Ok this one of my favorite areas so I'm going to share some of my thoughts
For me
Media Player must have :
- Support for probably all the video and audio files
- Good integration and ability to change the specific filter or codec by external one
- Subtitle region formatting options
- Ability to resync the subtitle and save it in particular resynced position
- Ability to load external audio
- Ability to resync audio
- Good audio normalization and amplification (in case of lower audio quality)
- Ability to shutdown computer after playback
- maybe some more I cannot remember at the moment
So,
VLC Player, SMPlayer, UMPlayer, Windows Media Player nad AVS Media Player are out of the game
I was user of
KMPlayer for about 5 years, loving what new stuff they have been implementing for all over these years : ability to directly play Youtube videos, to record videos connecting to the Webcam, loving they interface and skin support, in v3.6.0.87 they have added an Instant View to view specified parts of the video without need to seek to that part, great seeking speed for HD or FullHD movies, especially encoded in mp4 or mkv with x264 codec...
But new
3.7 version added a PlusTab ( who is using KMP will know what I'am talking about), the stupid external window which is mainly purpose to download commercials and interrupt you in the middle of the movie.
And guess what? It cannot be disabled
And yes, support are not listening to their users complaining of the PlusTab, codec malformations, and bunch of adware implemented into installer from last 3 versions of KMPlayer, all that developers care is money nowadays.
So...
GOM Player is a good choice, it's beautiful, fast and light, but it has some audio normalization bugs, and it happened to me that wasn't able to play some specific movie and crashed.
PotPlayer doesn't like my PC, it has artifacts when seeking a video and I think it's probably connected GPU encoding, and as developers are only speak in Korean I could not contact their support
And at last
MPC-HC, is the player that I am using right now
It's light, fast, frequently updated, has all functions mentioned above. Can be a little sluggish when seeking certain files but I'm OK with that.
Thanks