MSPlayer

MSPlayer is a software tool which was developed specifically to help you watch AVI video files from your web camera, take snapshots and save them to the hard drive.

The installation process does not offer to download and add other third-party products, and upon finalizing it, you come across a modern-looking and minimally-designed interface. All user categories can easily find their way around it, regardless of their level of experience.

It encompasses a few playback controls, such as play/pause, next, previous and stop, some other buttons and a panel which displays the video feed.

The main window can be placed on the entire screen, you can control the volume, as well as create and manage a playlist. Items can be uploaded to the media player with the help of a “+” button, or with the “drag and drop” function.

Aside from that, it is possible to zoom in and out of the video, as well as capture pictures and save them to the HDD in a BMP format. A setback here is the fact that users cannot choose the output folder. By default the software program saves the snapshots to the directory where it is installed.

By right-clicking the main window while playing an AVI, you bring up a context menu which enables you to pause, go to last or next file, apply fullscreen, change the video speed (slow or fast) and tweak the display ratio. Moreover, keyboard shortcuts are provided for most available actions, yet you should know they cannot be customized.

MSPlayer is a pretty decent piece of software, with a user-friendly interface and a good response time. Nevertheless, its limitations might drive away power users.