MPlayer

MPlayer is a Windows version of a console media player familiar to Linux users that "understands" almost all common audio and video formats.

Among its main advantages, it is worth mentioning:

Wide format support: it plays MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, ASF/WMV, QuickTime/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska and many other files, as well as DVDs and network streams;

MPlayer provides excellent quality audio and video playback and supports almost all common formats, making it highly versatile and reliable.

Using your own built-in codecs: if no codecs are installed in the system, the video will still be played back;

Cross-platform and multi-architecture support: the player works on Windows and on almost all POSIX-compatible systems (Linux, Unix, macOS, BSD and others), on x86, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM and other processors.

Another important feature of the MPlayer, which is worth telling about, is that it is fully implemented in the console version, and if in *nix systems you can still attach to it a graphical interface (and on the official website there is a large collection of design themes), then in Windows it is just an executable file, which is controlled via the command line or hot keys in playback mode. Windows builds are made by third parties, for example for the SMPlayer front end.

Despite the fact that MPlayer will be of primary interest to developers looking for a fast and powerful multimedia engine with a wide range of settings (in the configuration file you can specify many different parameters, the description of which is highlighted in several chapters in the documentation), it will be suitable for ordinary users who need a simple player with an on-screen display and support for 12 subtitle formats and DVD subtitles. MPlayer is free software under the GNU GPL version 2; new releases are rare, the latest one came out in 2022.