You've all heard of Mplayer and its magnificent capabilities. It is able to play video files without any external codec installed and even broken files with absolutely no problem. I still have at home an earlier version of the application that behaves beautifully. There is no interface, but it plays all the most known video formats on the market.

Being an open source, you can use it for as long as you want, no questions asked. Its award-winning Linux engine has begun to be implemented in other video players as well. SMplayer is one software that adopted the same strategy. Being developed with the QT toolkit, the application can run on multiple platforms. The application is an open source that can be redistributed or modified according to the GNU General Public License published by Free Software Foundation.

You should not expect it all from the beginning as you must give the developer and the software some credit because the latest version has reached only 0.2.0 edition. Being designed for Linux, you should expect some problems while using it.

The interface is nice and simple and most of it is the video window. The controls are set in the lower part of the screen. SMplayer is actually a front-end for Mplayer and the same video formats are supported. Additionally, the developer added some options like DVD playing, skipping to different chapters and titles, or loading of subtitles.

Viewing the movie in fullscreen can be achieved by double clicking the video window but also by using the traditional F key shortcut. Aspect ratio setting functions in two ways: you can either let the software detect it or set it manually to one of the available values (4:3, 5:4, 14:9, 16:9 or 16:10).

SMplayer comes equipped with only three deinterlace filters, all taken from Mplayer. Lowpass 5 works very well with bad deinterlaced files, but according to the developer, it will produce "ghost" effect in movement scenes. Yadif, despite its affinity for MPEG video files will result in movement on the screen not being smooth enough. The last deinterlace filter is Linear Blend which causes a lot of ghosting and blurring of the image.

Some other filters available include Denoise (cleans the image, but will also result in removing details), Deblock (improves visual quality and prediction performance by smoothing the sharp edges) or Add Noise (adds a bit of noise; comes in handy when you want to cover "blocks" after denoise).

The software supports the most used audio files and running MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA is a cinch. SMplayer can also function as an audio player as the playlist option allows the user to add as many files as desired. The drawback is that there is no audio equalizer and only volume up/down options are available. However, the playlists can also be created and saved in M3U format for future auditions. Shuffle and Repeat options seem to be very popular and they could not miss in SMplayer either.

Preferences dialog may seem a little poor in options, but it is exactly what the average user needs in order to play the video files with no problems. Due to the missing help file, some of my colleagues asked how to capture the application window with a video playing. That is a driver issue and in Windows, you should use directx:noaccel option under Preferences, General section. If you want to take screenshots of the video only, SMplayer provides a capturing solution by using the S key shortcut. But first, you will have to set the path to the directory storing the screenshots (General Preferences menu).

For a smooth playing of the movie, you should consider setting a higher priority of the SMplayer process. This can be achieved from Task Manager as well if you recognize the process. But in Preferences, you can do it very easy under the Performance menu.

If you are familiar with Mplayer you know that for automatically loading the subtitles of the video both names for subtitle file and video had to match and to be stored in the same folder, the only difference between them being the extension. In SMplayer adding subtitles has been improved and you can load the subtitle file from any location of your hard disk. The supported formats are *.srt, *.sub, *.ssa and *.idx.

In the Subtitles dialog of the Preferences you can configure the caption the way you like it. The font, scaling it according to the movie aspect ratio, color of the text and of the border can be customized by the user in just a few clicks.

The software plays fine the video fed by the user but there are some major drawbacks when using it on a Windows platform that cannot be overlooked. One of them would be that video playing is not functioning properly. Going for the DVD option in Open menu is useless as nothing will happen.


The Good

The application is free and judging by its features, the potential is immense. If you use it only for playing regular video files like AVI or MPEG, everything works fine. There are some improvements in what concerns adding subtitles and playing the audio files is a cinch.

The Advanced Media Settings under Options menu provides a myriad of video and audio codecs to be used when playing an A/V file. And if you are a bit more experienced, you can play with the demuxing tools available for different video formats.

The Bad

There is still something to be fixed in order to make it work good on Windows platform. DVD playing is not available and sometimes, the preferences window hangs over the video window.

A help file is needed in order to explain the "not so obvious" things like double clicking on the pause button results in playing the video frame by frame or that "O" key switches OSD modes.

The Truth

What most users seek in a video player is to support as many files as possible (checked), support DVD playing and menu navigation (not checked), subtitle adding (checked) and no problems during the video playing (checked). However, the elimination of bugs is also something we want and difficult working with the menus is a downhill ride for every application.

For regular video formats (AVI, MPEG, DivX, etc.) the software is very good, especially if you take into consideration the zero number of codecs you have to install.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:


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