Free, multi-functional media player
KMPlayer is an intuitive media player that lets users easily watch and download videos and movies or play music. It offers smooth high-definition video playback of 4K, UHD and full HD. With KMPlayer you'll never need to install additional codecs, and the app recognizes all manner of extensions, providing you with the best viewing and listening experience - no matter what kind of file you're working with.
Any format, any extension, any way you want it
Open and play any file.
At its heart, KMPlayer is an unencoded video player that can run videos from a ton of different file extensions, but it's also a great pick for its user customization and elegant design. If you're used to using third party sites to convert files, you're probably familiar with the tedious, mundane process. KMPlayer gets 1.5 billion plays a month, and for good reason: The interface immediately makes sense and will play whatever video or music you select. Once you have KMPLayer installed (which you can do for free) you can immediately view whatever media you put through it. Open and play any file.
KMPlayer supports subtitles in SMI, ASS, SRT, PSB, S2K, SUB, TXT, and LRC, and utilizes 24 different languages for users worldwide. You can toggle and adjust any of the default settings within the app, and set content to run in whatever manner you choose. Users can freely adjust the video screen and sound with advanced image processing functions like noise reduction or high speed mode, and from within the application you can even edit file extensions and folder names, lock/unlock the screen, slow down or speed up the file, or adjust the volume at your convenience. Considering the impressive number of features, we were surprised at how lightweight the platform was. While there's a ton of customizable options with this program, it only requires a mere 37.25 megabytes of free memory. KMPlayer may not be the only free media player available, but it's certainly one of the most lightweight, running smoothly and quietly in the background even when used it run larger files.
There's no conversion, reformatting, or painful buffering times with KMPlayer; it already knows how to read your file and does so without delay, whether it's AAC, RTS, MPEG1, MPEG2, WMA7, or OGG. It's also got a neat Media Library feature which auto-detects your video files and allows users to explore files on internal or external memory. You can even use it to capture videos from online sources such as YouTube, Daily Motion, and Instagram. Additionally the bundle package also has KMPlayer VR, which can also work with virtual reality files: As long as your file is coded to support VR playback you can actually get a cool 360-degree view of your media!
Where can you run this program?
KMPlayer is still under development for Mac OS X, but is supported on any Windows Operating System, iOS and Android. It also offers 3D format videos with a low CPU Memory share, and provides an optimized, stable playback through GPU support.
Is there a better alternative?
For all the good qualities (and there are many!) for KMPLayer, picking the best media-playing software is really apples and oranges. Does KMPlayer do anything remarkably different from VLC or MX Player? Not really. In fact, MX Player allows for a wider array of touch gestures and can also often yield higher quality visuals than KMPlayer, which by comparison occasionally makes media appear grainy or distorted. VLC also boasts superior features for multi-platform use (as well as nearly double the shortcut commands), and has the capability of working as a streaming media server, a feature that is lacking in KMPlayer.
Another gripe with KMPlayer is the ads. It's free software, so normally we wouldn't complain about this too much, but considering that this is a platform for playing music and videos, the ads are extra noticeable. If your screen isn't maximized while you're watching a video, ads will even run at the side of the player, which can be intrusive. VLC has the same baseline functionality as KMPlayer and never suffers from that kind of distraction. No one likes interruptions for advertisements. Literally no one.
That said, if you're looking for intuitive (albeit bare-bones) freeware that gets the job done simply and elegantly, look no further than KMPlayer. KMPlayer is also our recommended pick if you're running a media player on a laptop. VLC can have a tendency to spike the small speakers of a laptop, which could risk damaging them. As for customization, while KMPlayer lacks the hotkey commands of VLC, it does allow for greater personalization within the application. You can even do fun things like change the color for new music tracks or import a song's album art.
Our take
When you want to kick back and watch a TV show or listen to music the last thing you want is a media player that gets in your way or delays the experience.
For that reason we like the simplicity, versatility, and quality of KMPlayer.
