SPlayer 3.5

SPlayer is a powerful multimedia player that can play any file. After having used VLC for so many years, I sometimes forget that there are other great players out there. SPlayer was an unknown application for me and I was gladly surprised by its looks and performance.

I ran it inside a virtual machine, limited to 256 megabytes of ram. As a first test, I decided to drag and drop a 65-megabyte, 720p, MKV file onto the application. Just like that I tested two of my favorite two features in a video player: drag and drop support and performance. The file took some 10 seconds to load. The window got resized to the video's resolution and it started playing. To my surprise, the file played smoothly, without a hitch, for the duration of the clip. Following that initial test, I opened several files in different formats. They have all played well and smoothly.

The graphical user interface is very simple, and that is a must in a good video player. At the bottom of the window there is a video playback menu (play, pause, rewind, etc). There are also buttons for changing the subtitle tracks and the font size. These changes happen in real-time, so you can forget about pausing and going to the menus for this. There are also buttons for the settings panel, playlist editor and to open new media.

All in all, this app can play mostly any format you can think of. It plays them smoothly, even HD content, it is free and there is also a portable version. Watch out, VLC!