SMPlayer is a very popular open source video playback application that provides a wide range of features. It is based on the MPlayer command-line application and it’s fully compatible with the GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The application is basically an advanced GUI (Graphical User Interface) front-end for MPlayer, allowing users to watch movies, TV shows, DVD-Video discs, as well as listen to radio stations, playback music files and view YouTube videos.
Features at a glance
Key features include audio track switching, seeking by mouse wheel, built-in video equalizer, multiple speed playback, filters, audio and subtitles delay adjustment, playlists, automatic updates, and automatic download of subtitles for films.
It provides users with a familiar user interface, especially if you’ve used the KMPlayer application. While they are both written in Qt and use the KDE runtime libraries, the main difference is that SMPlayer is more advanced than KMPlayer.
Thanks to its built-in codecs, the software can playback various audio and video files formats, including MP3, AVI, MKV, FLAC, OGG, WMV, WMA, MP4, MPEG, MPG, VOB, as well as DVD-Video, VCD, and Audio-CD discs. In addition, it can play TV, radio streams or custom URLs.
Users can quickly choose an audio or subtitle track (if multiple are available) for the currently playing video directly from the main toolbar. Works MKV and AVI files, as well as with DVD-Video discs.
Another cool feature is the ability to seek a video with the mouse wheel, quickly navigating backward or forward in any video. Furthermore, it is possible to adjust the gamma, contrast, brightness, saturation and hue of a video files from the integrated equalizer accessible from the Video menu.
Bottom line
Summing up, SMPlayer is a really great and powerful multimedia playback application, specifically designed to be used on Qt-based desktop environments like KDE or Razor-qt, but the truth is that our favorite video player is VLC Media Player.
