Best Media Player for WINDOWS

• Plays and streams just about any video format under the sun
• Can play incomplete or damaged AVI files (by skipping the damaged frames)
• Very fast and lightweight
• Can remember where you left off in a video
• Keyboard shortcuts for just about anything, including seek, volume, zoom, brightness, contrast, and even subtitle resyncing
• Robust subtitle support, including SAA and ASS support as well as embedded subtitles in MKV, OGM, MP4, MOV, and 3GP files
• Fully skinnable, can choose different skins for different types of files, make the window transparent, hide the window border when playing, and more
• Video filters, like deinterlacing, postprocessing, de-noise, and more for customized playback
• Audio equalizer and video equalizer, that lets you adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, and more of the video

More advanced settings in the Options menu than you can shake a stick at. For more info, see their Home Page.

As with most advanced programs, PotPlayer’s biggest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses. It has a ton of different settings, which unfortunately makes wading through the checkblox-laden settings menu kind of a pain. Even if you’re rather tech-savvy, it could take you awhile to find the setting you’re looking for. While that’s never fun, though, it does mean you can tweak every aspect of the player to work how you want, so it’s a small price to pay, and most of your videos should work great out of the box. We do wish it could save those settings on a per-video basis like SMPlayer, though. In addition, it’s pretty young, and still technically in beta, so it’s possible you could experience some bugs (though many have found it more than stable enough for daily use). Lastly, as a Korean program, you’ll find tiny bits of the program are still in Korean, but it’s nothing that would hinder you from using it—just a button or two here and there. All the preferences have been translated well.

The Competition

PotPlayer isn’t perfect, but we’ve yet to find a video player that is. It will play a lot of files, but if it ever doesn’t, we recommend having a backup video player on hand (no matter what you use as your primary player). Here are a few of your options.

The most obvious competitor to PotPlayer is VLC, which many of you probably use as your main player. Both are pretty close in terms of quality, but PotPlayer’s nicer interface, lighter weight, and tons of advanced features all bring it a step up above VLC in our eyes (though VLC does have some nice extra features). If you have an older computer and you’re playing high definition video content, you may want to try them side-by-side: while PotPlayer was lighter weight in our tests, VLC does have built-in hardware acceleration features that may play high-def videos a little smoother.