Media Players, lets discuss!

[servocrow]

With so many different media players out there I thought it would be nice to discuss what everyone is using: I myself have noticed the following

VLC, yeah it works but ALWAYS looks washed out.

MPC, I tend to use from time to time because I like the fact I can add my own external filters/codecs for playback.

SPLAYER, has anyone tried this? I have and though it doesnt play EVERY file it does tend to play MKV files AWESOME and use it for almost all my MKV playback.

http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html

Windows Media Player , no matter how I try to tweak this I cant get this to play back certain MKVs

I use SPLAYER for MKVs on my HTPC and most of the time VLC for just a quick playback on whatever project I am working on, mostly used on my WORK PC.


Lets discuss!

[setarip_old]

@servocrow

Hi!

It would probably be a good idea to state what O/S you're using...

[servocrow]

your right.

I am currently on W7 64x Enterprise

[alehel]

I use Mac OS 10.6 and I almost always use VLC. I agree that it looks a bit washed out when compared to quicktime, but quicktime isn't capable of smooth video playback of the 1080p movies I rip with MakeMKV and encode with Handbrake. VLC handles them just fine. Also, the fact that I can watch BD rips without converting to mkv or encoding means I rarely use anything else anymore.

Currently thinking about getting the server edition of the new Mac Mini (they just went down in price) to store all my encoded movies on, in which case I'll probably start using Front Row which uses Quicktime. I presume the new Mac Mini should handle my 1080p files just fine in QT. The server version of the new Mac Mini looks to be a great media computer. I doesn't have a dvd drive, but it has 1tb storage space, and I've got an external BD drive which I can use to play DVD's anyway.

[Icanseestars]

XBMC - free, open source and cross platform, granted not for everyone given its media center interface but pretty good overall.

Best two Windows player for me are MPC-HC and PotPlayer, I prefer the simple GUI of MPC-HC and its quick loading but videos in PotPlayer look slightly better and it has a bazillion options to suit almost anyones needs.

Tried splayer a while back didn't like it.

[servocrow]

I am currently using Splash Pro, and its pretty decent , esp for MKV playback

[MorkFromOrk]

Windows 7 Ultimate, 32bit: I'm new to playing blu-ray movies in this way, (have been just plugging the disks into a PS3), so I don't know if there are BETTER players out there... I'm pretty happy with Windows Media Player and the current Klite Codec Pack.

[skittle]

IMO the best around:
MPC-HC by its self, or with haali media splitter, or with ffdshow. It does not need haali or ffdshow or klite or cccp
MPC-HC is free open source, and a standalone executable so keep it on flash drive if you want.

On linux (and windows too) there is VLC or Mplayer (gui of your choice, i prefer SMplayer).

[MorkFromOrk]

It took a fair amount of research before I found the answer to .MKV files not playing in Media Center or MediaPortal and thought that the information might be helpful here. I use Windows Media Center when I don't know what I want to watch and need to browse posters, and MediaPortal when I DO know what I want because it navigates to specific videos much faster. I assume that this information would be applicable to any of the "media center" programs.

Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit: I had been playing .MKV files with WMP directly on my HTPC, and that was working great. When I tried both Windows Media Center and MediaPortal, I found that neither one would play an .MKV file.

To make a long story short, I removed the K-Lite codec pack that I had installed and installed the current codec offering from Shark007. (Google "Shark007") That resolved the problems in both applications, and all my stuff plays. As their webpage says, you don't have to have "lots of stuff" installed for things to work.

[homeuser]

I'm looking for a media player that has specific BUTTONS for navigating the chapters within an mkv file. So if a single mkv file has multiple chapters, I'd like to have some next/previous buttons to navigate through them. Buttons for subtitles and audio options would be nice also. I know most players do this through context menus and other less convenient ways, but are there any good players with buttons?