Nowadays it’s pretty hard to be without a laptop or a desktop where you can easily spend some precious time without an inkling of ennui. And when you are with your favourite pal, you ought to have some really interesting ways of entertainment. With the advent of the internet you can have tremendous fun just with the help of a click. Regardless, watching movies and some demanding videos still forms the favourite pastime. But still you need some means to enjoy them to the fullest, where comes the heavy demand of the media players. Scads of highly advanced and easily interfacing media players are available over the internet for free. Users just need to download them with a click and enjoy the flavour of high quality videos.
With so many options available, it is obvious that users will get confused about their best choice. So just to make their work easy, I have come up with a list of 8 top media players available. So here we go:
1. VLC Media Player:
Perhaps the most user friendly and the most popular player among all those available. This player has the real capacity to play videos to the best quality. The most interesting feature is the 400% sound increase it provides which really matters at some time. Moreover its exclusive user interface with copious shortcut keys really makes it the best. VLC can even be used as a streaming media server, can play DVD’s, can be used as an audio decoder, and doesn’t require external, extra codec to run.
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2. GOM Player:
GOM Player (Gretech Online Movie Player) is a 32-bit media player for Microsoft Windows, distributed by the Gretech Corporation of South Korea. Features include wide ranging ability to play media files, including flv – without needing to obtain an external codec, and the ability to play some broken media files. The word Gom means “bear” in Korean, and as such GOM Player uses a bear’s paw as its symbol. It has the ability to play files that include MPEG-1, MPEG-4 Part 2, MS MPEG4 V1/2/3, MJPEG, WAV, MP3, AAC, Vorbis etc. GOM Player also supports Peer to Peer video streaming through an official add-on called GOMTV Streamer.
3. Media Jukebox:
Media Jukebox is an all in one media player developed by J River. It is a music player and organizer that offer many options for playing, managing and creating digital music on your PC. It even offers
file organization, helping you find, store and play music and video. Moreover it also extends its features to CD ripping, CD burning,
visual displays, CD-quality encoding to MP3, WMA, OGG and APE. Some other features include support for popular handheld players (iPod, Sony PSP, PlaysForSure devices and phones), integrated CD labelling, audio tagging and interface skins.
4. SongBird:
Songbird is an open source player and a web browser developed by POTI Inc. It utilizes the cross-platform frameworks Mozilla XULRunner and GStreamer media framework, and largely capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. It has the ability to play multiple audio formats, such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Apple Lossless and WMA. It has the ability to scan the user’s computer for all audio files and add them to a local library. An extended functionality in Songbird is the installation of extensions. Extensions include Audioscrobbler Notifier, Wikipedia Artist Display, SHOUTcast Radio Directory, UnPlug, Adblock Plus, Taglib metadata handler, and ChatZilla.
5. Winamp:
Basically one of the oldest media player, it is developed by Nullsoft and is known for its huge skins for personalization. Winamp supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC, and ReplayGain for volume levelling across tracks. Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video. For MPEG Video, AVI and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsoft’s DirectShow API for playback, allowing playback of most of the video formats supported by Windows Media Player.
6. Windows Media Player:
WMP is basically a Windows supported player which runs easily in Windows atmosphere. Besides playing high quality music and videos, this player is a master
of all trades. Its extended list includes playing audio, video and viewing images on
personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. In addition to being a media player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to
compact discs, burn recordable discs in Audio CD format or as data discs with playlists such as an MP3 CD, synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enable users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores.
7. KM Player:
KM Player is basically known for its trendiness it offers to its users. The high user interface it provides makes it really dependent. The right click menu can offer you all the options that you want while playing the videos without any inkling of searching the options from the menu. Moreover you can set the player to change its style according to the video you are playing which reflects the mood of the song. It can play almost all the types of files and is really worth trying.
8. Crystal Player:
This media player originally made by Kim Bondarenko and then developed by Crystal Reality LLC is a compact media player for Windows. Crystal Player features an original video kernel, and does not use built-in Windows Media environment, so there are fewer limitations implied as with other players using the Windows Media environment. It uses the playback engine of Crystal Player which is known as Crystal2 technology. Crystal Player can smoothly play video on slow machines (netbooks, etc.). The various supported formats are DivX, XVID, MPEG1/2, MPEG4, WMV, Real etc.
So that was a collection of the best 8 media players supported by most of the operating systems. Though some players are specifically supported by Windows, but still they have some features in them which compelled me to include them in this list. I must have left some good players in this list but I would love to know them from you. Do share your valuable views.
