The software market that covers media players grows by the day and while new additions are appreciated, the old alternatives will never run out of fans. Such an application is MPlayer, a media player that makes an impression through its impressive functionality, simplicity and ease of use.

MPlayer comes with support for 192 video and 85 audio codecs, which is outstanding by all standards. The fact that it can play some of the most popular formats (AVI, MPEG/VOB, ASF/WMA/WMV, RM, QT/MOV/MP4, Ogg/OGM, MKV, VIVO, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM and RoQ), you can also use it to watch VCD, DVD, SVCD, Blu−ray, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies, too.

Installing MPlayer is not a tricky business, although some of the steps in the deployment process may seem of a complicated nature. This is due to the fact that the application comes with three different installation modes: minimal, which includes only the MPlayer UI (also known as MPUI), complete (comprises MPUI and SMPlayer, together with all the necessary codecs) and custom (allows you to manually select the components to be installed).

For maximum performance, the installer includes optimized builds for various CPU types; the built-in detection feature will automatically scan and recognize your CPU type, so the effort on your side is minimal. The first eye contact with MPlayer’s interface is pleasant, to say the least; although the GUI is simple, the general look and feel rises to one’s expectations.

MPlayer was designed with simplicity in mind and the accent is kept on functionality rather than looks. All the functions are displayed in a few menus that include media playing controls (Play/Pause/Forward/Rewind), possibilities to create playlists, to customize the aspect ratio and to deinterlace the video files.

As for the player itself, it worked great during our tests and it really managed to open all formats we had available on our computer. It’s not hard on the eyes and it’s impressively light on computer resources. In addition, its accessibility and ease of use make it the appropriate choice for all the users in the crowd.