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, is truly portable, and offers a handful of innovative features such as on-demand automatic downloads of subtitles.

Media Cope is a free program that supports a wide range of video and audio formats and combines a media player, audio and video converters and cutters, batch photo resizing and conversions, as well as a handful of other functions in a single tabbed interface.

This strangely named program is primarily a media player, but it also includes many other functions that typically are not bundled together, such as media conversions and cutting. There’s something really nice about having multiple functions in the same place within a unified interface; take a look at the screenshot above and notice the tabs and top, and you will immediately ’get’ the concept behind this program.

Jaangle (previously Teen Spirit) is a free media/music player that provides an excellent user experience. It offers online integration (automatically downloads and displays artist information and artwork from the net) as well as full-fledged, integrated audio tag editing for every imaginable audio format.

Double Vision is a freeware program designed for viewing web video (such as YouTube, Netflix, and Fancast) while you work, by providing a semi-transparent player that shows through all other windows and programs that are visible on your desktop.

Hulu desktop is a free desktop client for Windows and Mac that connects to the Hulu service and plays Hulu videos and programs within a sleek, feature-rich interface, without the need for an internet browser. It features a spectacular look-and-feel, high-definition video, and offers the ability to resume partially watched shows. It also supports standard Windows Media Center or Apple IR remote controls.

Songbird is a an open source, multiplatform music player intened to rival players such as iTunes; but does it have much more beyond the basics?

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com]. 

The KM Player is a free media player that supports a comprehensive range of media format, including broad DVD support using all internal filters and codecs. It is extremely feature-rich, offering a range of features such as applying filters during playback (sharpening, denoise, color effects, etc), excellent subtitles support, playing (and capturing) streaming media over the internet, playing incomplete files, bookmarking parts of videos, and others.

BBox Audio Player (BBoxV2) is a free lightweight audio player/manager that offers a good range of features including CD ripping, audio file tagging management, internet radio, automatic volume normalization, audio library management functions, and others.

Adobe Media Player is a free video streaming application that runs on the Adobe Air platform. What it is is a desktop content delivery vehicle for “Adobe TV”, which comprises a number of licensed networks and channels offers content creators the opportunity publish their videos. Content is managed within the app so that it is saved and be accessed offline, and a range of video resolutions (480i, 720p, and 1080p) are supported.

Rating: 5

Rating: 5

Rating: 5