SMPlayer
SMPlayer is a free and open source cross-platform video player for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's a frontend for MPlayer, so it shares the same roots as other video players like MPV and Celluloid.
Download from its official website: [smplayer.info].
SMPlayer can play all common audio and video formats (AVI, MP3, WebM, MKV, WMV, MOV, FLV, WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG, WMA, AIFF, MIDI), can play the next video in a folder, supports videos with multiple languages (audio stream switching), embedded and external subtitles, and has several advanced features.
Although it may look and feel a bit awkward at first glance, SMPlayer provides a lot of customizability that you can use to make it suit your preferences. Your can customize the icons, the theme, what clicking on the main pane does, what the scroll wheel does, all keyboard shortcuts, etc.
In summary, you can make it look and work just like MPC-BE, which is one of the best free video players for Windows, but isn't cross-platform, unfortunately (you may still be able to make it work with WINE, but that's not guaranteed).
One feature that SMPlayer has that MPC-BE doesn't have is its ability to cast to Smart TV's using Chromecast.
![A window titled "[virtualcuriosities.com] Video by LUIS GALLARDO.mp4 - SMPlayer." Its menubar: Open, Play, Video, Audio, Subtitles, Browse, View, Options, Help. A toolbar of colorful icons. In its main pane, a bunny. Below, a progress bar with pause, stop, go back, and go forward buttons; a button to expand the window, and a speakers icon with a slider. The black statusbar displays the timestamp 00:00:03 / 00:00:20.](https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/smplayer-20250420.webp)
VLC
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform video player for Windows, macOS Linux, Android, and iOS.
Download from its official website: [https://www.videolan.org/].
Like SMPlayer, VLC can also play all common audio and video formats. What makes VLC worse than SMPlayer is that its user interface is worse. Several advanced features that VLC does have can't be found through its menubar, hurting their discoverability. For example, both SMPlayer, and VLC can loop a section of a video, but while in other software this feature is found on the menubar, in VLC it's hidden in a secret toolbar that only appears after you click on a button.
In spite of this, VLC is still good enough that it should be listed among the best.
Note that because video players often process files differently, sometimes a file that doesn't open in a video player, crashes in a video player, or that a given video player may have trouble seeking through, may work perfectly in a different video player, and VLC would be a great video player to have around in these cases.
![A window titled "[virtualcuriosities.com] Video by Shah Jahan.mp4 - VLC media player". Its menubar: Media, Playback, Audio, Video, Subtitle, Tools, View, Help. The main pane displays a flock of birds on the beach. Under it, a progress bar. A text on its left side reads 00:17, on its right 01:15. At the bottom several buttons: pause, a left arrow, a square icon button, a right arrow, an expanding rectangle button, an icon that appears to be an equalizer, an icon that is three bars with a right arrow, two arrows looping, two arrows crossed. At the bottom right, a speakers icon next to a volume slider.](https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/vlc-20250410-1024x664.webp)
Other Video Players
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem we have many great options for video players on Linux compared to what we have on Windows. For the sake of completeness, I'll list some other Linux video players I'm aware of, but that looked so terrible at first glance I didn't even bother fully reviewing them.
MPV
MPV is a minimal video player. I feel even calling it that may be inappropriate. MPV is a library for playing videos that comes with a basic GUI and some people use that as a video player because it doesn't have any of the "bloat" that normal people call "features."
It doesn't have a menubar. It doesn't have an open file dialog, you open files by dragging and dropping then into its main-and-only pane. It doesn't have a main menu, not even a main menu that appears when you right click. Just no menu at all. It doesn't have a preferences dialog. It doesn't have any dropdowns, dialogs, or additional windows. It doesn't have anything. It's just a rectangle inside a window frame that shows the video, plus a minimal semi-transparent user interface overlay that appears when you move the mouse cursor over it.
In terms of media support, it should be identical to SMPlayer, since MPV is a fork of MPlayer which SMPlayer is a frontend for.
Celluloid
Celluloid is Linux Mint's default video player. It was formerly called GNOME MPV. It's essentially just MPV with a GNOME interface. To be brutally honest, I don't even know if this is better or worse. On the plus side, there is a real interface now. On the minus side, the interface makes me irrationally angry.
Why are there two dropdown menus in the headerbar that are just icons with no tooltips instead of a menubar? Why is "Open file" inside a button that looks like a plus icon instead of a folder icon? No, seriously. WHY A PLUS ICON? WHEN EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE USES AN OPEN FOLDER ICON?? It's the literally the first thing you see in any toolbar of any application you will ever use. It's literally the first thing on SMPlayer's toolbar! How does a developer not know this? On what planet does the semantics of "plus" equal "open" or "load"? It's a plus. It means add. It's already used to mean "new" these days because some people can't go through the effort of adding a tiny sparkle to a folded rectangle in Inkscape. Who thought it was a good idea to use an icon that means "new" to mean "open"? How does this even happen? What goes through people's heads when they do this—they had to browse through all of GTK's standard icon names to find list-add-symbolic and they somehow missed document-open-symbolic? How? Why? Is this supposed to mean "add to playlist"? Even though there is literally nothing that even remotely looks like a list in the main pane? I have so many questions.
To be fair to Celluloid, in version 0.28 it seems they corrected this mistake and labelled the dropdown "Open," but I only have version 0.21 here.
- https://github.com/celluloid-player/celluloid/commit/5e961df9b3d441fa46263f0380ae1db84a67f6cd#diff-17e0040bf96fb324e7af6471c19a2023a8461a0cedc6be15e79297dfdbc70c96R239 (accessed 2025-04-22)
There are very few menu items, so not much you can actually do in this application, its preferences dialog is also extremely small compared to more complete video players. "Better than MPV" is probably the nicest thing I can say about it.