Our best media player article has been fully updated for 2011.
Some media players are bloated monsters, packed with unnecessary features. You've seen the results: open an HD video and they'll keep you waiting while your hard drive thrashes, your RAM is gobbled up and your CPU utilisation reaches new highs.
You don't have to put up with this, though. Other media players launch in a flash, and then make minimal demands on your system resources, allowing smooth HD video playback even on the most underpowered of PC hardware.
There's a problem, of course - you have to figure out which players fall into each category. And that's not easy, because everyone claims their own products are fast, efficient and great performers, whether they are, or they're really not.
The answer was obvious, then. We had to benchmark the players ourselves. So we took 16 of the top contenders from around the web, measured the time it took them to load and begin playing (largely) HD videos in 6 common formats (MP4-based AVI, H264 MOV, MPEG-2, MP4, OGG and FLV), and monitored their average CPU utilisation and RAM requirements.
And it turned out there were major differences in launch time and resource use between some of the programs – so let's find out which is the best media player for 2011...
The contenders
We selected the following 16 popular media players for the tests.
ALPlayer 2.0
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DAPlayer 1.0.1.9
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Daum PotPlayer 1.5.26392
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DivX Plus Player 8.0
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GOM Player 2.1.28.5039
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jetAudio 8.0.11 Basic
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Kantaris 0.6.9
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KMPlayer 3.0.0.1439
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Media Player Classic Home Cinema 1.5.0.2827
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MPCSTAR 5.0
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RealPlayer 14.0.2.633
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SMPlayer 0.6.9
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SnowPlayer 1.10
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VLC Media Player 1.1.7
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Windows Media Player 12
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Zoom Player Home Premium 7.0
How we tested
The benchmark process started by selecting our test videos, and we opted for five versions of the Creative Commons-licensed animation, Big Buck Bunny.
These included an AVI movie with MP4 video and AC3 surround sound, a MOV file with H264 video and AAC surround sound, and an OGG Theora video with Vorbis stereo sound, all of which were full 1080p resolution.
For good measure we also grabbed a copy of the Flash video (FLV) and iPod 5G versions (320x180), before creating a PAL DVD-compliant version of the file to test MPEG-2 playback.
We chose a reasonably powerful test PC, equipped with Windows 7, 4GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7-2533 CPU. And a baseline hard drive image was taken, to ensure each program would start with the same filters, codecs and system configuration.
We then opened the test videos in each of our media players, noting the time it took for them to begin playback.
And as the players worked, we used Process Hacker to access the average CPU utilisation and RAM (private working set) and RAM they required. We didn't try to optimise the player's settings to improve results, so our figures relate to the default settings only: it's possible that some players may work faster or use less resources if you spend time working on their settings.
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