SMPlayer - updated with lots of new features!

[Enhasa]

Download:
http://speeddemosarchive.com/smplayer/smplayer-20090712.zip (8.17 MB uncompressed)
If you run Linux, OS X, or similar, you can get packages from the SMPlayer site or your distribution's repository, or compile from source.

Purpose:
This is an extremely fast and lightweight media player for Windows that plays basically everything and supports -- but in no way requires -- extensive customizations. It is designed to work out of the box with no setup or configuration. Depending on your taste, the interface can be highly minimalist or something fancier as above. Please note: I didn't do that much work at all, so thank the people behind FFmpeg, MPlayer, and SMPlayer.

Usage:
There is no installation and this does not use the registry or steal all your file extensions or require codec packs or whatever. Just unzip the 3 files and click on smplayer -- you can create a shortcut if you like. To play a file, just drag and drop into the window or use the open menu. SMPlayer recognizes segmented files, so you can just open segment 1 and the entire run will be loaded for you. By default, available audio commentary will also be automatically selected.

Basic commands:
Arrow keys navigate: up/down for previous/next file, left/right to seek in the current file. Double click on the window or alt-enter to go in and out of fullscreen -- in fullscreen, there is a nice popup menu at the bottom. To toggle double size on and off, middle click on the main window or hit ctrl-enter. You can set the demuxer/codecs used for the current file in the file info <enter>. You can select audio or subtitle tracks with the corresponding menu, and you can go to audio/load to load an external file, like audio commentary.


Additional customization:
You will probably never need to do anything else, but it could be useful for you to mess around with the settings once to see what you like. I picked settings for maximum compatibility, but you can customize things to your own machine or preferences. Most of the stuff is self-explanatory but there are some key points.

- If you want to associate SMPlayer with all sorts of different files, go to "file types" in preferences.
- SMPlayer has support for most formats built in, but if you ever find something you can't play, download this. Unzip these files into your SMPlayer folder.
- If you want even more speed, the biggest "free" things you can set performance-wise are directx (fast), direct3d, or gl (fast) instead of gl2 for the video driver, and number of threads (2 for dual core, 4 for quad, etc) in performance. It may cost you slightly in video quality, but you can turn off postprocessing in general/video for a small boost and always skip the loop filter in performance for a large boost.
- To get higher quality subtitles, select "Use SSA/ASS library" in the subtitles menu. This will make the very next file you load take a long time as it generates a fontconfig folder.

- If you want SMPlayer to reuse the existing window instead of opening up another window when you load a new file, you can set that in options/interface/instances.
- If you want to keep SMPlayer in your tray persistently, hit f4 (or options menu) and now when you close, it will stay there. f3 (or video menu) toggles "always on top." And f5/f6 toggle the toolbars. You can move the playlist around or undock it completely by dragging.
- To take advantage of SMPlayer's file-specific "memory" features, check the box in media settings in general. Go to interface and see if you want to check "remember position and size" and bump up the max files history. Finally, you can open the playlist preferences and have it remember your previous playlists or read all metadata automatically.

- This won't be a problem for SDA videos of course, but if you have a wack vid, it's easy to fix it. For upside-down or rotated vids, go to the video menu. If only the left or right channel has audio, use audio/stereo mode. And if the stereo channels are reversed, audio/filters/reverse stereo.
- If you would prefer the volume to stay roughly consistent from file to file, go to general/audio and check "volume normalization by default."
- You can go to keyboard and mouse to change what the mouse buttons and wheel do. You can change the keyboard shortcuts around to your liking here (perhaps add numpad or special media keyboard usage), or you can load this file for the much simpler SMPlayer defaults. You can revert back to my build defaults with this file. Once this is done, you can go to interface/seeking and set how far a short/medium/long seek or mouse wheel jump goes.
- If you know what you are doing with command line mplayer, you can go to advanced in the preferences and pass in parameters that way.

[KennyMan666]

Heh... the complete and utter lack of any interface is part of the reason I love mplayer.

[Enhasa]

Well, I just use keyboard shortcuts anyway, but it's nice to have the little WIMP conveniences.

BTW, I don't want to be pedantic but it's funny. I think you mean "utter lack of any interface GUI," because having absolutely no interface would be quite a problem.

[Enhasa]

I'm not going to be updating all the time but I did compile a new version because there were some minor things in the interface I wanted to tweak. It's slightly smaller (by 0.3 MB) because of a different MPlayer version. I'm probably not going to update this for a while unless something new and important happens with SMPlayer.

- updated to MPlayer rev 25962
- updated to SMPlayer rev 826
- changed some random crap in the interface

[Psonar]

If you're curious about what us hopeless Windows users are using, I use a mixture of VLC, VLC Portable, TCPMP (Core Pocket Media Player), GOM Player, iTunes, winDVD, and yes Windows Media Player.

I attempted to find an mplayer build to try once upon a time, but the lack of any official build and the mess of user-concocted builds on their website turned me away. You're right, it wasn't the most user friendly experience, and I do always hate it when I run up on a website that's based around Unix users, because I feel all left out.  With college and work being so Windows-centric, it wouldn't really do me a lot of good to try and learn Unix now.

Anyway, I'm definitely giving your smplayer build a try - it sounds like a wonderful thing and I can't wait to play with the key bindings and settings, which it sounds like it has plenty of.

Thanks for your work in putting this together and using the forum here to bridge the gap between things like mplayer and us Windows users.

[nate]

With college and work being so Windows-centric, it wouldn't really do me a lot of good to try and learn Unix now.

on the contrary - if everyone else smoked, would it still be pointless for you yourself to quit smoking? unix is great no matter how much you get to use it, and you may find (as i did) that knowing it equals using it, no matter what others are using.

[Poesta]

If you're comparing using Windows to smoking, you must be anti-Microsoft. Check this out.

[nate]

cute page.

i'm anti-anti. only pro-. pro-productivity in this case. i have to be. sda is evidence of the strength of unix.

[Enhasa]

I updated the smplayer.ini in the zip with some "better" default settings. Thanks to Maur and especially BoltR from IRC for giving me feedback, and no thanks to Lord Booga for refusing to download.

[Enhasa]

With college and work being so Windows-centric, it wouldn't really do me a lot of good to try and learn Unix now.

My advice depends on what it is you study in college.

If it's something nontechnical like say history, then don't bother. Lots of people use Windows just for word processing, web browsing, and playing games, perfectly happily.

If it's computer science or computer engineering, then you're probably learning it already. Pretty much mandatory.

If it's computing/infosys/management based, I really recommend it since not knowing it would be really hurtful come job hunting time. If it's another technical field (say engineering of any type) then I think you should also learn as well since many people write Unix-specific tools and you should at least be able to use the command line.


Really there are two separate issues here. I guess by Unix you mean a Unix-like shell like bash (aka terminal, command line). I know people who have Ubuntu or OS X who don't know a thing about the command line, and in that case, all they are doing is showing off that they aren't using Windows.

I'm not really making the distinction between Windows and Linux so much as GUI vs CLI (command line). Also, once you learn a shell like bash, you can also leverage this in the Windows world by getting Cygwin. So don't really think of it as learning something you won't use later. It's a different paradigm and how easy it is to learn depends on how much experience you have in something like DOS.


Edit: BTW, if you are a computer scientist or anyone that writes code, the first thing you absolutely need to learn is how to use a good text editor (emacs, vim, whatever). I am pretty much appalled at the people who are proud that they code in notepad like that is some kind of positive.

[nate]

all things are relative, my friend. notepad > netscape gold.

[Psonar]

I knew saying I shouldn't learn unix was a wonderfully loaded statement that would get some interesting feedback...

I'm majoring in Aerospace Engineering and thus far I've done pretty well with programming skills as a strength.  Most of the people around me don't want to have to learn any more programming than necessary to get their degree, so I've been the programming dude for every group project I've been in.  That and right now I'm working at an engineering company and doing a good bit of programming for them as well.

Most of the programming that I've done has been with Matlab, but has also included MathCAD, Visual Basic (esp. VBA with Excel), LabView, TecPlot, my TI-89 calculator, etc.  I'm guessing a lot of those don't sound too familiar because besides Matlab and Visual Basic the others have a more limited scope or audience.  So far I've had two jobs at engineering companies, and all I've seen is a very strictly maintained Windows network, complete with an Outlook email system and Internet Explorer for everyone, and I've never heard of anything different from any of my friends, unless they're computer science.  But, for mechanical, civil, and aerospace engineering, it seems Windows is a workplace standard, and I'm uncertain of how to make a switch to utilizing the power of Unix... right now I'm memorizing keyboard shortcuts like a crazy man to work efficiently in Windows, and I do use the 'Run' prompt (Win+R) with simple commands like notepad, mspaint, and cmd.  Also, I know what you mean by the command line paradigm verses Windows because (among other things) Matlab is command line based, and programs written in Matlab that require user input can do so through the command line with input() commands, or with GUIs, which are often preferred by users.

And while I do use Notepad and Wordpad for some tasks, I'm a fan of Notepad++, but don't often get to use it because Matlab and Visual Basic have their own editors that contain very necessary tools for programming in those languages, so I end up just using Notepad++ for HTML or the occasional side-project.

Do you (nate and Enhasa) see Windows users as being inefficient for not using a more command-line based interface?  What would you expect someone in my position to do differently?  You mentioned Cygwin, which I've yet to research... is it a command line interface for Windows?  I'm just very interested in getting your thoughts and bridging some of the gap I feel between myself and "those Linux people."  Just to be clear, I'm not asking anyone to defend themselves, or to try and convince me of anything, I'm just wanting to open-mindedly explore the choices of communities other than my own.  I've definitely expanded my horizons a lot since coming to SDA.

[Enhasa]

Well I have a dual boot but honestly I'm in Windows almost all the time since my comp is too crappy for wine and I like to play games, lol. I ssh into linux/solaris machines to work all the time though.

If you're writing stuff with IDE's like Matlab or VisualBasic, best to use the IDE's like you said. Also, if you've had two jobs, and they use Windows, you're really fine with that. The corporate world likes to use Windows and the academic world likes to use Unix. When in Rome...

Then again, it's not very hard to learn the basic shell commands so you can just do that by yourself, if you are interested, even if you don't really need it. And yeah, Cygwin is probably enough to start out.

Do you (nate and Enhasa) see Windows users as being inefficient for not using a more command-line based interface?

It depends very much on the job. Windows users are often very inefficient because they don't realize they can automate repetitive tasks they do, such as batch renaming of all the files in a directory. They will happily do it all manually since that is what they are used to.

OTOH, there are certainly many situations where a GUI is more efficient. If I didn't think so myself, I would be using command line mplayer as opposed to smplayer. Try editing playlists with CLI as opposed to a GUI and you will get what I mean.

[BDA]

[20:30] <bsidwell> Enhasa, I'll use it if and only if you can promise me it has the compability of MPC and the speed of VLC.
[20:30] <bsidwell> And that if it doesn't I get to kick you in the balls if we ever meet IRL.

I'm holding you to this even though you technically never agreed.

[rock1644]

This looks pretty good. What formats can it play?