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night_sky2
September 27th, 2015, 04:32 AM
Hi,

Why is it never included in any distros whatsoever? It comes with built-in codecs, themes and SMTube to watch high quality Youtube videos in the native player. It is unlike anything I have seen.

I have long been sold to VLC exclusively but after discovering this media player - that I can use on both Linux and Windows - I honestly think it is superior.

BTW you can install it with a ppa to get the latest release, the version in the Ubuntu repo is awfully outdated.

Here: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

What do you think?

CharlesA
September 27th, 2015, 04:55 AM
Never heard of it, even though I have heard of mplayer.

night_sky2
September 27th, 2015, 05:20 AM
Never heard of it, even though I have heard of mplayer.

It is built on the Mplayer engine and can play all formats, just like VLC.

Here's a review in the TuxArena: www.tuxarena.com/2014/10/smplayer-14-9-review-one-of-the-best-movie-players-for-linux/ (http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/10/smplayer-14-9-review-one-of-the-best-movie-players-for-linux/)

mikodo
September 27th, 2015, 05:32 AM
It's been my go to player since, monkeybrain spoke of it here.

Why it is not default anywhere, is knowledge, I am not privy to.

monkeybrain20122
September 27th, 2015, 05:32 AM
I have been using it as my main video player since I started using Ubuntu. I find it better than VLC. Now I use mpv as the backend instead of mplayer. mpv is a mplayer fork which is under active development, it supports hardware decoding in Intel (vaapi) which mplayer does not. Using mpv with the (youtube-dl hook)you can stream videos from many sites through Smplayer (Vlc works only on Youtube, and only up to 720p, Dash videos don't work there)

Afnan
September 27th, 2015, 07:35 AM
I absolutely think its underrated, I have been using it for 3 weeks and God I am really very satisfied with it. Its highly customizable and can play almost any media format you throw at it. It has a tons of feature and its just really user friendly. I used to use vlc media player but I have this peeve with it, I need click to play/pause feature to enjy watching my videos and after trying a lot I couldnt get it to work on vlc and I gave up. Then I went to smplayer and it was as easy as a few clicks thats it. Absolutely loving smplayer. Highly recommended to everyone to give it a try.

SeijiSensei
September 27th, 2015, 03:27 PM
SMPlayer has been pretty much the only video player I have used for the past decade. It offered a simple interface for Matroska files with multiple audio and subtitle tracks and methods to enable or disable the raft of options that come with mplayer. Like monkeybrain I'm using it now with mpv as the player engine.

If you're running Trusty, I recommend adding Doug McMahon's repository (https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/trusty-media) to get the most up-to-date versions of all these programs and others like ffmpeg.

I also install it on any Windows machines I need to use from http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/.

monkeybrain20122
September 27th, 2015, 04:34 PM
Only thing that vlc works better is DVD. Chapters don't work or don't work very well in Smplayer. But that is not essential and I tend to rip the DVD first anyway.

mystics
September 27th, 2015, 07:07 PM
I tried it out. It doesn't seem to be able to recognize some videos on my computer if I try to open them from inside the player. Works fine if I open them from Thunar and just select the player, but for some reason, it doesn't see them itself. Oh well, VLC has the same problems. Parole is the only one that works for those files.