good light weight media player

im looking for a media player thats less of a resource hog than winamp. and a good codec pack for it.

 

VLC is a good player with a lot of codecs and cross-platform:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

You also get a basic player "Media Player Classic" with the free WinXP Codec Pack - though I find all the codecs I use work as well on WMP, which I'm more familiar with, so I just use it:

http://www.xpcodecpack.com/

For DVD I usually make .iso files and mount them using Daemon Lite, also free, and play them like the DVD itself, being too lazy to play with formats:

http://www.disc-tools.com/download/daemon

 

i'm not a big fan wmp. i have vlc but for some reason the audio is very choppy. i have the latest sound drivers so i'm a bit confused as to what the problem is. i do like vlc though as it uses half the resources of winamp (my normal choice for media players).

 

You might want to try the Media Player Classic that's packed with the Codec Pack - very small and lightweight.

I found something in the VLC took over and garbled some online video I watch (Bloomberg TV) so I uninstalled it - otherwise it worked alright. As for WMP, I know it and haven't found anything it doesn't handle as well as any of the other players. I'm just using WMP with the codec pack and keep Quicktime for a few online streams and .mov digicam files, since I'm not on iTunes.

One thing I noticed in the trial and error process was that these codec/player combinations create a lot of registry entries that seem to compete with each other, and it's better to pick one or two and get rid of the rest - uninstall with something like Revo that roots out all residual stuff.

 

Media Player Classic is the only media player I found that will handle both hardware accellerated video and soft subtitles simultaneously. Very handy if you need that sort of thing (which I do)