Most of you must be playing music files often along with watching movies on the system with your media players. Many of you may be still stuck with the conventional Windows media player to play all your files and must have faced difficulty with it.

Today i will talk about some great media players from which you can choose and then use it to play your media files without any problems anymore. These are the best alternatives for Media Player you may have now.

1. THE KMPLAYER

This one is a personal favorite for me. I always use this to play each and everything either its Audio or Video whether its VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, QuickTime  or any other format etc. It lets you play almost everything  seamlessly. I havent ran into it not being able to play any format of media files.

It got too many options letting you adjust everything you could ever think of starting from equalizer, Subtitles, audio settings, Video settings, 3D Surround sound, Audio/video Synchronisation and much more. Just think of something and you can change it just by your right-click.

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2. MPLAYER

This is my another favorite. For many this player is too much odd and complicated. But for me ,its awesome. Mplayer basically is a command line Video/Audio player. Yes you read it right, Command line. This player is without any Graphical user interface. You can just download all the required standalone files in a folder and you can play your files straight away.

For playing the files , the simple way is to just drag and drop the file on the MPlayer executable file. The codec files reside inside a folder within. And with all the codec files downloaded there, it plays everything you can imagine of. There may be just a few exceptions to this though.

mplayer-commandDevelopers of Mplayer recently though developed a GUI though and its available for Windows version. Previously GI was available only for Linux.

mplayer

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3. VLC MEDIA PLAYER

Most of you may have heard about it or used it. It’s another Free player available with amazing options and performance.

It can play various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

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4. MEDIA PLAYER CLASSIC

By seeing this, you would be reminded of the very old Windows media player which used to be bundled with Microsoft windows till Windows XP came out. Dont go by the looks. It will beat Windows media player by miles in performance in playing media files.

media-player-classic

The interface is too simple  but when you go in settings, it got loads of stuff to tweak on if you like them to be hanged or tweaked. Great for playing anything but  you will need to install all codes e.g. using K-Lite codec package for playing non standard media files.

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5. GOM PLAYER

This is another great player. It got great features and i use it when i am not using KMPlayer. It got just few features less compared to KMPlayer and plays almost all the files except a few. Check it out.

Gom Player

It supports most of the codecs (AVI, DAT, MPEG, DivX, XviD, WMV, ASF more) by its own embedded codec system that you won’t have to look for appropriate codecs every time when you can’t play a certain video format.Also it is able to play incomplete or damaged AVI file by skipping the damaged frames. And it can also playback Locked Media Files while downloading or sharing (with real-time index rebuilding under certain condition: AVI downloading in consecutive order).

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6.  JET AUDIO

This player from COWON even though having “Audio” added in its name , can play both audio and video files. It can also be used to convert Audio , RIp CDs, Record or even burn CDs. It lets you even broadcast your music over the web.

JetAudio

You can have different skins changed at will. With some great configuration options in both Audio and Video , it’s a great player to have.

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7. ZOOM PLAYER

Another player with some nice features but an odd interface at least for me. It does need additional codecs to play file and doesn’t have any inbuilt codec libraries with it.

Zoom_Player

The options/ settings panel is also a bit minimal compared to say Mplayer or Media Player classic.

Zoom Player settings

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8. AIMP2

This a great player when you want to play just Audio files. It provides a simple interface similar to Winamp to play audio files with some good features like a full 10 band equalizer.

aimp2

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9. BS PLAYER

This is another great player which can play both audio and Video files with ease. This also got some good configurable options especially when you are playing a Video file like subtitle synchronisation.

bsplayer

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10. WINAMP

Winamp’s old version(2.x.x) is still my favorite when it comes to play mp3 files on my system. I am not a big music freak, but sometime i love to listen to music and then use Winamp. I love the minimal nature of it without any complexities.

winamp 2

The latest version of Winamp is having more features and Menu along with a big skin. It may be loved by many users across the web, but for me its a big NO. I am still sticking with the minimal stuff to play my mp3 files.

New version also includes ability to play Video files too provided your system has the required codes to play the file.

winamp 5

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11.SMPLAYER

This is basically an enhanced Version of Mplayer about which i talked about in the starting of this posts. It brings all the features and options available in Mplayer command lines to a graphical user interface.

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Just a note here. I have omitted Windows Media player here from the list just because it’s already pre-installed on every Windows system. I have almost never used it at all and many of you may forget about it if you start using its alternatives listed above.

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