My Review of SMPlayer

Summary: SMPlayer is an extremely well-made video and music player with support for all common video and audio formats and great support for advanced functionality. Some of its default settings may feel strange, but it provides excellent support for customization, so you can probably configure it to suit your preferences. I'd say it's the best media player available for Linux.

Supported Formats

I've tried opening a few different files on the SMPlayer to check if it supports them.

Format	Support
WAV	✅ Yes.
MP3	✅ Yes.
FLAC	✅ Yes.
OGG	✅ Yes.
WMA	✅ Yes.
AIFF	✅ Yes.
MIDI	⚠️ No*.

⚠️ It may be possible to play MIDI files in SMPlayer by installing a synthesizer plugin for MPlayer, installing a soundfont and then configuring it, but I haven't been able to find any documentation on how to do this except from random posts on forums.

Format	Support
AVI	✅ Yes.
MP4	✅ Yes.
WebM	✅ Yes.
MKV	✅ Yes.
WMV	✅ Yes.
MOV	✅ Yes.
FLV	✅ Yes.

Main Interactions

Main Pane

✅ All behaviors can be customized through Options -> Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Mouse.

❌ Left click: does nothing. ✅ But I can customize it to "Play / Pause" the way I like it so it's fine.

✅ Right click: displays main menu as context menu.

✅ Double click: enters and exists full screen mode.

✅ Middle click: mutes and unmutes.

⚠️ Scroll wheel: seeks forward and backward. ✅ But I can customize it to "Volume Control" so it's fine.

Keyboard

✅ All behaviors can be customized through Options -> Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Keyboard.

✅ Spacebar: Play / pause.

✅ Left and Right Arrow Keys: seek backward and forward 10 seconds. Modifier keys don't do anything.

Playlist

✅ Has sibling traversal. Although it's not enabled by default, SMPlayer can open the next file in folder if you configure it through Playlist -> Add files from folder -> Video and Audio Files under Add files to playlist automatically in the Options -> Preferences dialog. Doing this will automatically add the entire folder to the playlist when you open a file, which means that ⚠️ if you add or remove files to the folder, the playlist won't be updated automatically. It doesn't search for the next file when you press the play next button like it works on MPC-BE.

✅ Playlist has own window: displayed through View -> Playlist.

Looping

✅ Can loop a whole playlist. ⚠️ This can only be done through the playlist window and isn't an option in the menubar,

✅ Can loop a single file. ❌ This is achieved by checking Play > A-B Section -> Repeat WITHOUT setting an A-B section.

✅ Can loop a segment of a file. Through Play -> A-B Section.

Shuffling and Playback Order

❌ Can't traverse the playlist in random order.

✅ Can shuffle the items of an existing playlist. To do this, click on the button with a circling arrows icon at the bottom of the playlist window.

❌ Playlist doesn't have a view mode with thumbnails, only a tabular mode.

✅ The playlist can be sorted by Name (Title), Filename, and Length. ⚠️ No options for Artist or Album. ⚠️ Sorting is only doable by clicking on column headers as there are no context menu options for this.

✅ List view column headers are clickable and sorts the list accordingly, both descending and ascending.

✅ Can modify order manually by clicking on arrow buttons.

Playback

✅ Has a progress bar.

✅ The time elapsed is displayed on the the statusbar together with the length. It's possible to replace time lapsed with time remaining in preferences.

✅ Can seek by clicking on the progress bar.

❌ Doesn't have a windowed minimal interface. You can manually hide the toolbar, and there are alternative interfaces in preferences, but it's not possible to simply quickly switch to something minimal without going full screen.

Casting

✅ Can cast to a smart TV using Chromecast.

Full screen

✅ Can go full screen.

✅ Pressing the Esc key leaves full screen mode.

✅ The interface is hidden while in full screen, but reappears when you move the cursor around, and there is a button to exit full screen mode on it.

Speeds and Frames

✅ Can play at different speeds through Play -> Speed. ✅ Ranges from 0.1x to 100x.

✅ Can go to the next frame of a paused video.

✅ Can go to the previous frame of a paused video.

✅ Can save the current frame of the video with Video -> Screenshot. The snapshot is saved to a smplayer_screenshots folder inside your Pictures folder.

Audio

✅ Has a volume control.

✅ Clicking on the speakers quickly mutes and unmutes the audio.

✅ A volume slider can be clicked on to set the volume at any time with one click.

Music Playback

✅ Has an equalizer. It must be enabled in the preferences dialog: General -> Audio -> Enable the audio equalizer.

❌ No visualizations.

✅ Can display the cover picture of a music album.

Video Audio Playback

✅ Can switch between languages in videos with multiple audio streams.

Subtitle Support

✅ Can display embedded subtitles. Subtitles -> Primary Track and choose the subtitles.

✅ Can load subtitles from a file. Subtitles -> Load..... ⚠️ The open file dialog for choosing a subtitle file has the filter "Subtitles" without listing which file extensions are being filtered, e.g. I don't know if .srt is supported because it isn't written on the filter's label.

✅ Can retime the subtitles. Press the Z and X key to move backward and forward by 100 milliseconds, respectively.

File Properties

✅ Has a dialog for file properties that includes the title, artist, album, genre, date, codecs of a file and other information, accessible through View -> Information and properties....

Other Observations

✅ Has a menubar.

✅ Every keyboard shortcut can be customized in the preferences dialog.

✅ The order and layout of buttons on the interface and toolbar can be customized as well.

✅ Very colorful icons by default, which is nice. Unfortunately they're a bit too large. You can change the interface to a "Mini GUI" in preferences, but that just gets rid of the toolbar. ❌ When I tried to use the gtk2 theme SMPlayer crashed.