A new version of the – in my opinion – best media player SMPlayer has been released and can be downloaded from the website of the developers at Sourceforge. SMPlayer is a Mplayer frontend that plays most video codecs out of the box which means that you do not have to install codecs to play the majority of video – and audio – formats. It does play for instance Apple Quicktime .mov videos without the need to install Quicktime at all.
Real Player 11 Beta leaked
I’m sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.
Fix Avi Frame Drops and Artefacts on the fly
I think we all experienced frame drops and artefacts in avi movies which is pretty annoying if it happens during the whole movie. I found a media player called HDngn which is able to interpolate new frames in realtime using Direct Show and Open GL. This is achieved by using frames more than once and algorithm that recalculate everything in realtime.
I would not say it is the perfect media player yet but it surely has some nice interesting features that no other player offers yet. The drawback is that it currently supports only a limited amount of filetypes and not enough possibilities to change the configuration of the player at all. It took a while until I was able to remove the logo of the player from the upper right corner. I had to edit the lua file which was used to init the interface.
Songbird the ultimate Media Player ?
Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 “test flight” and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.
Bsplayer 2.0 out
The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released as version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.
VLC Media Player
Don“t you hate all the different video and audio formats, all those codes and tools you need to play them all ? The VLC media player is able to play many formats including (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX) as well as DVD, (S)VCD and various streaming types. The player is available for various systems including windows, macintosh and linux. It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video.

