KMPlayer 4.0 ships with minor improvements
Media players, there are so many out there for Windows that it is nearly impossible to compare them all to find out which is best. To name a few popular ones, there is VLC Media Player, SMPlayer, PotPlayer, KMPlayer, UMPlayer, Real Player, Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic Home Cinema and hundreds more.
KMPlayer is a long-standing media player for Windows that is usually listed as one of the top 100 downloads on download websites. According to the player's own website, it is used by more than 300 million users worldwide.
It is popular even though it has been criticized in the past for including adware in its installer and using components that leak information to a server operated by the program's parent company.
Most issues can be avoided by using the portable version of the player. Please note that KMPlayer 4.0 portable is not available at this point in time.
As far as changes go, there are not many which is quite disappointing for a major version bump. The developers have improved the loading speed of the player, updated the main splitter, and integrated Intel RealSense support.
The feature list of the player leaves little room for improvement. It plays nearly any video and audio file out of the box (it ships with binary codecs that it uses so that you don't have to install codecs on the system to add support for those), supports 3D and 4k playback, subtitles and all that good stuff that you would expect a media player to support these days.
In addition, it ships with a boatload of settings that let you tweak the player interface and functionality. For instance, you may select decoders for playback, change priorities, keyboard shortcuts or various video filters and playback controls.
KMPlayer supports local media files and broadcasts, can play optical discs (e.g. video DVDs), supports auto-resume of videos, bookmarking, video capturing and a lot more.
The player displays advertisement on start if you run it without loading a media file right away that advertise Pandora TV and KMPlayer products (Pandora TV is the parent company). These ads are not displayed if you load media files right away.
Playback works really well out of the box but shines when you take the time to configure it extensively to match your needs. There is little incentive on the other hand to switch to KMPlayer if you are making use of a media player such as VLC already as differences are marginal (not taking into account the ads situation at all).
Now You: Which media player are you using right now and why?
I use PotPlayer, works perfectly (although messing around with all those options to get it set up exactly to my liking took some toil) – would have liked to use VLC (as PP developers won’t publish in English) but PotPlayer lets you resume play for any video played previously. Tried various solutions to this with VLC but I couldn’t accept not having such a basic facility.
PotPlayer is awesome. It is my go to media player. PotPlayer is just too awesome with what all you can do!
PotPlayer. Its just too good. No match!
If I remember correctly, creator of KMPlayer sold it some time ago to some korean company and then he released PotPlayer.
I have a friend who uses the portable version of VLC, and the latest version will resume video play from the point it was stopped previously. But you have to stop play to make that work – if you just close the player it won’t do that.
Same. In the past I used KMPlayer and then switched to PotPlayer two years ago or so, when the programmer switched from KM to Pot.
Best player out there, trumps vlc in every way, except for livestreams I sometimes have to use it.
PotPlayer is indeed a good player. I really love its blue interface. It is my type. I only have PotPlayer and 5KPlayer on my Windows 10.
I use KMplayer as its the only one that can play blu-ray disks.
I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema that comes bundled with K-Lite Codec Pack. I also have VLC portable as a backup option.
i have used KM Player for longtime. but after its started to display ads , i switched to GOM Player and it plays fine everything including HEVC files.
I use Portable MPC-HC and Portable VLC as backup.
I’ll give a strong recommendation for SMPlayer. It has really great features, and is the first player to pull me away from VLC or MPC. SMPlayer has a great resuming feature. You can just stop a video, completely exit the app, and come back later and it will resume right where you left off. It does this natively with no need for a half-baked 3rd party plugin which rarely works right (as in VLC).
I mostly use Zoom Player Free with codecs configured the way I like it.
Funny thing, I use Potplayer mostly as audio player because it has great sound.
MPC-HC is also very good player.
VLC I use only through SubtitleEdit to sync subtitles with videos.
VLC for videos, AIMP for music :)
I’ve been using KMPlayer for many years. Last time I updated was with v3.0.0.1442, since then I’ve added ffdshow to it. I’ve gotten so used to the UI and keyboard shortcuts it’s hard for me to stick with anything different. Plays everything I’ve ever thrown at it but it does not play x265 which other than the smaller file size I don’t feel like I’m missing anything anyway, at least with the few files I’ve tried when using VLC. ;)
I also use ffdshow with Zoom Player and It can play HEVC (h265,x265) if I use LAV Splitter instead of Haali Media Splitter for MKV.
I test all these players and still have yet to find a player that beats MPC HC. Potplayer is close, but there is something missing that makes it feel not all there. I like Kodi and how well it looks on a very large screen, but the loading and shut down times take to long. The navigation of the interface can be a pain also.
Gom Player for me. Tried the others, came back to it.
PS: And sticking with Winamp for audio.
Gom Player has nice feature of auto loading next episodes :D
It can be done with MPC-HC as well. Options > Playback > After Playback > Play next file in the folder.
PotPlayer too
Tried GOM as well with windows 10 and it worked okay except for 1080 resolutions. I’ve seitched from MPC-HC 64 bit because it’s not working with windows 10.
PotPlayer all the way.
Far better than the over hyped VLC, which given the coverage some sites give it (ie WindowsCentral) you’d think they pay for constant and good press.
MPC-BE X64 is my favorite player.
With all features of MPC-HC with a beatiful black interface and X64 support.
Did they get rid of that hideous ad panel from version 3.7+? I’ve been sticking with 3.6 for a few years just to stay away from that thing.
May be I use a different player than the bunch. Its called SPlayer (http://www.splayer.org) with automatic subtitle matching, auto resume playback, GPU accelerated playback and many more.
Potplayer…No need to give crapware riddled with garbage and that phones home free web ad…
For all those that rave about PotPlayer – it uses far more memory & CPU than KMPplayer for the same file played & there’s nothing it does that KMP cannot do!.
I use MPC-HC because it has frame by frame advance.
Why would you use VLC over any other media player that can use MadVR? Do you not like better IQ?
I ‘ve been using KMPlayer , and I also never use another player like VLC , SPlayer , QQPlayer , GOMPlayer , Windows Media Player , but until in the end I come back again to use KMPlayer because I think it is the most excellent player ,
but there are some drawbacks to this KMPlayer which makes me seek Media Player else .
Poor of KMPlayer It is there are some movies that subtittle can not be read properly , so make the KMPlayer be Lag and Freeze while Movie was on the run
I use (insert irrelevant player here) because I’m (insert self absorbed comment) going to go on and on.
(Insert the phrase “That said”) now I’ll go on in a totally opposite direction from my original point pertaining to the reason why everything I do is better than the way everyone else does it.
I don’t use any standalone media players. All I need is the CCCP codec pack, which includes all the relevant codecs + MPC I’ll ever need to play 99.999999999999% of the video files in existence!
I use PotPlayer and 5KPlayer on my computer. PotPlayer has almost the same functions of KMPlayer, and it is clean. So I’d better choose PotPlayer rather than KMPlayer.
As for 5KPlayer, I use it for the function of downloading video. I think PotPlayer and 5KPlayer can be a good combination. One for some further adjustment, one for extending resources.