What is PotPlayer?
PotPlayer [potplayer.info] is a freeware video player for Windows.
Is PotPlayer Safe?
A good question to ask is whether or not PotPlayer is safe. After all, a video player is a lot of work, but PotPlayer isn't an open source project that can be contributed to by various people, it's the work of single developer, be it a single person or organization. This developer must be making money off it somehow. PotPlayer is free, so it's not from customers. There are no donation requests. Which means this is either a virus, the developer is a saint, or there is something more complicated going on.
PotPlayer claims to be developed by a South Korean company called Kakao Corporation. It seems that this same company provides a streaming service called KakaoTV, which is displayed prominently within PotPlayer.
The Kakao TV app service will be terminated on January 8, 2024. # Although the service can be used through PC web, mobile web, and PotPlayer, users are concerned about the termination of Kakao TV service.
https://en.namu.wiki/w/%EC%B9%B4%EC%B9%B4%EC%98%A4TV (accessed 2025-04-20)
I haven't been able to find any information on Kakao's website about the PotPlayer. Presumably most information would be in Korean and has never been translated to English.
Presumably, the commercial motive for its development and distribution for free has been: the player is an ad for KakaoTV. The first time you open it, no matter what your language or where in the world you are, you'll see a list of Korean VOD's and if you click on one you can watch it. And you can also watch ads in Korean that play between the VOD's. In other words, they made a client for desktop for their Korean Youtube, and it also works as video player in general.
A piece of evidence that supports this hypothesis can be found in their changelog (assuming it's legitimate and nobody went through the effort of fabricating 15 years worth of changelogs just to distribute a virus):
[0.95.5106]
*Changed the name from Daum Live to Daum Pot Player
https://potplayer.org/en/update/history.html (accessed 2025-04-20)
Above, the changelog for version 0.95.5106 indicates that PotPlayer used to be called "Daum Pot Player," and before that "Daum Live," implying its primary purpose was to watch livestreams and not to play videos in general.
I tried the Wayback Machine, but the changelog was only indexed since 2024. The website, however, has existed since 2011.
Adware
In 2019, PotPlayer's installer included adware, meaning that if you accidentally left a box checked it would install ads on your operating system. Specifically, McAfee® WebAdvisor. This seems to have been removed since, but it's kind of difficult to trust a software after it does something like that.
PotPlayer works good, can't see anything wrong, so the ad is just in the installer and you can skip the installation - and even if you install it, you can easily uninstall it, it's the part of the text "I have read…", as you can see on the screenshot above.
So you can still use PotPlayer without ad and you don't have to install that ad, it's just one more click.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/393452-PotPlayer-now-Adware!#post2553455 (accessed 2025-04-20)
PotPlayer doesn't provide a portable version, but you can try it without running the installer by installing 7-zip, right clicking on the installer to display its context menu, and then "extracting" the installer as if it were a zipped folder. However, it's not clear if this would have helped.
Potplayer autoupdated itself few days ago.
I now did a scan with Malwarebytes and it found this (it was in temp folder but I transferred it to another folder so i can copy on a virtual machine)
https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/248450-potplayer-adware-fusioncore/ (accessed 2025-04-20)