For so long, those who ditched Windows Media Player have used VLC as their default program for watching virtually every video file format out there. Simply because Windows Media Player sucks.
So ever since I was introduced to VLC more than four years ago, it’s also been the default video player on my PC. Though over the years, VLC has somehow become slow, bloated and crashed more often, especially when I skip ahead to scenes I like in a movie or video.
My secondary media player was GOM player, another free player that can be at par with VLC in terms of the wide range of formats in can play. Though it takes up less system resources compared to VLC, it doesn’t have the same set of features.
So I was looking for a media player that is free, has the same range of capabilities and features as VLC but with the light system footprint of GOM player.
I thank Ade for posting a link to SPlayer on Facebook, I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.
SPlayer - it's as flexible as VLC but as light as GOM player. (Click for larger view)
It’s sleek and modern interface is like embedding video from YouTube or Vimeo right on your desktop. It’s also free and open-source, which is always a great thing.
SPlayer does everything its official website says it does. Just control the grammar nazi inside of you when you visit and read the English texts because it seems that SPlayer is made in China, err by Chinese developers. I could be wrong though.
It plays HD video with great clarity. It even added more volume and clarity to audio of my copy of The Matrix, whereas with VLC, I had to plugin external speakers to my laptop just to hear the Morpheus dish out shit about religion and existentialism.
SPlayer is indeed light on system resources, starts faster and loads videos faster than VLC. The best part about it, is it automatically downloads a matching subtitle for your movie. That’s right, it does it on its own, saving you the annoying task of scrounging around the web for the right subtitle for your movie.
Take it for a spin, it’s a small 4.44Mb download and I’m sure you’d enjoy it.
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Julius aka "Jhay" Rocas has been blogging since 2006. He is a certified geek. New Media publisher/Professional blogger and Internet ninja. Youth activist. He blogs about tech news, gadgets and social commentary. 
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
VLC is overrated. The KMPlayer is a better alternative.
I haven't heard of KMPLayer before. Perhaps I'd give it a try, but for now, SPlayer would still be my default media player.
I second this comment though I might end up replacing KMP soon. It can't progress through the playlist if you're doing something CPU intensive
I actually LOL'd when I saw the option to add SPlayer to "Quick Lunch". I uploaded the installer to VirusTotal.com – there were a couple of hits (out of 42), most likely false positives. To be safe, though, I did two full scans with Malwarebytes and we're safe.
When I was redirected to a page written in Chinese after downloading the installer, I got nervous thinking SPlayer was a malware or loaded with it. Glad it checked out fine with my AV and Spybot.
So far though, it failed to find a matching subtitle for one of my movies. But hey, no body's perfect.