The best media player for performance is…
As we took a closer look at the figures it was once again obvious just how important your choice of media player can be.
Opening our 1080p AVI file with the DivX Plus Player rather than VLC Media Player, for instance, would leave us waiting almost 13 times as long (11.6 seconds as opposed to 0.9), while also requiring more than three times the CPU utilisation, and 2.76x as much RAM.
And while that's an extreme example, there were many other situations where some players would take two or three times longer than the competition to play particular file types.
We're still only talking about a few seconds, of course, and so if you like a particular program for other reasons - its interface, range of features, whatever it might be - then you might simply decide to live with this. But if speed is your top priority, then where should you turn?
Surprisingly, Windows Media Player 12 delivered reasonable results, popping up quickly and not using too many resources. Of course its integration with Windows gives the program an advantage that other players don't have, though, and it also failed to play our OGG test video.
And so our winner, for the second year in a row, is VLC Media Player. Its mix of fast start times (particularly for the two video formats we rated as the most important, AVI and MP4), generally low resource use, and ability to play a wide range of files meant it just kept its place.
The margin of victory was tiny, though, and several of the other programs actually beat VLC Media Player in some areas. In particular, Daum PotPlayer (the latest project from the original creator of KMPlayer), Media Player Classic Home Cinema and SMPlayer did a great job by not only playing all our test videos, but doing so with the minimum use of resources: if VLC doesn't work for you then these are fast, lightweight alternatives, and well worth a closer look.
* Couldn't play all our test files. Included for reference only.
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Liked this? Then check out How to speed up Windows 7
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