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.

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One of my regular readers CC send me a link to SMPlayer about a week ago and I was testing the frontend for mplayer since. SMPlayer is a video player that is supporting the most important video formats out of the box including avi, mpg, mov, wmv and vob plus numerous other formats.

It is also possible to play DVDs and Internet streams with the video player that is available for Windows and Linux. Several ways of displaying subtitles and various subtitle formats are supported including srt, sub and DVD subtitles. I personally think that SMPlayer is a great alternative to the VLC player.

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I prefer to watch videos in my favorite video player VLC instead of watching them embedded on the web. If you click on a video file on a website you open it either in your default video viewer or view it right in your browser using a plugin. You may also open websites in different browsers which is great for developers who were using several add-ons to view a website in different browsers.

Just right-click the link and select the application that you want to use to view it from the menu. Launchy, that is the name of the Firefox add-on, supports more than 60 applications right out of the box with the ability to add more applications using an XML file.

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I was contacted by the creators of the famous Democracy Player to test drive the upcoming Democracy Player 0.9.5 which is scheduled for release this wednesday. The most important features that will be introduced in this new version are pausing and resuming of downloads, submit buttons to digg, del.icio.us and reddit, proxy support and an interface redesign.

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If you are currently unhappy with the features of your mp3 player you might want to take a look at the open source rockbox firmware which adds lots of functionality to your mp3 player including iPods, iRiver and Archos models. A firmware update is of course something that should only be done with extreme precaution because it will void the warranty. Take a look at some of the features that can be added:

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