SPlayer is a free, open source media player that is lightweight, well designed, and quite powerful. It promises to play every conceivable media format (including DVD’s and streaming media), and to optimize your audio and video quality to best utilize your hardware specifications. It is light on power consumption, making it ideal for laptop/travel use, and offers a handful of innovative features such as on-demand automatic downloads of subtitles.
Wow! Where did this one come from? To start let me just state that there is an undeniable wealth of fantastic free media players available, such as The KMPlayer, which I am very fond of, VLC, GOM Player, BSPlayer, to name a few. Which is why it is quite an achievement when a newcomer can lump all of the others together and somehow differentiate itself. Splayer does exactly that by means of its sheer “economy”; i.e. by being lightweight, having a small footprint, being truly portable and light on power consumption, and by its sparse yet sleek interface. It does this while simultaneously being innovative and offering a breadth of features. Here are more notes on this program:
- Lightweight: low footprint, low startup and playback memory footprints, low energy consumption (perfect for laptop travel use).
- Design: a lot of attention to detail when it comes to interface design and look and feel. Splayer seems sparse and simple; on-screen controls appear only when you hover over the program dialog. They succeed in presenting a clean, minimalist interface even when the program has a lot of features on offer.
- Optimizes picture and sound quality: reduces screen noise, features algorithms that are enhance image and sound quality, optimized for multi-core SSE2 SSE3 MMX GPU etc
- Portable version available: unzip and run; includes all internal codecs that can play any media file in any environment. Look for the word “portable” on the program page to find the download link to the portable version. [Update 7/17/2010] Caution: some users have reported associations being hijacked and registry entries being added by the portable version – see comments section
- Streaming: streams any format; allows users to supply URL for media on the internet.
- Audio and video capture: to disk from device, supported.
- Other features: “subtitle matching” automatically downloads and displays subtitles, bookmark favorite media, pin as topmost window, tweak transparency, capture screenshots, automatically remove black bar (if any) for widescreen video, etc.
Wish list
- One thing I noticed switching from KMplayer on Windows 7 was that video file icons added after the switch no longer automatically displayed a preview screenshot as their icon. A minor issue but I hope it will be addressed.
The verdict: a very nice player that is also open source. With its combination of (a) being extremely light on resources, (b) having a very nice and sleek interface, and (c) playing every conceivable media format this program has won itself a permanent stay on my machine. It has also just become the default media player that I would recommend to people if asked. You will like it.
Version Tested: 3.3 (build 1021)
Compatibility: WinAll.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 5.75 megs).
I also use the KMPlayer currently, and prefer it over VLC, GOM etc. due to the minimal interface and some unique configuration options which I’ve found useful over the last few years.
I will give this a try, but it will take a lot to make me dump the KMPlayer over it.
Oh, and the KMPlayer isn’t ugly with the right skin… that’s a cheap shot on their part
(“comparison of similar products”).
What’s with these east-asians and kickass media players anyway?
Seems to be their niche.
Its obvious that Splayer use the Gabest Media Player Classic source. I hope this don’t infringe any GNU licenses.
Tried SMPlayer?
Like many others, this too is based on mplayer and works really well. The author gives wonderful support too! Many of the new feature request I put in got added … and added quickly!
OK I gave the portable version of this a go and it does look good. It does have a long way to go until it replaces KMPlayer on my system though. If you switch to accurate seek (keyframe) it tends to freeze up on seeking. Also I had automatic downloading of subtitles enabled and it downloaded the Spanish subtitles for the movie I had opened but there seems to be no option to change that.
All in all I will be sticking with KMPlayer as it is far more powerful and stable.
I am also a user of The KMPlayer (because of this site, actually).
I’ve heard the menu was all in Chinese or something, and that playing .mkvs causes some problems. Is this true? And can it play 1080p files flawlessly?
Also, the main thing that could get me to switch from The KMPlayer would be support for Blu-Ray discs (as long as it had the same exact playback support as The KMPlayer as well).
Can anyone confirm/deny these things? I’m loathe to install a new program until I do hefty research.
- PR-0927
@PR-0927 – Why not just download the portable version as I did? It’s a safe way of testing.
Be aware !
Even the portable version leaves traces in your system.
On my Windows seven, it added chineses menus into the type auto-detetction windows and into the explorer right-click menu …
Crap, that’s all.
@Franp – Can’t say it left anything on mine. Are you sure you didn’t accidentally et it to be the default player or set hotkeys from the menu?
Just tried the portable version and compared memory footprint & CPU vs KMPlayer, same film same segment.
KMPlayer < 20-25%, 25 MB
SPlayer 50-65%, 50 MB
It is very nice player but can not substantiate the claim of lightweight etc. I tried Splayer also with performance setting, a bit better but relatively little difference.
Btw I run a simple Pentium 4 system with 2 GB memory on XP.
@crapton , thanks you, i m using this on my cpu..
Tried the “portable” version, it added a “Play with ” and Chinese characters to my AutoPlay list, can’t remove it. Also hijacked all of my media filetypes (icons & descriptions, and “open with”) without asking. Terrible.
No matter the player–the movie clip shown is from “Ink”–watched last night on Hulu, Hi-Res, no flicker, etc. Anyway, the movie definitely shows some originality and new age speculation–worthy of a watch by anyone. Story Teller is a “dream girl” in this part of the country. She’s sweetness and light!
Same problem happened to me as it did to Doc, even though i selected no files to be associated with the program it resets the associations to the system defaults it seems, this included non-media programs like WinRAR! Bad bad bad software. Just need to reassociate things back to BSPlayer(well worth the cash, leanest and meanest player really) etc
I downloaded this software and then sent it to the Virus Total website to be scanned. At least three scan engines picked up problems. Am I to assume these are false positives? If yes, what do you think is causing the problem?
Appalling software, lasted 5 mins on my system and left LOADS of dreck in the registry…some in Chinese.
SMPlayer has now replaced VLC and GOM here; though puzzled as to why it has to cache font files.
@DrTeeth – So first you say it only lasted five minutes on your system but then you say it’s replaced VLC and GomPlayer. So which one is it? Did you find it so appalling you stopped using it or have you replaced your current player with it?
Splayer sounds promising, but it lacks definitly of some updates in the code and web site to translate all part from chinese developpement. I hope they could open their translation tool to let community supports it with more languages.
I also experienced a bug with subtitles, it changes of size quite often, as soon as there is an accentued character.
Nice start of a nice player, which would grow and improve with time. Thanks.
@Carbonize
Splayer and SMPlayer are two different products!!!!!!
DrT
Sorry my bad. I shouldn’t make comments after a 12 hour night shift.
Very Nice…. Post I am using VLC media Player. But Windows media player is also good.
if you want to know how to enable subtitles in Windows mediaplayer 12 visit link below
http://freecomputercourses.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-enable-subtitles-in-windows.html
Well, after using this program for about a month I still like it a lot. Am I really in the minority?
Yes there are some context menu entries that are in Chinese, such as the entry you get in the “open with” dialog, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem and will probably be corrected somewhere down the line.
I am disappinted that the portable version may not be “truly” portable, especially when the Splayer web site makes a bit deal that it is exactly that. Will keep an eye on it in case that issue is fixed (I am using the installed version on my machine and very happy with it).
I tried the portable version today and was very annoyed with a lot of entries it left in the registry. In terms of playback quality, the only player I can compare it with is Winamp (which is the only one I use on any regular basis), and in this respect it seems to do a little bit better than Winamp though.
I tried it after your positive review. It looks great & has a very intuitive GUI. After testing it I found it to be very buggy indeed. The internal subtitle downloader is fast & effective. It also messes with registry and other programs (it actually changed my KMPlayer subtitles settings !) I also found it to be using 25% more resources than KMPlayer. It has great potential but I will stick with KMPlayer for now. Splayer is something to watch out for when it is finished!
after trying the portable version out for a couple of weeks, i decided i really liked this media player. i decided to set it as the default player for all the file types it supported; then the problems cropped up. i’m running windows 7 x64 and splayer totally messed up my file associations. this isn’t a huge deal because i could reassign the file types with the built in windows “Set Default Programs” option, however this does not fix the bigger problem this created–thumbnails no longer show up in windows explorer (unless they were generated and cached before i installed splayer).
i ended up having to rebuild my registry with the default file types found here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/19449-default-file-type-associations-restore.html
this fixes the missing thumbnails problem, but completely violates my trust in the program. i’m really disappointed because the interface is beautiful and it did play everything i threw at it, i just can’t trust it.
Thanks for the tip! I LOVE well written software!
It will really have to be good for me to give up KMPlayer (love that app!). I’ll give it a try… but I’d be astonished if it can beat KMP!
Something is fishy about this software. First it tries to make an automatic connection to the net for updates to an IP address associated with http://www.Chehalisvalleyrealty.com located in texas but the IP in China!
After canceling that connection the next thing it tried to do was grab control of the system service that syncs the data between my computer systems, WTF!!! This software can not be trusted. I’m uninstalling this SOB now!
Oh yeah, DrTeeth was right. This POS had a ridiculous amount of registry entries I had to remove, over 2000! I’m running several scanners over my system to do all of the cleanup. Even though its free, BUYER BEWARE!!!
Splayer is good, but last time I checked it used unauthorized version of Core Codec, isted in the Misc.Settings install, which is quite wrong because Core Codec is not free and redistribution is prohibited.
If you want to use similar player that is based on MPlayer and has very similar interface and better skin support try MPlayer WW SVN-r30380 @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-ww/
Portable version also available and it is veeeery light on resources and IMHO better than Splayer. MPC-HomeCinema is MUCH better in terms of bugs and development cycle than Splayer.
Just my two cents,
Regards,
Ivan
Great Site…thanx.
John
Splayer hijacks file associations! Even the portable ones. Before running it, go to cmd.exe
and save your default associations by typing this (WinXp): ASSOC>assoc.txt
Now if it hijacks yours, you can restore them by finding the one hijacked in the file and restoring it by typing this in cmd, or making a batch of a bunch of them which is what I did:
ASSOC .mp3=mp3 file
here is my batch, which just calls an MP3 “mp3 file”, etc. if you saw this too late:
Re-ASSOC.bat
—–COPY BELOW—–
ASSOC .AIF=AIF File
ASSOC .AIFC=AIFC File
ASSOC .AIFF=AIFF File
ASSOC .ALAC=ALAC File
ASSOC .AMV=AMV File
ASSOC .APE=APE File
ASSOC .APPLICATION=APPLICATION File
ASSOC .ASF=ASF File
ASSOC .ASS=ASS File
ASSOC .ASX=ASX File
ASSOC .AU=AU File
ASSOC .AVI=AVI File
ASSOC .BIK=BIK File
ASSOC .CDA=CDA File
ASSOC .CSF=CSF File
ASSOC .CUE=CUE File
ASSOC .D2V=D2V File
ASSOC .DAT=DAT File
ASSOC .DIVX=DIVX File
ASSOC .DRC=DRC File
ASSOC .DSA=DSA File
ASSOC .DSM=DSM File
ASSOC .DSS=DSS File
ASSOC .DSV=DSV File
ASSOC .DTS=DTS File
ASSOC .EVO=EVO File
ASSOC .F4V=F4V File
ASSOC .FLAC=FLAC File
ASSOC .FLIC=FLIC File
ASSOC .FLV=FLV File
ASSOC .HDMOV=HDMOV File
ASSOC .IDX=IDX File
ASSOC .IFLV=IFLV File
ASSOC .IFO=IFO File
ASSOC .IVF=IVF File
ASSOC .IVM=IVM File
ASSOC .M1V=M1V File
ASSOC .M2A=M2A File
ASSOC .M2P=M2P File
ASSOC .M2T=M2T File
ASSOC .M2TS=M2TS File
ASSOC .M2V=M2V File
ASSOC .M3U=M3U File
ASSOC .MID=MID File
ASSOC .MIDI=MIDI File
ASSOC .MKA=MKA File
ASSOC .MKV=MKV File
ASSOC .MOV=MOV File
ASSOC .MP2=MP2 File
ASSOC .MP2V=MP2V File
ASSOC .MP4=MP4 File
ASSOC .MPA=MPA File
ASSOC .MPC=MPC File
ASSOC .MPCPL=MPCPL File
ASSOC .MPE=MPE File
ASSOC .MPEG=MPEG File
ASSOC .MPG=MPG File
ASSOC .MPLS=MPLS File
ASSOC .MPV2=MPV2 File
ASSOC .MTS=MTS File
ASSOC .OGG=OGG File
ASSOC .OGM=OGM File
ASSOC .OGV=OGV File
ASSOC .PLS=PLS File
ASSOC .PMP=PMP File
ASSOC .PSS=PSS File
ASSOC .PVA=PVA File
ASSOC .RA=RA File
ASSOC .RAM=RAM File
ASSOC .RATDVD=RATDVD File
ASSOC .RM=RM File
ASSOC .RMI=RMI File
ASSOC .RMM=RMM File
ASSOC .RMVB=RMVB File
ASSOC .ROQ=ROQ File
ASSOC .RP=RP File
ASSOC .RPM=RPM File
ASSOC .RT=RT File
ASSOC .SMK=SMK File
ASSOC .SND=SND File
ASSOC .SRT=SRT File
ASSOC .SSA=SSA File
ASSOC .SUB=SUB File
ASSOC .TP=TP File
ASSOC .TPR=TPR File
ASSOC .TS=TS File
ASSOC .USF=USF File
ASSOC .VOB=VOB File
ASSOC .VP6=VP6 File
ASSOC .WAV=WAV File
ASSOC .WAX=WAX File
ASSOC .WEBM=WEBM File
ASSOC .WM=WM File
ASSOC .WMA=WMA File
ASSOC .WMP=WMP File
ASSOC .WMV=WMV File
ASSOC .WMX=WMX File
ASSOC .WVX=WVX File
ASSOC .XSS=XSS File
——-End————-
Thanks for this bigjohnny.
the portable version install to my computer more registry keys and accessed startup files , this is a full install not a portable version is you want my opinion (still clicking allow on my firewall … 50 notices to run a portable program… CS5 installer had less
I tested this player today and was amazed by the video color filters. I had slight troubles when playing flac files though. It was able to open the files, but I could not seek to a specific point within the audio file without the player freezing completely.
Don’t use this program under any circumstances. Even using the so called portable version will hijack all your file associations (even when you tell it not to associate any files) and it makes numerous entries in your registry – not a portable program at all. Prepare to spend a lot of time cleaning up your computer after using this – it is bad news. There should be a prominent warning at the top of this post.
@ Bob: I removed the words “is truly portable” from the description and added a warning in red font, stating that the portable version may exhibit what you described. I did not experience this myself when I tested this program though.
Hello Samer,
My regards to the Says family — and yours too.
I’ve been playing with sPlayer v3.5 (build 1373), in Comodo Firewall Sandbox, just in case the Chinese characters invade my registry) but thanks to bigJohnny’s reminder (see above) of the ASSOC command, I monitored the install results: no invasion of registry associations — so far.
sPlayer (Shooter Player, as the “About” box says) is not that much better than VLC as far as I can see, feel, taste and smell.
Here are my comparative numbers in XP SP3, 2.8Mhz 3GB, NVIDIA GeForce GTS250 w/512MB, playing “Naked Lunch” over the Emerge Desktop shell version 5.0.0.213 (ahem!!!)
Footprint ……… VLC 79,280k ………. sPlayer 62,524k
CPU usage …. VLC 4-7% …………… sPlayer 8-10%
So, where is the obvious dichotomy that would make the difference between a sure-fire old-timer of sorts and the new kid-in-the-block?
I’ll be watching Spike Jonze next.
Surf’s up, dude.
jfjb
@ jfjb: I deleted the double post. Its not your fault my site seems to go offline for a minute or so every time someone posts a comment. I think its something to do with the hosting.
Thanks for these number (and yes the says family is alive and kicking as you can see)…
I don’t really have anything to add, except that VLC seems to be under intensive development lately. CPU usage for both seems particularly low, but the VLC numbers are very impressive. Perhaps VLC was merely more suited for Naked Lunch !
Thanks for sharing