KMPlayer

Having a proper media player installed on your computer should be a must. Windows does ship with several notable options, including Windows Media Player and Movies & TV app, however, each one of these suffer from certain problems, and there are many free alternatives that have overcome these problems.

One of such 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 as well.

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 download videos from Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.

This is a cool feature, but it won't work for all videos. When we tried to download a video from YouTube, it managed to download a 360p version easily, but it struggled with HD, because the video was protected. You can also stream videos without downloading them to your PC.

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 which may bother some users is also that the player includes ads.