MPlayer Everything Star

MPlayer Everything Star is a fast and versatile media player for Windows PCs.

Casual users like MPlayer Everything Star because it lets them play videos and music with very little learning curve or hassle. Advanced users like MPlayer because it’s all business. Many media players have a lot of bells and whistles, and while there’s nothing wrong with that approach, it can result in slower initialization and performance, require more resources and so forth. This media player, on the other hand, requires very little memory or space on disk and is one of the fastest media players around.

One aspect that makes MPlayer so user-friendly is its out-of-the-box support for codecs. In fact, it comes with support for 192 video codecs and 85 audio codecs. That means that no matter what media you throw at it, MPlayer is likely going to be able to identify the appropriate format and play the file flawlessly. In the off chance you need video or audio support MPlayer doesn’t recognize, the player can fall back on the codecs available through Windows. That means that AV format support is practically endless since you can install and configure just about whatever you want.

MPlayer Everything Star also has excellent hotkey support. Hotkeys are all well thought out, and if MPlayer has a feature, you can be confident that there’s a keyboard shortcut associated with it. It may take some time to memorize them all, but doing so is worthwhile because you can control the app completely without ever mucking about in the menus or other aspects of the UI. That means that you can make changes on the fly without interfering with video and audio playback.

The UI is a bit simplistic. Whether this is a bad thing is a matter of perspective. If you like that streamlined approach that MPlayer takes, then you’ll probably approve of the UI as well. One potential issue is that not all commands are represented well in the menu and other aspects of the UI. This program is definitely meant to be controlled with hotkeys, and some other aspects of the UI do suffer. MPlayer is also light on customization, so there’s no support for skins or the option to add items to the menu.

Pros

• Supports hundreds of audio/video formats
• Small footprint and not resource-intensive
• Initializes and runs fast
• Excellent hotkey support

Cons

• Simple user interface
• Few customization options