Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Linux - How about SMplayer?

SMplayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/), currently newest version 0.5, is, to me, the new multimedia leader in the linux world. Well, as I use it instead of my beloved BSplayer on my Windows machine, I guess it is also a great video player for Windows as well.
SMplayer uses the mplayer engine (http://www.mplayerhq.hu ), which by many is thought to be the best video player for linux. But for a long time there has been no simple, intuitive and complete frontend for this player. Until now.
The unique thing, one that I like mplayer (and hence SMplayer) about is, that it would allow me to watch a movie onlne with my extra-slow internet connection. I'm not very much sure if this is because of the cache it creates, or the usage of RAM memory it has, but for sure I'm happy about this.
Now, about the features of SMplayer. Probably the feature that distinguishes SMplayer the most is its ability to remember the settings for a movie - so the next time one starts it, the movie is played from where it had been stopped. This, of course, is a setting by default, which easily may be stopped from the settings box of SMplayer.
Another features may be found at the SMplayer website, at the features section. But they are many, and most of them were just (on my opinion) what one would want from a media player. The best one, of course, is that SMplayer is published under the GPL licence.
There is a translation in Bulgarian, which, of course, makes me very happy. As for the linux media players, the preferences dialog can be compared with the one of VLC. The ones who have used VLC may know how complicated things there may become; however, SMplayer allows an intuitive way for configuration. When using it with windows, there may be a need to tell SMplayer which font to use for the subtitles (for instance, C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/times.ttf). Some other basic configuration may be needed; however, after this, SMplayer is trully powerful; for me it is the best solution for video at linux at present time. And the best, it is under heavy development, so new features are probably being added even as I write this.

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I'm Adrian and this is my blog. Here I usually write about technical stuff (mostly about Linux).
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