Movie players

Can anyone recommend me a movie player for Windows that doesn't suck. In other words, not Media Player, not Real One Player, and not Quicktime. Something that just plays movies. No stupid web-browser in it, no trying to advertise at me, no taking 14 minutes to load, no trying to hijack my computer and associate itself with every file type and install auto-loading TSRs without my permission. Preferably something that's able to play as many formats as possible fairly reliably. I don't know if such a thing exists.

Have you tried Winamp? www.winamp.com

I've never tried it for playing movies. Only music. And I don't use it for music any more either. I'll try it I guess.

EDIT: Nope, sucks.

I use RealOne. I like it *shrug*

What's wrong with Media Player 6.4, anyway? Not the latest one bundled in XP, version 7 or whatever with all that flashy crap in it, but 6.4 - nice stripped down simple interface (you can strip it down even more to just the play/pause/stop, the seek bar and status line like I have, or remove them all if you really want to :p ) and no horrid skins or crappy interfaces present in Media Player 7 or later, and in RealOne. (All Real software SUCKS :D ) Just go to run, and enter "mplayer2" instead of wmplayer to load this old version instead. Version 6.4 is the best Windows Media Player there is, the latest one before it started getting affected by bloatware like the rest of the OS. :p

It's certainly a lot faster than other media players I have at loading, and will play anything you have a codec for installed, so that includes decrypted VOBs, and OGMs too :p And soft subtitles too, again with the right filters/codecs installed e.g. DirectVobSub. I've got a codec from somewhere that lets mine also play some (but not all) Quicktime movies, but not others. Not that I have many of those - Quicktime and RealMedia are horrible formats, difficult to play back with software not from their respective companies.

I use Winamp 2.91 (not Winamp 3), which plays movies and works like normal Winamp, which is to say that it has the same shortcut keys (zxcvb, plus Space Bar pauses/unpauses mplayer2 style. It's also fast and non-sucky (enough for me, anyway). Also, it doesn't have the terribleness of Winamp 3, which is a plus.

Well there's my two cents on the matter.

I also use Media Player 6.4. Works great. Winamp suck for movie files.

Light Alloy 2.4

Yeah, the WMP v6.4 is spiffy. It's everything you need and nothing you don't need. If you currently have a higher version of WMP (like 9), you can access the old v6.4 at C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe .

I just use WMP for my anime :p

I like PowerDVD's interface, too, but I've never bothered even trying to change the file association for movies to PDVD.

mplayer2 is fine. Thank you.