DebAWeek: smplayer

I feel that many of my package picks are console tools, more appropriate for system administrators and advanced users. So this week I Wanted to pick a GUI app and so I picked smplayer. Smplayer is a frontend to mplayer which is a highly compatible video player. Smplayer adds what I consider to be a nice interface which has led to it becoming my video player of choice.

Prior to trying smplayer I was a fan of kaffeine. And I'm still a fan but I started playing with smplayer in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fan) by downloading the package as it was not yet in the repositories. The interface is clean and attractive. One of the features smplayer is famous for is remembering settings applied to various media files. I have mixed feelings about this feature; sometimes it can come in handy and other times it seems to just add confusion. But all in all I think the layout of the menu items and choice of available options is really unmatched. While there's still room for improvement I can see myself using smplayer as my video player of choice for the foreseeable future.