Aside from VLC Media Player, some of the finest applications in this category are based on the open source MPlayer such as SMPlayer and KMPlayer. All of these are frontends to the ubiquitous MPLayer. UMPlayer – short for Universal Multimedia Player – is yet another fork of MPlayer that is capable of playing anything you throw at it. Additionally, it comes packed with a number of features that you will sure find useful.
UMPlayer supports some 270 audio and video codecs due to which it plays almost any media file including but not limited to AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and so on. It also plays from Radio cards, supports TCP/UDP/RTP unicast and multicast streams as well as YouTube and SHOUTcast streams.
The integration of SHOUTcast and YouTube are two of the distinguishing features of UMPlayer. YouTube and SHOUTcast are integrated as search-and-play, where you search for a particular video or radio station and get a list of matching videos, in the case of YouTube, and available radio station in the case of SHOUTcast. Users familiar with the now-defunct SHOUTcast integration on VLC will be slightly disappointed because of the lack of browse feature where you could scroll through a list of available stations instead of searching for one.
When playing YouTube videos a recording button appears which, I suppose, is another alternative to downloading YouTube videos.
Other notable features include:
- Search and download subtitles
- Skin-able interface
- Video filters – image adjustment, noise removal, deinterlace, cropping, video rotate etc.
- Audio filters – voice removal for karaoke, equalizer, volume normalization
- Customizable hotkeys
- Plays DVD menus
- Take video screenshots
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