the non-intrusive cccp package and viola everythings good again.
mplayer doesn’t seem to use updated codecs.
bsplayer seems to have lots of bugs
kmplayer i’ve never used.
Hello,
I think this is the best ever list for mac video player I have seen, also all of them are free to download http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1356879.htm
I think this is the best BS.Player you can download latest version here: http://downdl.com/Multimedia/bsplayer-257-build-1044-beta-bsplayer-256-build-1043.html