UMPlayer, Mplayer Fork With Interesting Features

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 31, 2011
Updated • Jan 16, 2013
Software
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17

I have reviewed several video players in the past that use MPlayer as a core component. This includes my favorite video player SMPlayer but also KMPlayer (just received an update to version 3) or MPlayer WW. UMplayer is another MPlayer fork with some interesting new features that you won't find in the other players. I do not want to say to much but I'm pretty impressed by the video player.

Like all other mplayer forks UMPlayer is released for all mplayer supported operating systems, which means Mac, Windows and Linux. The Windows version comes as a web installer that requires an Internet connection to download the latest package from the developer website. I was not able to find an offline installer but it may be there somewhere on the website or forum.

Universal Multimedia Player supports the same range of input, video and audio formats as other mplayer forks. From playing audio CDs and DVD videos to streaming video and audio to popular audio and video fromats like avi, flv, mp3, mp4 or mkv: It is all there and integrated in the player. No need to download codecs or codec packages.

First time users will probably notice the toolbar at the top with an embedded Youtube search form. This links directly to one of the unique features of UMPlayer: Youtube integration.

You can use the search form or the separate Youtube search window to find, play and record Youtube videos right in the video player.

youtube search

The search lists thumbnails, titles, descriptions, dates and views in a convenient listing. Filters are available to sort by most relevant to the search, most recent or most viewed. A double-click on any search result loads the video in the player.

The red recording button can capture the playing Youtube video so that it is saved to the local computer. The playback and recording quality of Youtube online videos is configurable in the settings (playback is set to the standard quality while recordings to 1080p).

Another interesting feature is the integration of the popular Shoutcast Internet radio service. Just press Ctrl-c or select Tools > Shoutcast to display a list of available stations. A double-click loads the station right in the player, a search is provided in case you do not find what you are looking for right away.

Other features worth mentioning are the built-in subtitle search, support for the majority of popular subtitle formats, audio delay adjustments , video thumbnail and screenshot maker, customizable hotkeys and advanced caching and cpu optimizations.

UMplayer has a lot to offer and it is definitely worth a closer look, especially if you like the integration of Shoutcast and Youtube in a desktop video player.

Interested users can download the latest version of UMPlayer from the project's homepage.

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Comments

  1. dez troyer said on May 16, 2012 at 10:55 pm
    Reply

    Why did this put a zillion new fonts onto my computer? hmmm.

  2. sul said on November 29, 2011 at 3:23 am
    Reply

    It is not a MPlayer fork! It uses MPlayer as backend. It is a SMPlayer fork, which is another backend for MPlayer.

    Anyway, it seem interesting but has some bugs, and the development has stopped.

  3. Hosu said on September 25, 2011 at 10:44 pm
    Reply

    I uninstalled this shit, terrible. It is exactly like SMPlayer, except a new theme and youtube and shoutcast slapped on. Mind you, the youtube feature doesn’t even work, as verified by several bug reports on their site. The instant it asked me if I wanted to share UMPlayer with my friends on facebook, is the very same instant I uninstalled this piece of shit.

    1. tpreitzel said on September 29, 2011 at 7:02 am
      Reply

      Wrong. The YouTube function works perfectly as I just built UMPlayer about a week ago. The alleged bug reports are nonsense with recent versions of UMPlayer. Users reporting such nonsense are doing so in ignorance. Although I’d prefer that the various patches were applied against SMPlayer instead of creating a new fork, I’ll still use UMPlayer as it’s incredibly efficient at gathering and viewing both video and audio.

  4. awer said on August 16, 2011 at 6:55 pm
    Reply

    Hi, you have a small typo in the title, it should be a SMPlayer fork :)

    Cheers

  5. vlc mplayer said on June 19, 2011 at 6:37 am
    Reply

    vlc is garbage in terms of performance and with lot of blocking in videos.
    mplayer is far the best on any system not matter if it is a netbook.
    mplayer also provide coreavc integration hence performance goes far beyond vlc.
    Since,Umplayer is fork of mplayer i’m definately going to use it earlier smlpayer also did good work for me with all options in one package

  6. ben said on April 2, 2011 at 6:38 am
    Reply

    I recently tried quite a few players (vlc, smplayer, splayer, gom).. they all seem to have their pros and cons. In the end, I chose gom as it was the only one that had minimal (if any) freezing when jumping positions in large mkv/wmv/mp4 files. VLC and smplayer had weird issues where only portions of the screen were getting updating.. not sure how to describe it. Splayer did not work with my dual monitor setup, it would only play video if the app was running on my left monitor!

    I’ll download umplayer and compare with gom.. but if it’s based on the same thing smplayer run on, then i’m not sure it’ll work for me.

  7. rAX said on April 1, 2011 at 11:38 am
    Reply

    Thanks for the article, but there’s a mistake. The player is a fork of SMPlayer AND a GUI of MPlayer. An example of an MPlayer fork is MPlayer2 http://www.mplayer2.org/

  8. Jack said on April 1, 2011 at 1:02 am
    Reply

    I’m with Steve – I don’t like streamed installers, and I’m suspicious of the motives of those who offer them.

    UMPlayer looks interesting. I’ll be back when they offer a normal install program whose security and size I can check before I commit.

  9. Varun said on April 1, 2011 at 12:34 am
    Reply

    I have been using UMPlayer for 3 months or so now.

    Codecs are not installed on their own, there is a option in custom install to not install them.

    UMPlayer-p4-mt.exe from
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/umplayer/files/

    is for latest gen CPU models (non AMD ofcourse)

    I use it for Movies, its pretty nice and its in active development hence it has room for improvement,

    Once can go to its Sourceforge page, the developer is very friendly, you can ask for feature request, they are nice guys.

  10. Steve said on March 31, 2011 at 10:54 pm
    Reply

    I’m not that keen on programs that link to downloads that are just exe installers which grab the program from the hosted site. The downloadable file from the main link is only 150 kb. Here’s the Sourceforge page where you can grab the full program for your Windows OS:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/umplayer/files/

    The p3 and p4 files may mean Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 but I’m not certain. In the 150 kb file (UMPlayerSetup.exe), there are several dll files called Hwinfo.dll (probably sends hardware information), cpudesc.dll (scans cpu model #), & getversion.dll. I’m not sure if these files are installed in the system 32 directory or are temporarym, but I’d rather download the full progam myself and install it or unzip it and run it as a portable.

    After unzipping the p3 executable, it appears that the user would havet to download the codecs file too in order to have a complete progam.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/umplayer/files/codecs-all-20110131.7z/download

  11. amon said on March 31, 2011 at 9:38 pm
    Reply

    Is this too far better than GOM player and the most popular media player,VLC?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on March 31, 2011 at 9:50 pm
      Reply

      I suggest you try it out for yourself, both players that you have mentioned are good.

  12. hlm said on March 31, 2011 at 9:20 pm
    Reply

    From your personal opinion, how was it compared to VLC?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on March 31, 2011 at 9:24 pm
      Reply

      VLC is an excellent player as well, if you do not miss anything do not change. If you like the Youtube integration try the new player, but make sure that it does not register the file extensions during setup. A portable version would have been nice but I did not find one.

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