When it comes to watching video or listening to music, we usually want the simplest program that can accomplish this.

A minimalist media player usually means that it will do its job without having to receive too many commands, that the file will less likely crash or get stuck when playing, and that CPU and memory usage will be low.

Such an example is Media Player Classic. This application is a simplified version of Windows Media Player, and it comes with most of the codecs you need to play video files. The user interface is extremely simple, and the response time is very fast.

Media Player Classic supports most commonly used audio and video formats (including FLAC and FLV), as well as QuickTime and RealVideo. It can open DVD files, and has a real-time zoom feature.

You can take a snapshot and save it as a JPG image, create a thumbnail (16 captions taken at a 2-second interval), assign hotkeys to various commands (e.g. Volume Boost Max, Filters Menu), add files to Favorites and then organize them, and more.

Subtitles are completely customizable, and if you are playing a movie with no subtitle, you can use Media Player's online subtitle database (clicking "Search" at "Search Database" in "File" will automatically send you to a page where the caption file is available).

"Go to" lets you go to a certain frame on the video file. This is extremely useful if you want to crop the respective clip.

Video clips without sound can be simultaneously loaded with an audio track. You can set Media Player Classic to either close, hibernate, stand by, shutdown or log off the system, or do nothing, once it finishes playing the file.

Too bad you can't save video + audio, or video + subtitle if they are separated. When there is no file opened in Media Player Classic, little system memory is used, and when a video or audio track is playing, the usage number doubles. Overall, Media Player Classic uses less memory than most similar software.

In conclusion, if you want one of the best and simplest media players, you can't go wrong with Media Player Classic!