Back from vacations, no, I didn't abandon this blog :-P

Kaffeine was the most used Video Player on KDE 3, however, for KDE 4.x it's in a pretty early stage, but fear not, the SMPlayer (which is technically a Qt application, not a KDE one) and Dragon Player came to fill this hole.

Why I review two applications that do basely the same? Because Dragon Player is deadly simple, and SMPlayer, while being less simplified, has an amazing feature package.

Let's start by the young new Konqui son:

Dragon Player

As I told you, it has a extremely simple interface, if you open it directly (from the menus, without a file pointed out) you'll get a little dialog with the recent played files, an option to play a file, and "play disc":


While playing it looks like this:


Simple. Its HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) it's outstanding, specially since it doesn't use pop-ups or dialogs, check it out:


You can tweak video brightness, contrast, hue and saturation:


The Full screen mode is obviously available, it's simple (and nice), but I think it could use some composite:



SMPlayer

It's a MPlayer front-end, if you're familar with it, you know it has thousand of configurabilty options. Let's start by how it looks by default:


It would take me ages to review every single feature, but I'll cover what I consider more relevant, and without converting this in a how-to of Mplayer.

It has playlist suppot, which can be embedded or floating (like any panel on KDE 4):


Compact Mode: Just the video :-)


Full subtitle support:


Changing the audio and subtitles on the go:


Dragon Player doesn't have a configure dialog, well, in contrast, SMPlayer has a very detailed one:


And it also has a small dialog with the command line options:


As you probably noticed, it has a hell lot of features.

This is all for this "week (lol)", I hope you enjoyed it, oh, and If you're wondering which one I prefer, I think they serve different purposes and users, that said, I prefer the simple and clean Dragon Player (which doesn't mean it's better, it's just a personal preference).

Next issue: The controversial Amarok 2 ;-)
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