Media Player Classic: They don't make media players like the used to.

While it may look like a Microsoft product, Media Player Classic is not. Though it's designed to look like the old version of Windows Media Player, it is actually open source, and holds alot more than WMP.

The best part of MPC is that it can play nearly every media file (both Video and Audio) right off the bat, and it doesn't even need to be installed. So let's talk about that for a minute.

MPC is fairly small, and standalone. It weighs only around 6mb, which may not be the smallest player, but considering how many built-in codecs it has, I'd say it's very worth it. It is also portable, meaning that you can take it anywhere, to a computer with no codecs, and still be able to play many files.

In terms of functionality, MPC has everything that I currently need to play in terms of audio and video.

-DVD player: Yes, it does have a DVD player. It may not be very flashy in terms of interface, but it is fully functional.

-Favorites: You can mark a file as a favorite so it can be easily accessed, and you can even make it remember the position of the object, so if you quit a movie, you can pick up right where you left off.

-Subtitles: To be honest, I've never used it. I don't even know how. But it's there, and that's what matters.

-"Open Device": Though I haven't used it much, it is a pretty nifty idea. For example, I can open my webcam, and view myself, typing this post.

-Keyboard shortcuts: Maybe not the most original idea, but almost everything has a keyboard shortcut, making it easy to go fullscreen, pause, view information, etc.

To be honest, that's all I can think of, at the moment. There's alot more customization, like you can open things in the same window or a different window for each file, you can change the icon for the main screen when no media is playing, and you can even specify an action to be performed after a media has finished playing (like shutting down or standbying.)

MPC is that it is the smallest, fully functional media player I've seen. When it comes to media player classic, I just want a program to play all my files. I'm not concerned with how it looks, just as long as it works. MPC opens files very, very fast, and I'm happy with that.

But if you guys think that my review was pathetic, let me know. I'm not very knowledgable on codecs and whatnot, so if something just works, I usually don't question it.

Visit Media Player Classic site for download