Well, weekend again, I need some relax for today. One of my hobby is to watch movie, and I guess many of you sould have the same, right. Just some years ago, there were a few file formats of video as well as music and I often buy movie CDs to watch. Don’t ask me why I didn’t download a movie with a 56Kps connection at that time.

Nowadays, there are hundreds kinds of codecs and file formats. Be an internet worm, I enjoy searching and downloading a lot types of media to enjoy, from music video lip, funny clip to a whole movie. Then I tried various kinds of media player, from free to commercial to find a perfect one. Guess which one I will recommend you ? No one actually, but I will present you a list of the best, and of course, as usual, they are free.

I won’t put three popular ones Windows Media Player, Real Player and Quick Time into my list. They are still doing their jobs very well, however I am always eager to find others to try. Now, enough chat, let’s go.

1. VLC Media Player

This is too popular, and I haven’t much things to say about it. Basically, it is lightweight, support almost media files. More than that It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. Its biggest advantage is cross platform support. I have known it when I installed the KLite Codec package. At the beginning, it was not my favorite at all. However, day by day, it has been improved in both of functions and user interface as well. It is always appear in both of my desktop and laptop.

Available OS: Windows, BeOS, Linux/Unix,Zaurus,BSD,Solaris and etc
Homepage

2. GOM Player

One of the out-standing feature of this media player is “codec finder”. So, you don’t need to worry the sort of codec for your media content. The GUI is simply beautiful with a very convenience playlist and many other features, which you often have in a commercial product. I usually use it to play downloaded media. The most useful function, you may concern, is that it could play, even a broken AVI file. When downloading, or copying from somewhere, my media files could be broken, then the GOM Player is my hero.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

3. Miro

One of the most wonderful and powerful media player I have ever used. Except that it could support almost video format, it can play thousands of built-in channel TV, and be added more daily. The most interesting features, personally I love is that it help me to download any torrent file and YouTube video easily. The door to the media world is open widely with Micro. I could spend the whole weekend to play around with this.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

4. JetAudio

I have used and fall in love with Jet Audio for a very long time. This is the first media player I known when I started using Windows 95. I still remembered, at that time, when I turn on the computer, the first application I run is JetAudio. It is unbelievable to know that a program like JetAudio, could be free. You can play DVD, CD, Audio CDs, other media files even rip and burn your favorites music with its built-in engine. It has various kinds of modern and beautiful skins for your choice.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

5. MPlayer

This player plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies..

The advantage is that it supports many kinds of output drivers such as: X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too!

More than that, the most important thing is that it could be run on many platforms, from a window machine to a game cube.

Its poor design GUI is the big minus point if I vote for it.

Available OS: Windows,Mac,Linux/Unix,BSD,Solaris,AmigaOS4,ReactOS and etc
Homepage

Do you have known any of other ones ? I am always eager to try something new, then I may make a top 10 media player instead of 5. Just kidding !