KMPlayer

Having a proper media player installed on your computer is a must. Windows does ship with several notable options, including the classic Windows Media Player and the modern Media Player app, however, each of these suffers from certain problems, and there are many free alternatives that have overcome these problems.

One such alternative is KMPlayer, which is 100% free and offers many useful features. The installation is clean and there are no ads or suggestions to install other programs. It doesn't occupy a lot of space on your drive either.

Clean interface and media extraction

The interface is user-friendly and minimalistic. The options menu can be accessed from the top left part of the window, where you can tweak certain settings. There are some useful buttons in the bottom left part as well. Here you can switch to 3D view or even perform offline media fetching from Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.

This is a cool feature, but it won't work for all web content. When we tried to extract web media from a major video platform, it managed to fetch a 360p version easily, but it struggled with HD, because the content was protected. You can also stream videos without saving files to your PC.

Format support and settings

You probably won't need to install any codecs, as KMPlayer supports a wide variety of formats. Pressing the F2 key brings up the Preferences window, but a regular user probably won't be able to find plenty of useful options to tweak, as they are difficult to understand. Another thing that might bother some users is that the player includes ads.