14 DAY TRIAL // ALLPlayer is an audio and video player that caught our attention thanks to a pretty resourceful set of skills. It offers support for many popular formats, and lets users adjust settings and resort to handy tools. The program's not that bad looking either.
Customizable installer
The setup procedure is brief and, by default, includes all ALLPlayer components, namely subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org, Catzilla (a benchmarking tool made by the same developer) and a remote controller for Android devices, in addition to the core files.
What's more, it uses the already installed codecs to play movies. However, any of these modules can be excluded from setup. In the next stages, it lets users pick the preferred UI layout.
At startup, the app offers to turn on smart subtitles, a feature made to intelligently adjust the subtitle display time to the user's reading speed.
Comfortable interface and supported media
The main application window has a minimalistic look. Standard media player controls are displayed at the bottom of the screen, allowing users to pause, resume and stop videos, adjust the volume level, repeat the current track, enter full screen mode (even on multiple monitors), create playlists, and more. After creating playlists, they can be saved to file and imported later.
ALLPlayer supports audio and video files, including DVD movies and audio CDs that can be read directly from discs. It is not explicit regarding the types of files it can load, but we have noticed that 3GP, AVI, MKV, AVI, FLV, MOV, M2TS, MP4, 3GP, VOB, MPG, MP3, OGG, WAV and AC3 are among them.
It can also play video clips from URLs and contains a personal database with movies that can be watched online. For DVD movies it is possible to insert chapters, edit existing ones or replace them in the menu.
Video, audio and subtitle settings
It is possible to increase or decrease the screen size, change the aspect ratio, flip or rotate the image, adjust the brightness and contrast, switch to night vision or high definition mode (where this is available), take snapshots and save images to JPG files.
As far as the sound is concerned, users may resort to an equalizer to apply presets or customized settings, turn on an audio visualization, as well as modify the speaker mode and audio output device.
Supported subtitle file extensions include TXT, SUB, SRT and SSA. Settings can be made for the font name, color, size and width of frame around the text, time of subtitles displayed on the screen (in seconds), distance of subtitles from the bottom edge, maximum subtitles width in full screen mode, along with their transparency level.
An important feature previously mentioned is that ALLPlayer is able to automatically search the well-known subtitle database OpenSubtitles.org for missing subtitles.
Users can take advantage of another noteworthy feature of the application, namely its ability to automatically turn off the monitor, exit (the program) or power off the PC once the current playback is over.
Program preferences
ALLPlayer is capable of automatically downloading missing codecs after specifying a language for the server and scanning the computer. Experienced users can consult a list with available codecs and select the ones to look for while excluding the rest.
Other advanced settings may be tweaked too. For example, the tool can be asked to show OSD sizing in full screen mode, start in full screen mode, save the position for all movies, and display additional details on the monitor, like the clip's duration, frames per second, CPU usage, and clock.
Moreover, users can make file associations, reconfigure keyboard shortcuts for important functions, as well as retrieve a movie's cover from file or iMDB, among others.
Settings can be reloaded to default.
The Good
It can play a wide range of audio and video files, including audio from CDs and DVD movies from disc, in addition to clips from URLs.
It is possible to make image adjustments, set the PC to turn off immediately after playback stops, add subtitles and configure their settings, download missing codecs easily from online sources, take snapshots, and much more.
It is free to use.
Those who want to bypass the installer and directly run the program from a pen drive may resort to its portable counterpart, namely ALLPlayer Portable.
