I’m always searching for media player that will let me watch my video files hassle free; meaning that I don’t have to worry about codec installation/setup and having different player for different file types. Before this, whether on Windows or Ubuntu, I often end up needing a different media player due to some problems that occurred. Mainly the problem consist of a bloated codec and its’ compatibility with my media player. At that time I used K-Lite Codec Pack as my main codec pack. Time passed by and I realized that I must change to other codec pack to rectify my problem; and doing some search on the net I’ve encountered with CCCP. It solve most of my problem thank GOD, but I realize how do I install CCCP in my Ubuntu machine?

Don’t get me wrong, the codec that I’ve downloaded from Ubuntu’s repositories provide me with no major problem at all but still I feel that it can become much better. Then through some of my acquaintances, I tried VLC media player. But it seems some of my *.mkv files will not play properly using this player. Some times the screen goes blank or when viewing videos with external subtitle files, there’s some kind of green line been drawn at the bottom of the screen. My searching at the net again had resulted in the discovery of another media player that share some of the greatness of VLC media player, SMPlayer.

SMPlayer is a new multimedia player, it uses the award-winning MPlayer as engine, so it’s able to play the most known video & audio formats without the need of external codecs.

SMPlayer is available for Windows and Linux.

Other additional interesting features:

• Configurable subtitles. You can choose font and size, and even colors for
  the subtitles.
• Audio track switching. You can choose the audio track you want
  to listen. Works with avi and mkv. And of course with DVDs.
• Seeking by mouse wheel. You can use your mouse wheel to go forward
  or backward in the video.
• Video equalizer, allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue,
  saturation and gamma of the video image.
• Multiple speed playback. You can play at 2X, 4X… and even in slow motion.
• Filters. Several filters are available: deinterlace, postprocessing,
  denoise… and even a karaoke filter (voice removal).
• Audio and subtitles delay adjustment. Allows you to sync audio and
  subtitles.
• Advanced options, such as selecting a demuxer or video & audio codecs.
• Playlist. Allows you to enqueue several files to be played one after
  each other. Autorepeat and shuffle supported too.
• Preferences dialog. You can easily configure every option of SMPlayer
  by using a nice preferences dialog.
• Translations: currently SMPlayer is translated into more than 20
  languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese,
  Japanese….
• It’s multiplatform. Binaries available for Windows and Linux.
• SMPlayer is under the GPL license.

Source: SMPlayer Official Site

SMPlayer is available for both Windows and Linux; after trying it for both platform, I must say that I’m impressed by it’s features and performance, even though I’m only managed to try and test it for a short time (got something else to do.. :-p). Go try it for yourself, it’s worth it I assure you.

SMPlayer for Windows

SMPlayer for Linux

SMPlayer for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, 6.10 Edgy Eft, 7.04 Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon