Our best media player article has been fully updated for 2014.
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 under-powered of PC hardware.
There's a problem, of course. You need 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 not.
The answer was obvious, then. We had to benchmark the players ourselves. So we took 15 of the top contenders from around the web, measured the time it took them to load and begin playing (largely) HD videos in five common formats (MP4-based AVI, H.264 MOV, MPEG-2, MP4, and OGG), 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 one came out on top and can be proclaimed as the best media player for 2014...
- BS Player 2.66
- Daum PotPlayer 1.5.40688
- DivX Player 10
- GOM Media Player 2.2.53.5169
- jetAudio 8.1.0 Basic
- Kantaris 0.7.9
- KMPlayer 3.7.0.113
- Media Player Classic Home Cinema 1.7.0
- MPCSTAR 5.4
- RealPlayer 16.0.3.51
- SMPlayer 0.8.6
- Snow Player 1.19
- VLC Media Player 2.1.0
- Windows Media Player 12
- Zoom Player Free 8.6.1
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 H.264 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 Apple iPod 5G versions (at 320x180 pixels), before downloading the PAL DVD ISO to test MPEG-2 playback.
We chose a reasonably powerful test PC, equipped with Windows 8, 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5-4440 CPU, utilising its onboard Intel HD 4000 graphics. We also removed each program using Revo Uninstaller Free to see how much detritus each one left behind.
We then opened the test videos in each of our media players, noting the time it took for them to begin playback.
As the players worked, we used Process Explorer to access the average CPU utilisation and maximum physical RAM they required. We didn't try to optimise the player's settings to improve any results, so our figures relate to the default settings only. It's possible that some players may work faster or use fewer resources if you spend time fiddling with their settings.